What to Do With German Prisoners: The Russian Solution

VOLUME 174

NOVEMBER, 1944

NUMBER 5

87 th YEAR OF CONTINUOUS PUBLICATION

by HENRY C. CASSIDY

THE Russians are using their prisoners, just as they employ everything they can lay t heir hands on, as a weapon of war. It is something of a secret weapon, as far as details of its operation are concerned.

This Russian intellectual prisoner-weapon, entirely original and extremely simple in concept, is built on the principle of education. The enemy soldiers who fall into Russian hands are encouraged, or permitted, to study the faults of their country’s leaders, and to examine the impasse into which the mistakes of those leaders have led them. The results of this education are converted, in turn, into propaganda. The converts are permitted to speak and write to their countrymen, urging them to overthrow the Nazi regime and end the war.

The Americans and British ship or fly their prisoners off to camps (there was one, enjoying all the speed and comfort of a C-54, aboard the aircraft in which I returned to the United States last August), and leave them suspended in a vacuum for the duration of the war. The Germans install their American and British prisoners in concentration camps, and turn their Russian prisoners into mercenary soldiers or slave laborers when they can prevail upon them to work. Only the Russians put their prisoners to real use.

It is probably because they are not signatories to the Geneva Convention for treatment of prisoners of war that the Russians hit upon their unique system, while other countries have not come to use it. The Geneva Convention forbids forcible application of politics to prisoners. Unbound by this article, the Russians have felt free to experiment. Their finished product — education made available to the prisoner, and propaganda tools put in his hands — deserves a place in the future military machine of any country, signatory to the Geneva Convention or not.

The Russian process of education in camps, and propaganda from them, began as soon as the Red Army started taking prisoners. It was not an immediate success. During the first year of the war, it consisted of anti-Nazi and anti-war lectures, delivered in camp clubs by prisoners who had turned, or who had been turned, against their own regime. Many of the original speakers were inexperienced, inept, or insincere, and their audiences were cold. But the Russians persisted.

The plan took more concrete form when the Free Germany National Committee was set up at a conference of prisoners and refugees on July 12 and 13, 1943, in Moscow. This organization became an international issue. Established without consultation with the other members of the United Nations, and without advance notice to them, it was regarded by some as an independent Soviet agency for introducing Communism into Germany, and came under the careful scrutiny of Allied authorit ies.

Copyright 1944, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

The National Committee started publication of a handsome newspaper, Free Germany, complete with well-cut illustrations, and with red and black stripes at the top and bottom of the first page. Foreigners who requested copies of this newspaper through Soviet official channels — the usual way of obtaining newspapers in Russia — were told that it was not open for subscriptions. The Committee was given time on (he Soviet state radio, but the hours and wave-lengths of its broadcasts were not made known to other foreigners.

Then the Committee issued its first manifesto. Addressed to the German Army and the German people, it warned that “Hitler is dragging Germany into an abyss,” that “the German people need immediate peace,” and that to gain this, Hitler must be overthrown and a new government organized. The Committee announced as its goal a “free and independent Germany,” with a “strong democratic authority,” “complete repeal of all laws founded on national or racial hatred,” “revival and extension of the political rights and social gains of the working people,” “freedom of business, commerce, and industry,” “immediate liberation of the victims of Hitlerite terror and material compensation for the losses caused to them,” and “just, ruthless court trial of those guilty of launching the war.”

The test of the Free Germany National Committee was not t he fact of its existence, but t he way in which it was used. Its professed military and polit ical aims were such that no reasonable person could quarrel with them.

Gradually, the obscurity surrounding the operations of the Committee was dispelled. Allied observers succeeded in finding copies of its newspaper and picking up its broadcasts. They encountered German Committee members in publishing offices and radio studios of Moscow, and learned they were living near the capital and traveling to prison camps to speak. What, they were saying, writing, and broadcasting followed the lines of the manifesto.

At first, the National Committee turned out to be a rather weak instrument. Its leaders were little known and had almost no following among Germans. For the most part, they were anti-Nazi refugees who had been away from their own country since 1933. One of these was the president of the Committee, Erich Weincrt, well known internationally as a poet, but a nonentity to the young Nazis in prison camps. The soldiers on the Committee were nobodies.

2

THE organization assumed real strength when a meeting of about one hundred delegates from five camps, held on September 11 and 12, 1943, near Moscow, established the Union of German Officers. The officers’ union joined the Free Germany National Committee and subscribed to its program.

This time, real “names” were presented as attractions for the prisoners. General Walther von Seydlitz became president of the officers’ union and vice-president of the National Committee.

His background was in no way suspect. Descendant of an old Army family and son of the commander of the Danzig garrison, he was born at Hamburg, August 22, 1888. lie was a career soldier, having entered the Army in 1908 with a West Prussian field artillery regiment, and was wounded three times in the First World War. He remained in the Army during the lean years of the Reichswchr, being promoted to major in 1930.

He was well known to the other prisoners, having commanded the 51st Army Corps at Stalingrad. Earlier in this war, he served on the western front with the 22nd Artillery Regiment, became a major general December 1, 1939, commanding the 102nd Division, and became general of artillery in 1942, taking over the 51st Corps shortly before it was encircled at Stalingrad.

This tall, lean, intent soldier was sufficiently hotheaded to turn against the political leadership which had taken him into the Stalingrad trap and left him there. A career officer, with a distinguished record and no trace of Communism in his past, he had sufficient standing to bring ninety-four other officers with him into the original membership of the officers’ union. What made him turn? Was it the growing realization that Germany was faced with inevitable defeat?

There were others of importance, including Lieutenant General Alexander Edler von Daniels, commander of the 376th Infantry Division, who became vice-president of the union; Major General Otto Korfcs, commander of the 295th Infantry Division, and Major General Martin Lattman, commander of the 14th Tank Division, who took places on the presidium of the union.

With this organization complete, — an organization in which prisoners dealt directly with their own converted countrymen, in which old recalcitrants saw their own leaders participating, and in which newcomers encountered an established system, — the education of the captured Germans became more successful.

Where it took General von Seydlitz more than six months, from February to September, 1943, to turn against Hitler, sixteen generals who were captured in July, 1944, signed anti-Nazi, anti-war statements during their first month of captivity. Field Marshal Friedrich Paul us, commander of the 6th Army at Stalingrad, finally came around to the same point of view.

The number of men joining the movement could not be judged from the number of generals who learned their lessons as soon as they became prisoners. The effect of their propaganda by radio, newspaper, and leaflets on the Germans who had not yet been made prisoners could not be calculated accurately. Their influence, however, was certainly strong.

There is a risk involved in any new weapon. It may backfire. A premature explosion was threatened in the early days of Russia’s use of prisoners, when her policy created suspicion among her allies. That was averted, at least temporarily, by clear evidence that the weapon was being used only to win the war, not to affect the peace. There remained another danger, that of a post-war explosion.

By building up the theory that Hitler, and Hitler alone, lost the war, the Russians, it was suspected, might be fostering the creation of another legend that the German Army itself was never defeated, just as the loss of the last war was attributed to a stab in the back by Jews on the home front. By excusing these prisoners (who repented only after being captured), without thought for the more serious issues of war guilt, the Russians might be encouraging the next generation of Germans to start on another career of expansionist adventure. But as we see the system of post-war Allied control of Germany being perfected, this danger is lessened.

3

WHAT will become of the German prisoners in Russia after the war? One theory has been advanced that the Russians might attempt to retain them as laborers to repair the damage inflicted on Soviet property during the war. This idea was first suggested publicly by Professor Evgeni Varga, economic adviser to the Soviet government, who estimated in a Moscow lecture that it would require the work of 10 million Germans to rebuild the devastated areas of Russia. Whether he meant this as a measure of the damage caused in Russia, or as a serious proposal for reparations in terms of human labor, was not clear.

In actual practice, the half-million or more prisoners already taken by the Red Army are permitted to work if they wish to do so. One group of Germans was sent to aid in reconstruction of Orel, the ancient city of Central Russia which they burned last summer before it was recaptured by the Red Army. How the Germans are paid is one of the secret details of the prison system. If they do not wish to work, they are not required to do so.

The Germans are strictly secluded — even those who work most strongly against the Nazis. It seems clear that the Soviet Union will neither attempt to assimilate them nor permit them to remain in Russia permanently, particularly after the experience of the Volga German colony, which, despite more than a century’s existence in Russia, had to be exiled to Cent ral Asia at the out break of the war.

Some prisoners are certain to face Soviet prosecutors for acts recorded by the state atrocities commission and registered in edicts of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Three Germans, the first to be brought to Allied justice, were tried last December in Kharkov, and hanged in the market place. Although the impatience of the Russians for vengeance was restrained by Allied desires to escape German reprisal executions, others will come eventually. But the number of men involved is comparatively small. It includes few, if any, of those taken prisoner so far, and none of those who have participated in the anti-Nazi movement.

The remaining, and most probable, outlook for these prisoners is that of a return to their homeland. There, if the Free Germany National Committee and the Union of Officers follow the precedent of the Union of Polish Patriots in the U.S.S.R., they will become important parts of the first postwar provisional government of Germany, at least in the Russian-occupied section of the country.

What kind of government will this be? The Free Germany National Committee has given its definition: —

“This government must be strong and wield the necessary power to make harmless the enemies of the people, Hitler, his patrons and henchmen; to end resolutely the reign of terror and finish with corruption; to set up firm order and to represent Germany before the outside world with dignity. This government can be established only as a result, of a struggle for emancipation, waged by all strata of the German people. It will base itself on the militant groups which unite to overthrow Hitler.

The first of these groups has sprung from the prison camps of Russia.