On 30 January, under the headline, ‘The Reckoning Has Begun’, he [Ilya Ehrenburg] admonished: ‘The soldiers who are now storming German cities will not forget how the mothers of Leningrad pulled their dead children on sledges. […] Berlin has not yet paid for the sufferings of Leningrad.’
Ehrenburg’s strident calls for revenge were echoed by Soviet generals in orders to their troops as they prepared the final onslaughts on the Reich in early 1945. When Marshal Zhukov issued his orders on the eve of the Soviet offensive of January 1945, he wrote that ‘we will get our terrible revenge for everything’; and when Soviet soldiers crossed into East Prussia, the Main Political Administration of the Army stated that ‘on German soil there is only one master – the Soviet soldier’.
The Soviet soldier, the directive went on, ‘is both the judge and the punisher for the torments of his fathers and mothers, for the destroyed cities and villages’; the people he would meet there were not his friends but ‘next of kin of the killers and oppressors’.
The call issued by Zhukov’s colleague Chernyakhovsky to the troops of the Third Belorussian Front massing to attack East Prussia on the eve of the January offensive was even more explicit:
There will be no mercy – for no one, just as no mercy was given for us. It is unnecessary to expect that the soldiers of the Red Army will exercise mercy. They are burning with hatred and thirst for revenge. The land of the fascists must be made into a desert, just like our land that they devastated. The fascists must die, like our soldiers have died.
Source:
Bessel, Richard. “Revenge.” Germany 1945: From War to Peace. New York, NY, HarperCollins, 2009. 151. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Ilya Ehrenburg, ‘Nastala rasplata’, in Krasnaya Zvezda, 30 January 1945, p. 3. Quoted in Zeidler, Kriegsende im Osten, p. 124.
Naimark, The Russians in Germany, p. 72.
Printed in Herbert Michaelis and Ernst Schraepler (eds.), Ursachen und Folgen. Vom deutschen Zusammenbruch 1918 und 1945 bis zur staatlichen Neuordnung Deutschlands in der Gegenwart. Eine Urkunden- und Dokumentensammlung zur Zeitgeschichte, vol. xxii (Berlin, 1976), p. 343 (doc. Nr. 3584a).
Further Reading:
Илья́ Григо́рьевич Эренбу́рг (Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg)
Siege of Leningrad / Блокада Ленинграда (Leningrad Blockade)
Гео́ргий Жу́ков (Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov)
Ива́н Дани́лович Черняхо́вский (Ivan Danilovich Chernyakhovsky)
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