* The Germans had been given a short rest of sorts in the East in late 1943 -- but of course it didn't last, with the Red Army inflicting heavy blows on the Wehrmacht north, center and south in early 1944. In the meantime, while the Germans were being dealt with, Stalin also dealt with the matter of Soviet ethnic minorities that were perceived to have been too friendly to the invaders. The result was one of the great crimes against humanity of the 20th century.
* Stalin began 1944 by directing Mikhail Kalinin, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and in principle the "leader" of the Soviet State, to read a speech to the Soviet people, praising Stalin for driving the Germans out of half of the Soviet territory they had seized. Stalin liked to toy with Kalinin, like a puppet on strings. Kalinin's wife was in the Gulag, and though he pleaded with Stalin to have her freed, the Great Leader refused.
The Red Army had pushed back the Germans during the height of summer. In the depths of winter the Red Army was comparatively even more powerful, and was pressing its advantage, engaging in three offensives through December and January. One of the offensives was to relieve Leningrad and shove the Germans out of the northwestern regions of the USSR, while the other two would fall on the Germans in Ukraine and in Crimea.
The Leningrad offensive was the least important in strictly military terms, The city was actually in no great danger any longer; there had been a lifeline to Leningrad since the late winter of 1941, and it had been expanded and strengthened since that time. The Red Army and the Germans faced each other in sets of fortified lines that prevented the two sides from doing much more than trading somewhat indifferent, if still murderous, artillery barrages. Leningrad's citizens had long acquired the ability to react quickly to the sound of incoming shells, cart off the dead and wounded, clean up the damage, and then go on about their business.
In effect, Leningrad was helping to keep German Army Group North uselessly pinned down. The commander of Army Group North, Field Marshal Georg von Kuechler, had seen his command looted of troops to deal with the emergencies to the south; he had no good reason to remain where he was and was vulnerable, so in the summer of 1943 he had begun to plan an orderly withdrawal about 240 kilometers (150 miles) southwest to a fortified line known as the "Panther Position".
Considerable work had been done to build up the Panther Position. By the end of the year it was very strong, and well-supplied with large stockpiles of food. Kuechler expected to withdraw to the Panther Position in January 1944, but he failed to understand the Fuehrer's insecurity over retreats of any kind. When the field marshal spoke with Hitler about the matter at the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia on 30 December 1943, Kuechler unwisely commented that the German lines around Leningrad were very solid, if undermanned. That was enough for Hitler: he refused to authorize a withdrawal.
Whatever misgivings Kuechler felt about this would have been greatly enhanced if he had understood Soviet intentions. The siege of Leningrad had gone on for years, becoming a symbol of Soviet resistance, and Stalin was now determined to see the siege lifted. Kuechler's 18th Army, under General Georg Lindemann, was confronted in the north by the Leningrad Front, under General L.A. Govorov, and the Volkov Front in the east, under General Kirill Meretskov. Both fronts had been receiving massive reinforcements and by the end of 1943 were massively superior to Kuechler's forces.
German intelligence fell down badly on the job. For example, shipping had been observed moving back and forth between Leningrad and Oranienbaum, southwest of Leningrad on the Baltic coast and the nucleus of a "pocket" in German lines, but nobody clearly grasped the significance of the traffic. In fact, the ships were bringing in the powerful Soviet Second Shock Army. Govorov wanted to use it as half of a pincers movement, with the Forty-Second Army moving out of the defenses in the Leningrad area as the other half, to bag the Germans concentrated in that area.
That done, Govorov's forces would operate as half of a still-larger pincers, with Meretskov's Fifty-Ninth Army smashing through the German lines around Novgorod in the east to operate as the other half of the pincers. In principle, the entire Germany 18th Army would be encircled and destroyed.
* The attack jumped off before dawn on 14 January 1944, with Red Army guns dumping 100,000 shells on German positions. The Soviet assault made good progress, though it was slowed by unseasonably warm weather that thawed the ground, and sometimes created thick fogs that kept aircraft grounded. Kuechler and Lindemann were not too worried for the moment, since the Soviets had made attacks into their lines before that had always eventually been broken, to be thrown back by reserve forces. They did not understand the magnitude of the Soviet offensive. They became much more aware of it on 18 January, when their defense began to disintegrate, with German troops falling back to avoid encirclement and destruction. Hitler demanded that the troops stand their ground to the death, but few were willing to die for such fantasies.
The German garrison of Novgorod got permission to withdraw only at the last moment, pulling out on the night of 19 January, with the Red Army moving in the next morning, the 20th. They found the city completely ruined. The Germans had actually been demolishing classic Russian buildings there for some time, on the policy that the place was to be handed over to German settlers and built into a German city.
Kuechler and Lindemann now knew there was nothing to do but pull back to the Panther Position. Hitler refused to authorize the withdrawal and told the generals to fight harder, but the 18th Army was on the run whether he liked it or not. On the evening of 27 January 1944, Soviet authorities made a public announcement to the citizens of Leningrad that the city was now out of reach of the longest-range German guns. The 900-day siege of the city was broken. The city's artillery batteries fired 20 volleys to celebrate.
* Kuechler was not in any mood to celebrate; he was doing what he could to resist the Red Army juggernaut, but it was hopeless, and he knew it. Hitler summoned him to the Wolf's Lair on 31 January and sacked him, replacing him with Walter Model. The troops had noticed the Fuehrer's inclination to call in the trustworthy Model when things were going badly, and so had nicknamed him the "Catastrophe General".
Model managed to sell the Fuehrer on a concept called "Schild und Schwert (Shield and Sword)", which was a philosophy of performing controlled retreats to put German forces in positions where they could perform counterstrokes and regain the ground they had lost. That may have merely been a smoke-and-mirrors way of selling a retreat -- but if so, it worked, the Fuehrer approved. Model pulled his forces back gradually, sometimes so slowly that even Hitler nervously told him to hurry up, and by the beginning of March 1944 the survivors were all more or less safe and snug in the Panther Position, short three divisions that had been chewed up in the previous weeks. The spring thaw put an end to further Soviet offensive operations for the moment.
BACK_TO_TOP* While the siege of Leningrad was being lifted, the Red Army was conducting its second blow, an offensive against German forces in Ukraine that was basically an extension of the fall campaign that had broken the German Dnieper line and captured Kiev.
The Germans still held the downstream portions of the Dnieper, which flowed southeast and then southwest towards the Black Sea, creating a great riverbend in which German forces might be trapped. Vatutin's First Ukrainian Front moved out on 24 December 1943, driving towards Manstein's headquarters at Vinnitsa, on the Bug River southwest of Kiev.
Manstein was not overly worried at first, since he found it hard to believe that the Red Army was in any condition to carry out another major campaign so soon after the brutal fighting of the fall. The weather to the south was also unseasonably warm, and that meant that Soviet armor would be bogged down in mud. However, Manstein underestimated Soviet resources. On 29 December, Konev's Second Ukrainian Front jumped off on a second thrust, crossing over the Dnieper far to the southeast of Vatutin's drive. Konev's objective was Kirovograd, in the Dnieper Bend. Finally, on 10 January 1944 the Third Ukrainian Front launched a third prong of the offensive from the southern end of the Soviet line.
Manstein quickly recognized that he could not deal with combinations of such powerful forces. His only hope was to concentrate his own forces and try to defeat the enemy by parts, and he wanted to yield ground to Konev so he could strike hard at Vatutin, the bigger threat. Hitler contemptuously called the strategy "running away", and refused to give Manstein a free hand to deal with the crisis.
However, Manstein was correct in believing that the mild winter weather and the muddy conditions it created would bog down the Red Army. Vatutin and Konev of course realized this as well, and suggested a change in battle plan. Several corps of the German 8th Army were concentrated at Kanev, not far downstream on the Dnieper from Kiev. Vatutin's drive flanked them to the northwest while Konev's columns flanked them from the southeast, leaving the German forces sandwiched between them and obviously vulnerable to encirclement. Hitler, as usual, had refused to authorize their withdrawal; very well, as long as they were obligingly sitting there, there was no reason not to bag them.
Red Army planners did not like to improvise, for the simple and sensible reason that Soviet forces usually lacked the flexibility and competence to pull off such improvisations. The Red Army was a powerful but blunt instrument, and though matters had greatly improved during the years of total war, trying to finesse things, particularly in the face of the more skillful German Army, was asking for trouble. However, this was a fairly straightforward adjustment in plans, and the opportunity seemed too good to pass up. Zhukov chatted with Stalin about the idea over dinner. Koba liked the idea and was agreeable.
Vatutin would turn south, Konev would turn north, and the two fronts would then meet, isolating the Germans. The weather went cold, improving Soviet mobility, and on the morning of 24 January 1944 the movement began as a series of probing attacks by Vatutin's troops to test German strength. German defenses were soft, and by the end of the day the First Ukrainian Front was on the way south.
Next morning, 25 January, Konev's Second Ukrainian Front began to drive north. One German compared the onslaught to a flood, like a dam breaking, the Soviets pressing on with a complete indifference to losses, the initial attacks followed up by a huge theatrical horse cavalry charge. The German 8th Army commander, General Otto Woehler, asked for permission to pull out. Hitler refused. Hans Hube's 1st Panzer Army tried to hold the line, but Red armor broke through on 26 January. Hube also asked Berlin for permission to withdraw. Once again, Hitler refused.
The First and Second Ukrainian Fronts joined hands on 28 January, trapping the 11th & 42nd Corps of the German 8th Army in a pocket around the city of Cherkassy. Soviet intelligence estimated that the Red Army had bagged 85,000 Germans, but that was a gross exaggeration. Military units that have been suffering losses over time that cannot be made good naturally tend to shrink, and there is a certain reluctance, due to a desire to keep up an appearance of strength plus simple inertia, to consolidate depleted units. There were actually only about 56,000 Germans trapped in the Cherkassy Pocket.
The Soviet hold on the pocket was not very strong, and the Germans would only have to punch through about 40 kilometers (25 miles) of Soviet-held territory to break out. Hitler refused to authorize a breakout, reasoning that if it was relatively easy to break out, then it would be about as easy to mount a relief effort. The Fuehrer authorized Manstein to organize a relief column, and on the morning of 4 February 1944 the German 3rd Panzer Corps and 47th Corps moved out. They made good progress at first, but the weather had gone warm again and by the next day, 5 February, the Germans were bogged down. The 47th Corps was forced to call it quits on 6 February. It was obvious that the relief column would not make to the pocket. Woehler sent a courier to plead for authorization of a breakout. Hitler thought it over for twelve hours, and then grudgingly approved.
The two German corps in the pocket were now under the unified command of Lieutenant General Wilhelm Stemmermann, previously commander of 11 Corps. On 11 February, the 3rd Panzer Corps managed to grab the village of Lysyanka, blocked from a linkup with the forces trapped in the pocket by the Gniloi Tikich River and tough Soviet defenses. Stemmermann's troops moved out just before midnight in their first breakout attempt, but they were quickly halted by Red Army counterattacks.
Mud and rain stalled the fighting for a few more days, but on 14 February the 1st Panzer Division of the 3rd Panzer Corps managed to capture a bridge over the Gniloi Tikich. The major obstacle left to completing the breakout was a prominent high point over the terrain named "Hill 239", defended to the teeth by Red Army tanks and artillery. The Germans attacked Hill 239 in a blinding blizzard and a nasty fight followed.
Manstein saw that he was not likely to win the fight. On 15 February, he told Stemmermann that his forces would have to complete the breakout themselves. Stemmermann replied that he would begin his breakout at 11:00 PM on 16 February. The Red Army was pressing him heavily and sending appeals from captured German generals to persuade him to surrender, but Stemmermann managed to hold out, while he rearranged his forces for the escape. The blizzard ended on the morning of 16 February and the 1st Panzer Division renewed its push on Hill 239, even getting three tanks on top of the hill for a short time; but that was as far as the relief effort got. The rest was up to Stemmermann and the 45,000 troops in the pocket that had survived the fighting so far.
By nightfall, final preparations were being put in place for the breakout, with a timetable in place and orders handed down the ranks. There were about 1,500 men who were too badly wounded to join the breakout and had to be left behind. The action began precisely on schedule at 11:00 PM that night. Three infantry regiments led the way, moving out as quietly as possible and relying on the bayonet. Although the Soviets should have been expecting something like this, they were taken by surprise, and the breakout effort went surprisingly well. One infantry regiment ran into four Soviet tanks and a column of trucks, but a German soldier coolly ordered the tanks to halt in Russian. They did so, and the Germans marched past unhindered.
Other German units were not so lucky, some being forced to swim the frigid and fast-moving Gniloi Tikich, with many men drowning or dying of exposure. Of course, by the time the sun came up on the morning of 17 February the Red Army was fully aware of what was going on and bearing down on the fleeing Germans, who were bogged down by the mud. While the German troops dodged artillery and machine-gun fire, Soviet tanks raced after German vehicles and carts and simply ran them down, grinding soldiers under their tracks.
It was every man for himself, which under the circumstances was likely the only sensible policy. Since the fighting was concentrated around Hill 239, the escaping Germans went south and tried to swim the Gniloi Tikich. The water was no more pleasant in the day than it had been in the night, and to compound the misery of the situation, Soviet tanks took the troops under fire as they tried to cross. The river was littered with bodies floating downstream among the ice floes.
By the time the action faded out that afternoon, about 30,000 German troops had managed to escape to safety, a surprisingly large number given the difficulty of their situation. Stemmermann was not among the survivors. He had been one of the last to leave the pocket, remaining behind to get everyone on their way and ensure that anything left behind was destroyed. A soldier reported that he had given Stemmermann a ride on his wagon, which had then been hit by a shell from a Soviet antitank gun.
* The large number of survivors gratified Manstein, though they were absolutely no good to him as fighting men. They had lost all of their heavy equipment -- in fact, many had lost the clothes off their backs -- and their wretched condition shocked other German soldiers, who were themselves accustomed to living conditions that were normally much less than comfortable. Manstein was forced to send the survivors to Poland to recuperate. Worse, in being forced to focus on relief of the Cherkassy Pocket, Manstein had pulled forces from other sections of his line, and the Red Army had of course exploited German weakness elsewhere. Soviet forces were pressing him heavily on his flanks, as well as threatening Kleist's Army Group A on the southern end of the German line. The only relief was that the muddy season was now in effect with a vengeance, rendering serious military operations impossible for a few weeks.
Manstein, Kleist, and Zeitzler wanted to use the breather to pull back behind the Bug River and set up a new and hopefully solid defensive line. Hitler, still obsessed with holding onto ground at all costs, had a different idea. In early March 1944, he issued orders indicating that 26 cities and major towns in German-occupied Soviet territory were to be set up as "fortified places" and held to the last. Troops assigned to the garrisons of these fortified places knew perfectly well they were unlikely to leave them alive.
In the meantime, the Red Army resupplied, refitted, and regrouped for the next phase of the push. The only real setback they suffered during this time occurred on 29 February, when anti-Soviet Ukrainian partisan fighters jumped Vatutin's car and seriously wounded him. He would die in six weeks, to be buried with military honors in Kiev. Zhukov replaced him in command of the First Ukrainian Front.
The Soviet offensive restarted on 4 March, with the First, Second, and Third Ukrainian Fronts rolling forward like a tidal wave. They quickly crossed over the Bug and reached the next river line, the Dniester, on 22 March. Hitler was being as stubborn as ever about withdrawals, but on 26 March Kleist of Army Group A, knowing perfectly well he was making a career decision, ordered the 8th Army to fall back on his own authority. Hitler did not countermand the order, but he was far from happy with it.
To the south, Zhukov's armor had already trapped Hube's First Panzer Army. On 25 March, Manstein flew to meet the Fuehrer at the Berghof, Hitler's resort in the Bavarian Alps near the town of Berchtesgaden, and pleaded the case for withdrawal. Hitler did not like the request, accusing Manstein of being a retreating general -- but the Fuehrer thought it over for a while and then not only authorized the breakout, but also ordered two SS divisions sent east as reinforcements to help it along. Hitler still had his moments of lucidity.
Manstein flew back to his headquarters in Lvov the next day, 26 March 1944, the same day that Konev's tanks reached the Rumanian border, on the Prut River in front of the Carpathian Mountains. Not only had the Red Army finally achieved a handhold on the border from which it had been thrown back so painfully almost three years before, but the Rumanians had little fight left in them, and the country's leadership was clearly moving towards an accommodation with the USSR. Massive artillery salutes were fired in Moscow that evening in celebration.
* None of the Germans were doing any celebrating, least of all Hitler. On 30 March his personal FW-200 Condor transport flew to Tiraspol to pick up Kleist, then to Lvov to pick up Manstein, and flew them to meet with the Fuehrer. The two generals almost certainly knew what was going to happen to them. Hitler gave them awards, praised their diligence, and then sacked them. Manstein was replaced by Walter Model and Kleist was replaced by Ferdinand Schoener, a general who was imperious even by the standards of the German senior officer caste. Model's Army Group South became "Army Group North Ukraine" and Schoener's Army Group A becoming Army "Group South Ukraine".
All this command reshuffling was of little help to Hube and his trapped 1st Panzer Army. Zhukov was doing his best to send in more armor and prevent a breakout, and Luftwaffe airlifts to the 1st Panzer were not adequate to counter growing Soviet strength. However, on 31 March, the area was hit by a blizzard that lasted three days. The snow bogged down Red Army tanks, but the Luftwaffe kept flying and gave Hube enough material to greatly improve his chances for a successful breakout. The two SS divisions promised as reinforcements for the breakout also arrived by rail during the storm.
On 2 April, while the snow continued to fall, Hube consolidated bridgeheads for the breakout, and when the snow stopped Zhukov couldn't rush in armor fast enough to counter the move. In the meantime, the Luftwaffe was doing a heroic job of bringing in supplies. On the morning of 5 April, the two SS divisions attacked, and in two days of fighting managed to open up a corridor to the 1st Panzer Army. Supplies were brought in while Hube's men got out, and within a week the Germans had slipped the trap.
It was a bright point in what otherwise amounted to a dismal season for the German Army. Even Model, not a person given to doubts about himself, must have had worries about taking command of armies that had been thrashed, thrown back, and reduced to miserable condition, with little in the way of proper supplies and food. Hube was properly honored for his achievement, with Hitler awarding him medals at the Berghof on 20 April. However, while Hube was flying back to the front the next day, 21 April, his pilot flew into a mountain in the Austrian Alps, with everyone on board killed. At least Hube ended his career on a high note.
BACK_TO_TOP* The third of the three blows was the Soviet reconquest of Crimea. There had been a debate in the Soviet high command over the need for the operation, with one faction arguing that it would be most sensible just to seal it off and let the Germans hang on it to no good effect; while another faction argued that as long as the Germans remained there, they would be a nuisance. The advocates of action won out, possibly less because of the logical merits of their argument than because of the desire to avenge the humiliation over the loss of Crimea in the first place.
In the first half of November, the Fourth Ukrainian Front under General Tolbukin cut off the land bridge from Crimea to the mainland in the north, while the Fourth Maritime Army under Lieutenant General Ivan Y. Petrov, who had been the commander at Sevastopol before its capture by the Germans, established a beachhead on the peninsula on the west side of the Kerch Strait.
The operation to reconquer Crimea was assigned to Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, who had been shelved since late 1941. Exactly what Stalin was thinking is difficult to understand -- or at least more difficult than usual -- since Voroshilov was a pleasant and sociable fellow who liked the arts and the good life, but lacked any serious grasp of military affairs. Stalin at least assigned the chief of operations of the General Staff, Lieutenant General Sergei Shtemenko, as his adviser.
On their arrival in the battle theater, Voroshilov and Shtemenko spoke with Petrov, and all three agreed that Petrov's beachhead on the peninsula needed to be expanded with a second landing. That implied a cooperative effort between the ground, air, and sea elements of the Soviet military machine. Such coordination between services would be tricky for any nation's military forces, and it was particularly tricky for the ham-fisted Soviet war machine.
In any case, Voroshilov lacked the drive or capability to give the matter proper direction. He simply called the relevant senior officers together and let them hash it out, and when they came up with a compromise plan, he wrote it up and everyone signed it. The landing went forward about six weeks later, on 10 January 1944, and was a complete fiasco. The Germans hammered the troops on the landing beaches, and the force had to be withdrawn after two days of one-sided fighting due to a simple lack of ammunition.
The wheels turned back at the Kremlin, and on 3 February General Andrei Yeremenko, previously the senior commander for the defense of Stalingrad, showed up unannounced to summarily relieve Petrov. Petrov and Shtemenko were ordered to Moscow, where they found Stalin in an unpleasant mood. Koba was particularly annoyed with the committee approach to decision-making and gave Shtemenko a sarcastic chewing-out: "Like some collective farm! You didn't hold a vote on it, by any chance? Voroshilov can be forgiven for a thing like that -- he's not a staff officer. But you should have known how things were done."
Shtemenko returned south but Petrov was sidelined for the moment, while the command arrangements in the south were rearranged to ensure that Voroshilov could do no more damage. However, further plans for the reconquest of Crimea remained stalled.
* Despite the fact that the Red Army was not doing much to inconvenience German forces in Crimea for the moment, the German military command knew that the forces there had to be withdrawn. The peninsula was being held by the German 17th Army, with about 90,000 German troops and 60,000 Rumanian troops under Colonel-General Erwin Jaenecke. His forces were obviously greatly outnumbered by the Red Army elements in the region, and the Rumanians were notoriously unreliable in combat. In addition, as mentioned, his forces were serving no particularly useful military purpose bottled up in Crimea; they might as well have all been in a prison camp. Jaenecke, Kleist, and chief of staff Zeitzler all wanted to pull the 17th Army out of Crimea by sea, but Hitler was in his usual form: no retreats. After Kleist was sacked, in early April his replacement, General Schoener, performed an inspection of the defenses in Crimea, and stated that they could be held for a long time.
That depended on the definition of the phrase "a long time". By coincidence, the Red Army had ended its dithering and was now ready to deal with the German forces there in earnest. On 8 April, Tolbukhin's Fourth Ukrainian Front smashed into the northern German defenses in Crimea, cracking them after a day's fighting. Hitler was furious.
On 11 April, Yeremenko moved west with his Independent Maritime Army. The Germans and Rumanians tried to make a stand at the intermediate "Gneisenau Line", but they were confronted by almost half a million Soviet troops on a roll; the Gneisenau Line was cracked in turn on 12 April, with the survivors falling back to the Sevastopol defenses. Schoener saw no alternative except to evacuate the 17th Army by sea -- but Hitler, who had been wavering, went stubborn again and refused to authorize the withdrawal, even though it was very difficult to understand what significant military purpose was served by leaving them in place.
Despite interference from the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, there was no reason the evacuation couldn't be pulled off, since the Red Army was something of a victim of its own success, so far ahead of schedule that the last half of April had to be spent resupplying and regrouping. Late in April, Jaenecke went to the Berghof to speak with Hitler, and the Fuehrer promised him reinforcements. Jaenecke was outraged to find out presently that the reinforcements consisted of a small handful of green recruits. He protested bitterly and Hitler sacked him, replacing him with General Karl Allmendinger, a 17th Army corps commander. Allmendinger must have found this a questionable honor, since the 17th Army was in a very difficult position. The Sevastopol defenses were well-sited on rugged terrain, but Allmendinger lacked the manpower and material to adequately hold them.
On 5 May 1944, the Soviets began their assault with the Second Guards Army on the northern end of the German line, where the terrain was most favorable to the offense. However, that was just a feint, intended to draw off the defenders. On 7 April, the Fifty-First Army and the Maritime Army launched a heavy assault from the southeast that quickly penetrated German lines. By the evening of the next day, 8 April, the Red Army had seized the harbor. Hitler finally ordered an evacuation.
Although there were plenty of ships available, for whatever reasons the crews were less than energetic in their attempts to pick up the troops, and in fact some of the ships went back empty. In any case, only a fraction of the soldiers managed to escape over the next four days. When the fighting finally came to a stop, the Red Army snatched up over 26,000 prisoners and captured vast quantities of equipment. The humiliation of the loss of Crimea to the Fascists had been suitably avenged. The ugly fiasco led to recriminations in Berlin. Jaenecke and Allmendinger were sidelined for the rest of the war.
* The Three Blows had shoved back the Germans to the borders of the Soviet Union, north and south. Only Army Group Center still held out, standing its ground in Belorussia, and that was only because the Red Army had not turned its attention there yet. Army Group Center would have its turn soon enough.
BACK_TO_TOP* The Red Army had reclaimed much of the territory lost to the Germans, but for the people living in those regions, the return of Soviet power was by no means a liberation. Stalin was crafty in some ways, perfectly mad in others, and to him the fact that these people had been under German occupation made them objects not of sympathy, but of suspicion. Stalin's paranoia of the liberated peoples saw them as a class, and so they would suffer for it as a class. Entire populations were uprooted from their homes and sent to remote regions. Stalin had experimented with these mass deportations before the war, and now he was returning to the concept with a literal vengeance.
The peoples of the northern Caucasus -- the Ingushi, Balgars, and Chechens -- were among the first to feel Stalin's boot. Few of these people had felt any real loyalty to the USSR in the first place, and when the Nazis arrived on their short-lived excursion towards the mountains, some of the locals undoubtedly collaborated. However, in Stalin's eyes, they were all equally guilty, and he imposed his punishment: punitive deportation of entire ethnic groups.
When the Red Army came back in the wake of the fleeing Germans, it was followed by NKVD units that rounded up the local peoples in predawn raids. The Chechens were particular targets of NKVD wrath, with at least half a million deported. The able-bodied menfolk were rounded up first, sent to holding camps under armed guard, and then hauled away to remote republics. Then the women and children and old folk were rounded up separately and packed off in their turn, often to entirely different republics. The Kalmyks, a semi-nomadic Mongol people who lived in the region south of Stalingrad, were given the same treatment. Even Kalmyk soldiers who were home recuperating from wounds suffered at the front were deported.
Conditions of the deportations were primitive and many died, possibly as many as a sixth, with the deportations proving particularly harsh on the very young and very old. Families were reunited eventually, but sometimes only after a year or more as the clumsy Soviet bureaucracy ground through its motions. Back in their homelands, only ghost towns remained.
When the Germans were driven out of Crimea in May 1944, Stalin turned his eye on the Crimean Tatars and deported 400,000 of them. That required a great deal of transport, which had to be robbed from the Red Army which needed it for its operations, and large numbers of NKVD personnel. Stalin's vengeance took priority. Stalin apparently wanted to deport all the Ukrainians too, but concluded there were simply too many of them.
* The fighting on the front remained intense, drawing everyone's attention, and outsiders knew little or nothing of these barbarities. While the Soviet Union had great resources of its own, Western assistance remained valuable. Aircraft flew in across Siberia, or from Iran. American and British merchant vessels ran the German gauntlet to deliver their much-needed cargoes to Murmansk or Archangel in the north. The sailors believed they were allies with the Russian people and their Great Leader in the war with the devil Hitler. They did not quite realize that Stalin regarded them fundamentally as enemies, as he regarded anyone who was outside of his control.
Churchill, who never had many illusions about Stalin, understood this perfectly: "The Soviets fear our friendship more than they fear our enmity." Churchill might not have known that Stalin commented more than once that together the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany would have been "invincible", but he would not have been surprised; when Churchill was once told before the war that Communism and Naziism were worlds apart, he replied that the same could be said of the North and South Poles. Both Stalin and Hitler regarded cruelty not as a vice, not even an ugly necessity demanded by circumstances, but as a virtue. Both saw democracies as weak and contemptible. To Stalin, his allies were totally alien, and so deeply suspect.
Hitler's atrocities masked Stalin's, even though the full extent of Nazi brutality manifested in the great extermination camps remained hidden for the moment. As German soldiers pulled out in the face of the Red Army, they destroyed everything behind them, leaving little but scorched earth. They killed civilians indiscriminately. Survivors even told of mothers killing their own children, to spare them the worse brutalities of the Germans and to deny the Germans the pleasure of killing them.
Soviet moviemen filmed the survivors and recorded their tales of brutality. If Stalin wanted propaganda to cover his own trail of cruelty, Hitler was giving him all he needed. There was no need to lie or exaggerate; the truth was almost too savage to be believed.
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