Of all the Soviet anti-German propaganda, most famous were the calls of the novelist Ilya Ehrenburg to wreak revenge, calls which were repeated so often that they became a standard Soviet mantra of hatred: ‘We shall not speak any more. We shall not get excited. We shall kill. If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day… If you kill one German, kill another – there is nothing funnier for us than a pile of German corpses.’
As Soviet troops first approached the borders of the Reich in August 1944, Ehrenburg famously wrote in an article entitled ‘Woe to Germany!’:
Until we reached Germany’s borders we were liberators. Now we shall be judges. And never shall we mistake the home of a child slayer for an orphan asylum […]
We are coming to Germany, having left behind us the Ukraine, Belorussia, the ashes of our cities, the blood of our children. Woe to the country of the assassins!
Not only our troops, the shadows of the slain too, have come to the borders of Germany. Who is hammering at the gates of Prussia? The slaughtered old men from Trostyanets; the children from the Babi Yar ravine: the martyrs of Slavuta.
The children drowned in wells are hovering like angels of vengeance over Insterburg. Old women whom the Germans tied to horses’ tails are stretching out their hands to Tilsit.
Source:
Bessel, Richard. “Revenge.” Germany 1945: From War to Peace. New York, NY, HarperCollins, 2009. 150-51. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Quoted in Naimark, The Russians in Germany, p. 72.
Ilya Ehrenburg, ‘Woe to Germany!’, in Soviet War News (published by the press department of the Soviet Embassy in London), no. 941, 22 August 1944. Reproduced in Zeidler, Kriegsende im Osten, p. 217.
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