* The policies of the German occupation forces in the occupied regions of the Soviet Union were shaped by Hitler's racial bigotries and his desire for conquest. The locals were to be subjugated and reduced to an inferior status, when they were not simply exterminated. German brutalities in the occupied territories defied belief, and in response to the terror, many citizens took up arms and engaged in guerrilla warfare against the invaders. Beyond the limits of the German advance, Soviet citizens mobilized to perform extraordinary efforts to drive out the enemy, while the Western Allies ramped up their efforts to provide support.
* When the Nazis seized western Poland in the fall of 1939, many of the citizens of that land who had reason to fear them, such as Jews and Communists, fled east to the strictly relative safety of the Soviet Union. After the German invasion of the USSR in the spring of 1941, many of these people found themselves trapped by the Nazi occupation. They, and many of the peoples of Eastern Europe and Russia that had fallen under Hitler's control, now felt the teeth of the Nazi terror.
For a short time the Germans wore the velvet glove, presenting themselves as liberators. The first item on their agenda was to discredit Stalin by revealing the horrors in Soviet prisons and digging up mass graves of victims killed by the NKVD. There were many such gravesites. German moviemen captured the monstrosities in detail, and the films were played in cinemas back in the Reich. Although Josef Goebbels' Nazi propaganda machine was a master of the "big lie", there was no need to lie about Stalin's cruelties. Even though they were the truth, they were still hard to believe.
The moviemen caught Ukrainians smashing statues of Stalin and tearing down Soviet propaganda posters. The German authorities also encouraged locals to settle scores with Stalin's servants. This measure served the dual purpose of throwing a bone to the population while rooting out and destroying the Reich's enemies. The Germans offered rewards for information about Communists and Jews in hiding, as well as reports about ordinary folk who lacked enthusiasm for their new masters.
The Soviets had reparceled land and other possessions in the territories they had conquered in the west before the invasion as a means of cementing Soviet authority. The Nazis did it themselves, for similar reasons. The people had marched in demonstrations the year before to praise Great Father Stalin, and now they did it again to praise Hitler, their deliverer. Few of these people had ever read Hitler's flatulent MEIN KAMPF. They did not realize that in his New Order, the inferior Slavic peoples of the East were fit only to be servants for the German master race. The Nazis were careful to keep their contempt hidden for the moment, though when Ukrainian leadership tried to set up a new government for their region after the arrival of the Germans, they were arrested.
The velvet glove quickly disappeared to reveal the Nazi iron fist. While Jews, Gypsies, and Communists were at the top of the list of undesireables, the list didn't end there. The Reich needed living space in the East. Although subhuman Slavs had their uses, the Reich wanted their lands for German people. The Slavs had to be removed, if need be in a permanent fashion. SS chief Heinrich Himmler projected that about 30 million of the locals would die, mostly by the process of simply taking all their food and letting them starve.
The locals still had their uses. The Soviet Union was not yet beaten, and the menfolk of the occupied territories would make perfectly good cannon fodder. The SS, which was responsible for most of the dirty work of Nazi policy in the occupied territories, raised units from Ukraine, Belorussia, Latvia, Estonia. A million people in the occupied region became collaborators in the employ of the Germans, and a third of these people became soldiers. They were quickly put to use in combat, mostly in second-string duties such as cleaning up Red Army stragglers left isolated by the rapid German advance. About 70,000 of these collaborators were employed by the SS as assistants in a campaign of terror against the inhabitants. Even adolescents were recruited in the effort to cleanse the population of undesireables.
BACK_TO_TOP* The brutality of the Germans in the East was not entirely planned. In principle, the vast conquered territories were to be controlled by the "Ostministerium (East Ministry)" under Alfred Rosenberg. Rosenberg was actually in favor of keeping a fairly loose leash on the conquered territories, building them up to provide a defensive wall against whatever remained of Bolshevism to the East. Rosenberg was still a hardcore Nazi; his vision of the regime in the East was authoritarian, and the ruling class would be the Germans -- but as long as the locals did what they were told, he saw no reason to be unnecessarily harsh with them. In fact, Rosenberg believed, with plenty of good cause, that after Stalinism, the subject peoples would find a more or less reasonable German occupation a comparative relief.
Rosenberg, however, was not a very strong personality, and as far as Hitler himself was concerned, the Slavs were untermensch; though Hitler made agreeable noises about Rosenberg's plans, the Fuehrer had no intention of treating the Slavs as anything but untermensch. Rosenberg's position in the Reich was a reward for loyal service, but that reward did not include taking him more seriously than the Fuehrer felt necessary. Furthermore, other factions in the back-stabbing Nazi hierarchy had their own ideas for the East. The biggest threats to Rosenberg's authority were from Martin Bormann, -- whose title as head of the Nazi Party office in the Reich did not exactly convey the massive authority he held from his close proximity and control of access to the Fuehrer -- as well as Heinrich Himmler and, at least in the early days of the occupation, Reichsmarshal Goering.
The end result was that the rule of the East fell under the control of a very mixed gang. Formally, the grand plan of the Nazis was to set up four regions, or "Kommissariats", in the occupied lands for colonization by Aryans. The Baltic States were under Heinrich Lohse; Belorussia was under the control of Wilhelm Kube; and Ukraine was to be under the control of Eric Koch. The fourth region was to stretch from Moscow, which would become an artificial lake, to the Urals. It was to be known as "Moscovia".
The authority of these German "viceroys", or "ReichsKommissars" as they were known, was diluted by the SS, which operated as if it were above the law of the civil authority -- because it was. The campaign of terror in the East was directed by SS special action groups, or "Einsatzgruppen", each consisting of about 3,000 men. There were four such groups, each assigned to its own region in the occupied lands, and all under the command of SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewsky. They would eventually kill hundreds of thousands of people; the only fortunate thing was that this was such a small fraction of what Himmler wanted to accomplish.
The Einsatzgruppen had followed closely behind the advancing armies. One was operating in Kiev only two days after the city's fall to the Wehrmacht in September 1941. The Jews of the city were rounded up and marched to a nearby ravine known as Babi Yar. There, they were order to strip naked, herded into mass graves, and shot. The Red Army would retake the site in 1944 and find 125,000 corpses there.
Those Jews who could not be dealt with right away were penned up in ghettos. The largest was in Minsk. In the Minsk ghetto, the people were rounded up for work details and deprived of food. Any of them could be killed at whim by their German masters or local flunkeys. When hunger drained the life out of them, the skeletal bodies were carted off and thrown indifferently into a mass grave. At the end of the war, the mass grave contained 120,000 dead.
Kube was not happy with the activities of the SS in Belorussia, and complained up the chain of command. Kube had no great problems with brutality, but the SS raised the brutality to a level of whimsical mindlessness. 23 skilled Polish workers had been sent East since their services were needed; they were billeted in a jail for a lack of any other place to put them. The SS simply grabbed them and shot the lot of them, to then ignore protests over the matter. Eric Koch was much more enthusiastic about the heavy-handed approach, carrying around a whip and suggesting that the best thing to do in Ukraine was to kill all the adult males, then use the women as Aryan breeding stock. Koch shut down the schools in the Ukraine -- what conceivable reason was there to give slaves an education? He would eventually acquire the nickname of the "Second Stalin", and seem to like it.
Rosenberg and Koch were bitter enemies. Koch had been forced on Rosenberg. Koch was an old-time hard-core Nazi, though ironically he had started out as a Communist. Koch had long and close ties with Hitler, as well as direct access to the Fuehrer through Koch's "other hat" as Gauleiter of East Prussia, and Koch had no reason to care in the least about Rosenberg's technical authority over him. Koch would even be rude to Rosenberg's face in public. This insubordination went beyond a mere personal issue: the broken lines of authority in the Ostministerium, undermined by Hitler at any whim, reduced the organization to bureaucratic chaos. In vain, Rosenberg reprimanded Koch for his harsh approach, suggesting that all it was going to accomplish was to convince the locals that the Nazis were worse than the Bolsheviks, and lead to massive resistance against the German occupation.
Rosenberg, for all his limitations, was far-sighted in this. Lohse, in charge of the Baltic States, ran them under the principle that there was no sense in brutalizing people who obeyed the orders of the masters. This was much better than the deal the Baltics had got from Stalin, and the Baltics would never develop strong resistance movements against the Germans -- in fact, they provided much more of an economic benefit to the Reich than all the other conquests in the East. Certainly, had the Germans enlisted the Ukrainians as brothers in the fight against Bolshevism, they would have obtained many enthusiastic Ukrainian recruits. When German troops first arrived in the region, many of them automatically assumed that was how things were going to work.
They were mistaken. Hitler made his contempt for Rosenberg's ideas plain, and whatever pretense remained of treating Belorussians and Ukrainians as anything less than beasts of burden vanished completely. The German Foreign Ministry had been talking with various emigres who were seen as potentially useful surrogate leaders in the East. The Foreign Ministry was forced to give up on the exercise; files on the emigres were passed on to the SS, who threw the lot of them into concentration camps.
The German brutality in the East was far-reaching. Thousands of children who were regarded as of promising stock were rounded up and sent west for re-education, to become breeders for the Reich, as if they were so many cattle. Many children were sent to special education camps, where they were used in medical experiments or forced labor. If they outlived their usefulness, they were often murdered. Many adults were taken west as well, to be used as slave labor under a program begun in 1942.
As the SS rounded up food and livestock and sent it West, the Soviet people under their control were given a simple choice: either they worked for the Germans, or such "useless eaters" starved. Nazi propaganda films praised the "Friendship Movement" by which the locals and the Germans worked hand in hand, with smiling German soldiers frolicking with dancing peasant girls. After the war, survivors of the occupation saw the films and responded incredulously. "Friendship Movement?" The girls tried to make themselves look ugly, and hid when German soldiers came to their villages.
Although German Army troops later blamed all the horrors of the occupation in the East on the SS, in fact regions closer to the front lines were often under direct military control, and the locals were treated about the same -- left to starve and subject to brutal reprisals for any activities against the conquerors. German Army troops engaged in the same sort of pacification operations as the SS Einsatzgruppen -- raping women and girls, burning down villages, and slaughtering civilians; they were simply not as focused on the task as the SS. In addition, although German Army commanders issued orders that regular troops were not to participate in the mass executions performed by the SS Einsatzgruppen, either as voluntary active participants or as spectators, standing by and taking pictures -- German Army soldiers had actually done such things! -- these officers were aware of what was going on, and in fact provided logistical support to SS operations.
The mindset of the Germans would prove self-defeating, breeding hatred and stubborn resistance among the conquered peoples, when many of them would have otherwise thanked the invaders for deliverance. One girl trapped behind German lines wrote a letter that was smuggled out to her father in the Red Army, with the girl saying: "Many people have been killed in the villages around here. And all they think about is the bloodthirsty monsters, you can't even call them human, they're just robbers and drinkers of blood. Papa, kill the enemy!"
The extent and level of the brutality in the East remains appalling, but there were exceptions to the callousness. Only a handful of the Jews held in Belorussia were saved, and as one of those survivors said later, they always had an angel who saved them. A 48-year-old SS Oberleutnant named Schultz, who worked at the Minsk ghetto, fell in love with a 23-year-old Jewish girl named Elsa. He bought a truck and smuggled 25 women out of the ghetto, where they were picked up by the Belorussian resistance. For his reward, Schultz was sent by Soviet authorities to a prison camp, where he died within weeks. Else was sent into exile to the Jewish autonomous region in the Far East, though she would survive the war. The couple had simply escaped one monster, to fall into the hands of another.
BACK_TO_TOP* Many of the peasants ran off to the deep forest, where they built camps out of sight of the Germans. They were joined in some cases by Soviet soldiers who had escaped German mopping-up operations after the great encirclements early in the invasion. They made knives and other simple weapons in hopes of using them to get better weapons from careless German soldiers, but at first the resistance groups, the "partisans", were weak and uncoordinated.
These people fought for their homes and their Motherland and prayed to God for strength. They did not fight for Stalin and did not worship him. Stalin knew this and for the moment he would not support them. He ordered Beria to send NKVD people behind German lines to perform sabotage, as well as to remind Soviet citizens under German control that they were not beyond the talons of the Soviet state. The NKVD agents performed executions when deemed necessary to punish the disloyal. Some of the executions were filmed, apparently for propaganda films produced to suggest to those inclined to independent thinking that it might not be wise.
And yet the NKVD fighters were still often heroic. One of them, a pretty young woman named Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya and a member of the "Komsomol (Young Communist League)", was assigned to stampede horses and burn stables. She was caught by the Germans; tortured; mutilated with one breast cut off; and hanged from a gibbet. The Soviet propaganda machine played up pictures of her battered body lying frozen in the snow, with the noose still tight around her neck; and they still remain some of the most vivid and heartbreaking images of the war in the East.
* Stalin thought he could ignore the partisan movements at first, since he believed that his winter offensives would crush the German invader. This would prove untrue, forcing him to reconsider his attitude. He had to admit that he needed help, and if the help was not exactly to his liking, he could deal with that issue when the time came.
Stalin called for the formation of official resistance units in occupied territory. These units were called "otryadi". Supplies and Red Army personnel were dropped behind the lines to help organize the otryadi. The peasant fighters were given Red Army ranks and appropriate political discipline. Soviet newsreels began to praise partisan fighters. The resistance bands were given radio receivers so they could listen to Stalin's speeches. NKVD officers established propaganda mills behind enemy lines. Belorussian partisan Ponomarenko became the leader of the great movement, while other resistance fighters became field marshals: Kovpak, Fyodorov, Rudnyev.
By the summer of 1942, there were about 150,000 partisan fighters making war against the Germans. They operated in bands ranging in size from ten to a thousand. They opposed nine second-string German security divisions. The Germans could not hope to deal with the partisans in the huge forests, where intruders would be led on merry chases if they were not simply surrounded and wiped out, so they attempted to isolate the islands of resistance with barbed wire and minefields.
Some German officers believed that brute force was counterproductive in dealing with the partisans. In the fall of 1942, Colonel Reinhard Gehlen of German military intelligence more or less resurrected Rosenberg's ideas about enlisting the locals as allies instead of brutalizing them. The notion got no further than before, with Hitler characteristically responding that the answer was more brutality, not less. The result was an escalation of violence on both sides. The Germans began to lose the battle of the rear. Meticulous SS figures for the last six months of 1942 boast of killing 363,000 Jews and executing 19,000 suspected partisan sympathizers. As far as killing people who were actively fighting back, the SS didn't do so well, with their records indicating a mere 1,300 kills inflicted on the enemy in combat, with a little over 8,500 executed after capture.
The activities of the virulent gangs of "bandits" made exploitation of the captured territories extremely difficult. They had a psychological effect on the Germans out of proportion to the pain they actually inflicted, since the partisans made even driving from town to town very risky. The best any German soldier could hope for if captured by partisans was to be simply shot, instead of being killed in slower and more imaginative ways.
The partisans didn't have it all their own way, however. The first winter was in particular one of starvation and deprivation, and there were only a few primitive and necessarily isolated field hospitals to deal with the wounded who managed to live long enough to be carried to one. Although German propaganda films proclaimed that partisans who gave themselves up voluntarily and could prove they were coerced would be allowed to go free, it is unlikely that many believed such a foolish lie. Captured partisans would be shot, or preferably hanged from a gibbet to strangle, left dangling there as an advertisement to the subject peoples of what would happen to those who opposed the conquerors.
The Germans enthusiastically engaged in reprisals against Russian civilians. Soviet authorities later estimated that 600 villages were razed in Belorussia alone. If the Germans were feeling kindly, they drove the villagers out to survive as best they could. If they weren't feeling kindly, they shot them, or locked them barns and set the structures on fire. Sometimes the Germans forced the peasants to walk through minefields as a means of clearing them. The women were often raped and then killed. Hitler commented: "This partisan war has its advantages. It gives us an excuse to exterminate whoever opposes us." The statement seems odd in hindsight, since the Germans never seemed to need much excuse to kill anyone they pleased.
* The partisans had their revenge when they could. Wilhelm Kube was a prominent target of Belorussian partisans. In the summer of 1942, a 22-year-old partisan named Yelena Mazanik managed to get a job in Kube's household as a maid; apparently Kube recruited a fair number of pretty young local girls into his household as a harem of sorts. Mazanik put a bomb under Kube's mattress that blew him to bits in his sleep.
Retaliation was swift and brutal, with the enraged Germans hanging a thousand citizens of Minsk. Lena Mazanik escaped, and became a Soviet propaganda hero. Despite that, when she was sent to Moscow she was terrorized by Beria's NKVD thugs, who were suspicious of anyone who operated at all independently and were in particular suspicious of anyone who had demonstrable skills as an assassin.
By the end of 1942, the partisans had carved out their own domains behind enemy lines. The Germans had to be ready for stand-up battles if they went into these areas. The resistance fighters raised crops and tended livestock, building up small societies in primitive conditions. They enforced security on villages in their domain, shooting villagers who rightly or wrongly seemed insufficiently cooperative or too friendly to the enemy. Some villagers found the partisans to be as bad or worse than the Germans -- often drunk, generally thievish, and inclined to brutality with little or no provocation. Some ex-partisans later admitted to their sins: having few supplies, the only way to get fed was to take food from the peasants, who were rarely overfed themselves.
However, as the Soviet Union recovered from the terrible blows of 1941, supplies to the partisans increased to a flood. By the summer of 1943, the Germans had 300,000 troops in the rear trying to deal with the guerrillas. As the Red Army advanced, partisan fighters in the rear taking their orders from Moscow blew up trains, cut rail lines, tore town telephone lines, and burned supply depots. Eventually, a total of 1.2 million partisans fought against the Germans, demonstrating the Nazi foolishness of brutalizing people who would have otherwise regarded the Germans as liberators from Stalin.
The Germans controlled cities and strongpoints within a hostile wilderness, unable to venture out except in force. Given the devastation in the lands conquered by the Wehrmacht and the swarms of partisans infesting the countryside, Hitler's belief that his war in the East would win resources to help Germany carry on the war turned out to be a miscalculation. There was some loot to be had, of course, but under the circumstances it couldn't match what the Reich would have obtained from the Soviets through normal trade. Effective economic exploitation of the East was a task that might well take decades to achieve; Germany needed the resources in the here and now.
* Not all the partisans were controlled by Stalin. Some resistance bands fought both the Nazis and the Reds. Soviet propaganda referred to these groups as "bandits", just as the Germans called pro-Soviet partisans "bandits". Nationalist guerrilla bands sprang up in the Baltics and Ukraine. Ukrainian nationalists raised a partisan army, the "Ukrainska Povstanska Armiia (UPA)", with 100,000 fighters to fight for their national independence. The result was a hidden civil war as brutal as any that took place in the open, with murders and atrocities committed by one partisan faction against the other.
As the Red Army advanced, Soviet security followed and took revenge on those who had failed to be obedient servants of Stalin. Sham courts were convened, the accused were swiftly condemned and then shot or hanged. Those who had collaborated with the Nazis or joined the ranks of the regional SS didn't even get a sham trial, usually being shot on the spot.
BACK_TO_TOP* In the vast regions of the USSR that remained free of Nazi occupation, all the citizens threw their hearts into resisting further encroachments by Hitler's armies.
The relocation of Soviet industry to the east of the Urals that took place in front of the German advance had been a marvel, Stalin's machine at its most impressive, with more than 1,500 factories picked up and moved wholesale by 1.5 million railroad cars in less than three months. One American reporter described it vividly: "It is as if the principal factories of New England were suddenly picked up lock, stock, and barrel and shifted bodily to the slopes of the Rocky Mountains."
German intelligence gradually put together a picture of the relocation effort, assessing it with both awe and dismay. Hitler had hoped to obtain Soviet industrial resources to support the Reich, but they had largely slipped from his grasp -- as had the bulk of Soviet locomotives and rolling stock, with most of that left behind smashed up and rendered useless to the Germans. That meant the use of German trains on track in captured Soviet territory, which was problematic because the rail gauges of the two countries were different. The Germans couldn't use Soviet tracks until their gauge had been narrowed. The Soviets had also been effective in destroying power generation and electrical distribution infrastructure.
Although Soviet officials could take pride in this accomplishment, the enormous operation had also, and to no surprise, been accompanied by extreme hardships to the literally millions of workers involved. They had been shipped east in unheated cattle cars, with few provisions and poor sanitation. When they reached their final destinations, there was little food or shelter available in the grimy, unfinished industrial boomtowns. Workers began production in factories that didn't have roofs.
The shortage of food was greatly aggravated by the fact that vast regions of productive agricultural land and livestock had been lost to the Germans, as well as the loss of almost all able-bodied men from the ages of 16 to 40 into the ranks of the Soviet war machine. Women, old men, and young boys kept the factories and farms working. With production and supply all going to the front, such necessary equipment as farm tractors was hard to come by, and even when old tractors were available, there was little fuel available to run them. Plows were pulled by milk cows and farm workers, often women.
The winter of 1941:1942 was the worst, with substantial civilian losses from starvation and deprivation. By the spring of 1942, some order was beginning to return to the Soviet Union, though the USSR was still strained to the limit. Everything was rationed and hard to come by, and citizens had to scrounge, mend, and improvise to get by. Matches were scarce, so the people scrounged up flints or spyglasses to light fires. Newspapers were valued for everything from use as cigarette rolling papers, wrapping paper, toilet paper, and an extra layer between the blankets.
The citizens endured the hardships, having little choice, but they also gave up their savings to support the war effort, donating roubles to build tanks and planes, which were delivered to the front painted with text to announce that the machine was a gift from a particular collective farm or other civic organization. Stalin's propaganda apparatus helped encourage the citizens through appeals to their patriotism. The newspapers played up Soviet successes and played down Soviet defeats, though citizens quickly learned to read between the lines and figure out some approximation of the truth anyway. The propaganda mill encouraged hatred of Germans -- all of them, not just Hitler and his Nazi stooges. Ilya Ehrenburg, the Soviet Union's answer to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, glorified the slaughter of Germans, encouraging the people to kill as many as they could.
The earnestness of the Soviet people in support of the war would, with help from state propaganda, become exaggerated in memory later. There had always been petty corruption, pilferage, and black marketeering in the USSR, and the war didn't put a stop to these practices by any means. Still, the patriotic fervor behind the support for the war was widespread and deep.
Although the USSR remained a police state, the hand of the NKVD had relaxed somewhat. It was still not safe to speak one's mind, but most Soviet citizens had less fear of being arrested on lunatic whims. Even Stalin had become tired of some of the ridiculous accusations in NKVD briefs, scribbling on them that the claims were "nonsense", while still often confirming the sentences.
The pointedly godless Communist regime abandoned its harassment of the Russian Orthodox Church. Communist atheism had always been somewhat superficial in the first place. Many soldiers, particularly peasant boys, wore crucifixes around their necks -- keeping them buttoned up usually and saying it was a gift from grandmother if challenged -- and crossed themselves as they moved out into battle. The authorities called on the clergy to support the war, which they did enthusiastically, even to the extent of funding the purchase of weapons for the troops at the front. However, as discussed later, Soviet regional ethnic groups of doubtful loyalty to the Red cause would find that they still had plenty of good reasons to fear Koba.
The Gulag was far from disbanded, and prisoners were pushed to build new production sites. They also performed more sophisticated work than simply digging ditches and cutting down trees. Many of the prisoners were highly skilled; managers, engineers, and scientists were often arrested if the programs they were working on ran into delays or other troubles, the Soviet state judging such failures as "treason". Death sentences were often handed out to them, but it seems not so often carried out; Lavrenti Beria had recognized that there was no reason to waste the technical skills of Soviet engineers and scientists simply because they were officially traitors to the state, and organized "technical prisons" where those skills could be put to use.
The technical prisons were called "sharashkas", a Russian word roughly meaning "gang", and they were by the standards of the Gulag relatively comfortable and survivable. The great Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spent time in a sharashka during the war and described it in his novel THE FIRST CIRCLE, a reference to the first, mild circle of Dante's Hell. The master airplane designer Andrei N. Tupolev, a grand older statesman of the Soviet aviation industry, ran one of the more notable sharashkas, where the excellent Tu-2 medium bomber was designed. It was later said to be one of the few production aircraft ever designed by an engineering team whose members were all in lockup at the time. Tupolev would be given his freedom for his efforts in 1943; as the story goes, Stalin even personally apologized to Tupolev and shook his hand.
Artists also supported the war effort, producing propaganda posters, many of which still remain vivid decades later; writing patriotic plays and music, which were performed to the citizens and the troops on the front lines; and creating documentaries and movies, with the work of combat reporters and photographers filtered through the Sovinformburo propaganda organization and widely distributed to the public.
One documentary, ONE DAY OF THE WAR, featured the work of 160 cameramen, 30 of them being killed in action. The great film director Sergei Eisenstein produced IVAN THE TERRIBLE PART I, with the tyrant Ivan now played up as a Russian patriot. After the war, Eisenstein would produce IVAN THE TERRIBLE PART II, but then Stalin would find the resemblance between himself and the mad and brutal Ivan less flattering. Eisenstein escaped the security apparatus by the effective, if drastic, measure of dying of a heart attack.
In any case, the wartime propaganda played up Stalin above all, raising him to the status of a demigod: omniscient, all-wise, all-powerful. Despite the propaganda, many Soviet citizens understood that Stalin was a tyrant who ruled by fear. Still, he was their leader in a bitter war with a far more hated enemy. No matter how vicious he was, there would be a streak of admiration and fondness for the Great Leader. He might have been a brutal father, but he was father nonetheless, the Soviet Union's leader in a war with the scope of legend, the people's war -- the "Great Patriotic War".
BACK_TO_TOP* Allied assistance slowly ramped up through 1942. Weapons and supplies were brought in through Iran, Siberia, and Murmansk. The Siberian route was a particularly important pipeline for delivery of American aircraft, though cargo vessels also bought in materiel through Vladivostok, to then be hauled west by rail. The vessels were either Soviet or had been flagged by convenience as Soviet, allowing them to steam with impunity in Japanese-controlled waters. The Germans leaned on the Japanese to take action against the shipment of war materiel to the Soviets for use against the Reich, but the Japanese did nothing serious to interfere: they had no more wish to start a fight with the Soviets than, for the time being, the Soviets had to start a fight with them.
However, the most significant port of entry was Murmansk, in the Soviet Arctic near the Finnish border. Oddly, ocean currents in the area meant that Murmansk was ice-free even when ports well to the south, such as Archangel, were frozen over. There were some problems with getting processes in place at first, with British Royal Navy personnel stationed at Murmansk to support the convoys harassed by Soviet bureaucracy. Churchill complained to Stalin, who blandly replied that the British had to obey Soviet laws. Churchill shot back, not at all blandly, that he would halt the convoys if the games didn't stop. Soviet authorities would never be very pleasant to the visitors, but after that the games were scaled back.
The Allied Murmansk convoys were a major effort and were conducted under great hazards. They had to skirt around German-occupied Norway to reach Murmansk, and often suffered badly from Luftwaffe bombers, as well as German Navy U-boats and surface warships. Sailors falling into the frigid waters froze to death in minutes. The convoys were protected by the Royal Navy and, as the freighters neared Murmansk, the Red Navy, a "shallow water" force mostly oriented towards coastal defense.
The Germans of course recognized the importance of Murmansk, and launched an attack from Finland in the spring of 1942 to capture the city. After three days of tough fighting the German assault was blunted, with Soviet Marines in berets and red-striped tee shirts proving particularly effective fighters. The Germans learned respect for the "sea devils". It was the last time the Germans tried the direct approach against Murmansk. They refocused their efforts on using bombers and U-boats to shut down the lifeline. In response, Soviet long-range coastal guns targeted the harbor of Petsamo in northern Finland, from which nickel ore was shipped to the Reich, and did much to squeeze off traffic from the port. Red Navy submarines also torpedoed German vessels operating off of northern Finland and Norway.
By the end of 1942, Allied assistance to the USSR was becoming a flood, though it would never be the majority of the vast quantities of material needed to support the Soviet war machine. Still, despite the fact that the Soviets downplayed the assistance, then and later, as inconsequential, the aid was far from trivial. The Soviet Union would not have recovered so quickly from the devastation of the first year of the war in the East had help not been so forthcoming.
The Soviet Union was supplied with thousands of aircraft, notably the Bell P-39 Airacobra; hundreds of thousands of sturdy 6x6 trucks and little four-wheel-drive jeeps, the jeep proving so handy that the Germans considered one captured from the Soviets a real prize of war; almost 12,000 railroad cars and locomotives; plus raw materials, such as aviation aluminum alloys, as well as food and clothing. The Red Army would receive tins of Spam to keep them fed and large quantities of felt-lined boots that would be deeply appreciated by the infantry in winter combat. There was even space for some niceties, such as American chocolate.
Some tanks were sent as well, though the Soviets had better armor and were rightfully unimpressed by Western tanks. Ironically, their superb T-34 had its roots in a tank designed by an American, Walter Christie, which the US Army had not seen fit to adopt. On the other hand, Western electronics systems, such as radar sets, were highly appreciated, and the Soviets worked hard to reverse-engineer them and build them on their own.
Stalin's appreciation was always limited. He always wanted more, and in particular he demanded a second front. In a sense, he had got a second front almost at the outset, when the Japanese attacked the Americans, ensuring that Japan could not seriously threaten Siberia for the time being. It did not escape the notice of his allies that while Stalin was demanding a second front, he was pointedly doing nothing to help them in their war against the Japanese. Hints by the Americans to allow them to set up air bases in the Soviet Far East to bomb the Japanese home islands were emphatically rejected. The Americans were not inclined to press the matter: for the time being, the Soviets obviously had their hands full, and just as obviously had perfectly valid reasons to avoid a fight in the Far East.
The British, partly for a lack of anything better to do to support the USSR by offensive action, were conducting a bomber war against the Reich, to which the Americans would soon begin to add their weight. The bombing was inaccurate, absurdly so at first, and no more than a big inconvenience to German war production at the time -- but it did help relieve the pressure on the USSR by forcing the Reich to dedicate fighter aircraft and other resources to home defense. The British lost many bombers and aircrew, but Stalin had little gratitude. Bombing the Fascists was all well and good, but it wasn't a second front, and Stalin wanted a second front immediately.
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