Roger Moorhouse - The Devils' Alliance - Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941

Such actions were not particularly unusual. Indeed, rather tellingly, the person whom Stalin saw most often during the opening weeks of the war was NKVD head Lavrenti Beria. Alongside Pavlov, a number of other commanders were charged with treason and made to pay personally for the Red Army’s failings, including Lieutenant General Aleksandr Korobkov, commander of the 4th Army, and Major General Stepan Oborin, commander of the 14th Mechanized Corps. The arrests were quite arbitrary, arranged more or less by quota, as had been done during the Great Purge. Stalin’s order required simply that one front commander, one chief of staff, one chief of communications, one chief of artillery, and one army commander be arrested and charged; the specific transgression or offense was immaterial. The unfortunate Korobkov, for instance, had performed no worse than his colleagues but was the only army commander who could be found on the day of the order. A further three hundred or so Red Army commanders would be executed later in the year, as German forces neared Moscow, pour encourager les autres.

Given such levels of brutality against his own loyal generals, Stalin could scarcely be expected to show any compassion to his perceived political opponents. On the day after the German invasion, Beria’s deputy, Vsevolod Merkulov, instructed his subordinates in the areas threatened by the invasion to check their prisoner holdings and “compile lists of those whom you deem necessary to shoot.” Beria clarified the instruction the following day, ordering that all prisoners convicted or even accused of counterrevolutionary activity, sabotage, diversionism, or anti-Soviet activity be executed. The NKVD jailers did not need telling twice. Whereas ordinary criminals were sometimes released, and others were successfully evacuated to the Soviet interior, the looming chaos of the German attack made evacuation seem a rather perilous and unreliable way of dealing with Moscow’s political enemies—a point grimly demonstrated by the unhappy fate of two transports of the last mass deportation from the Baltic states, which had simply disappeared in the chaos of the blitzkrieg. From the NKVD’s perspective at least, the most responsible option for the remaining prisoners was execution.

Consequently, in countless locations, the incoming Germans found evidence of killings and massacres of those people whom the departing NKVD had not wanted to take with them and could not afford to leave behind. At Tartu in Estonia, for instance, some two hundred political prisoners were shot and dumped in the prison yard and in a nearby well. At Rainiai in western Lithuania, about eighty prisoners were driven on June 24 to a local forest, where they were tortured and abused before being executed. The victims were so badly mutilated that more than half of them could not be identified. At Chișinău, in what had once been Bessarabia, the garden of the former NKVD headquarters was found to contain the corpses of some eighty-five prisoners, all with their hands and feet tied and shot in the back of the head.

In the former Polish eastern regions, annexed by Stalin in 1939, at least 40,000 prisoners—Poles, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, and Jews—were confined in overcrowded NKVD prisons by June 1941. As elsewhere, some were released or evacuated, but around half would not survive. The worst massacres were in L’vov, where around 3,500 prisoners were killed across three prison sites, and at Lutsk (the former Polish Łuck), where 2,000 were murdered. But almost every NKVD prison or outpost saw a similar action—from Sambor (600 killed) to Czortkov (Czortków) (890), from Tarnopol (574) to Dubno (550). In most cases, similar methods were employed: prisoners were brought to the prison yard in batches of forty or so and machine-gunned. When time was short, NKVD troops did the killing in the cells, firing through the observation holes or tossing in hand grenades and locking the door. Any survivors were then bayonetted or battered to death. One eyewitness to the killings at Lutsk recalled, “Blood flowed in rivers, and body parts flew through the air.”

Total figures for those executed by the NKVD in the wake of the German invasion are unclear and will probably never be known for sure, but a few tentative figures may be presented. In Latvia, for instance, over 1,300 corpses would later be unearthed from the grounds of the NKVD prison and other locations, while a further 12,000 individuals were unaccounted for. For Lithuania, the figure of 1,000 murdered by the NKVD in June 1941 has been suggested. In Estonia, meanwhile, a figure of 2,000 has been estimated for those civilians killed either by the NKVD or in fighting with the withdrawing Red Army. An analysis of recent Soviet data gives a total of 8,700 Poles executed by the NKVD in June 1941, though other investigations suggest a figure around three times that. Charting a course between the hyperbole and the denial is not easy, but we must bear in mind that in many cases the dead from that period find no reference in the official Soviet record. Given that one respected historian has given a total figure of 100,000 for prisoners executed by the NKVD in former eastern Poland alone, one might assume a significantly larger figure for the total across all of the Soviet borderlands.

Just as the NKVD had eliminated its perceived class enemy, so the SS and its allies were exterminating their perceived racial enemy. Indeed, in the opening phase of the invasion, the two processes could be linked. Although Hitler’s SS and Einsatzgruppen execution squads had genocidal designs of their own upon crossing the German-Soviet frontier, in a few places anti-Soviet feeling was running so high that they had little difficulty inspiring local paramilitaries to take the lead in targeting those deemed responsible: the Jewish populations.

One of the most infamous examples was the Lietukis Garage Massacre in Kaunas, Lithuania, on June 27, 1941. One German eyewitness recalled coming across a crowd of people “cheering and clapping mothers lifting their children to get a better view,” so he decided to push his way through to take a look. There, he said he witnessed “probably the most frightful event that I had seen during the course of two world wars.” A local man, nicknamed “the Death Dealer,” was dispensing mob justice to those considered “traitors and collaborators”:

On the concrete forecourt of the petrol station a blond man of medium height, aged about twenty-five, stood leaning on a wooden club, resting. The club was as thick as his arm and came up to his chest. At his feet lay about fifteen to twenty dead or dying people. Water flowed continuously from a hose washing blood away into the drainage gully. Just a few steps behind this man some twenty men, guarded by armed civilians, stood waiting for their cruel execution in silent submission. In response to a cursory wave the next man stepped forward silently and was then beaten to death with the wooden club in the most bestial manner, each blow accompanied by enthusiastic shouts from the audience.

Another German watching events that day was astonished by the behavior of the crowd, women and children included, who applauded every time the man beat one of his helpless victims. When it was all over, he recalled, the “Death Dealer” put down his club, picked up an accordion, and played the Lithuanian national anthem.

In Lithuania alone, it is thought that some 2,500 Jews were slaughtered by their neighbors in similar bloody pogroms in the opening weeks of the German-Soviet war. In eastern Poland, at least thirty towns saw pogroms against the local Jews as soon as the Soviets departed. In many cases, anti-Semitism merged with anti-Soviet sentiment, and unfortunate Jewish victims were forced to sing Red Army songs or hymns to Stalin as part of their public humiliation. In Kolomyia (the former Polish Kołomyja), Jews were rounded up and forced to pull down the statue of Stalin, which had been erected in the center of the town in 1939. A particularly gruesome example of the treatment meted out to local Jewish populations occurred in Boryslav (Borysław) in western Ukraine, where the incoming German commander gave locals twenty-four hours to “avenge themselves.” In the horrors that followed, Jews were rounded up by a militia and herded to the former Soviet prison in the town, where they were forced to exhume and clean the corpses of those Poles and Ukrainians murdered by the NKVD and buried in the prison grounds. One eyewitness recalled, “I found myself in the middle of a huge courtyard. Everywhere there were bodies. They were terribly distorted and their faces were unrecognisable. It stank of old blood and rotting flesh. Next to the corpses stood Jewish men with wet cloths in their hands, to wipe away the blood. They keenly washed the decaying bodies. Only their eyes were feverish—crazed with fear.” Their hideous work done, the unfortunate Jews were then shot or beaten to death by the mob, their bodies in turn flung into the mass graves they had just exhumed. An estimated 250 people were murdered in Boryslav that day, before the German authorities put a stop to the slaughter. The numbers killed elsewhere in similar atrocities will probably never be known.