In Europe

Communist Party were murdered by Stalin than by Hitler: of the sixty-eight who fled to the Soviet Union in 1933, forty-one were killed. The executioners themselves were not spared either. On 3 April, 1937, Genrich Yagoda – head of the NKVD and the slave-labour camps until 1936 – was arrested. He was accused, among many other things, of complicity in the murder of Kirov – probably rightly so, in this exceptional case – and executed. He was succeeded by Nikolai Yezhov and, one year later, by Lavrenti Beria.
    The army, too, received its comeuppance. On 10 June, 1937, the Red Army's most effective generals were all arrested, tried and executed within a day. All of the military district commanders and three of the country's four admirals ended up before a firing squad. Of the eighty-five corps commanders, fifty-seven had disappeared within the year. Half of Russia'sestimated 100,000 military officers were put on trial. Once again: more Russian officers with a rank superior to colonel died at Stalin's hand than at Hitler's.
    In spring 1939, the arrests stopped as suddenly as they had begun. A few months after Beria was appointed, the central committee ruled that serious mistakes had been made in the persecution of communists and others. It was time, they said,‘to draw a distinction between saboteurs and people who have done nothing wrong’.
    Even after this, however, only a few exiles and prisoners were released. It was not until 1956, after Khrushchev's public admission of Stalin's terror, that the majority of the victims were rehabilitated. Public excuses were offered only to the wrongly punished communists; not a word was said about the hundreds of thousands of non-communist victims. The mass deportations continued until 1953. According to the most reliable estimates, somewhere between 2.5–3 million people died in the Gulag. Between 1928–52, some 10–12 million Soviet citizens lost their lives to purges, famine, executions and forced collectivisation.



Chapter THIRTY-SIX
Stalingrad
    You needed nerves of steel to listen to the report delivered to the Führer by a young officer from Paulus’ staff. He delivered his report with level-headedness and determination, without accusation or complaint, and that made it all the more shocking. I often feel like a real bastard myself, whenever I lie down on a bed in a room and, despite everything, fall asleep without a care.
    GENERAL ALFRED JODL IN A LETTER TO LUISE JODL, JANUARY 1943.
    ‘That “young officer”, that was me, Winrich Hans Hubertus Behr, known to my friends as Teddy. In the 1950s I worked for the European Community for Coal and Steel, after that I was assistant secretary general of the European Community. From 1965 I served for twenty years as managing director of a telecommunications concern. We made telephones, switching systems, switchboards, alarm installations, things like that. A 12,000-man work-force. Now we live outside Düsseldorf, in a quiet area. A wonderful time.
    ‘On a few occasions it has occurred to me that my great-grandfather, my grandfather, my father and I all have one thing in common: all four of us fought in a war against France, and all four of us were wounded. I can show you a little box containing the Iron Crosses of four generations. In those days that was seen as a great honour for a German family. But there's also something pathetic about it, don't you think?
    ‘In 1914, my father was a battalion commander. Right at the start of the war, while leading a sabre charge on the French in a forest close to Maubeuge, he was hit by a grenade. His whole face – nose, eyes, mouth, everything – was torn apart. He lay on the battlefield for hours. Finallythey collected him, sent him to Berlin and patched him up there. His face was completely mutilated. He was blind. That's how he met my mother, she was his nurse. They married in 1915. I was born three years later, on 22 January, 1918. I had a father who never saw me with his own eyes.
    ‘My whole family originally came from the Baltic States, but at the same time my father was a typical son of the Prussian cadet academies, a real soldier of the imperial generation, just like my grandfather. He could be devastating in his criticism of Wilhelm II, but no matter how he ranted, he always spoke of “
Unser allergenädigster Kaiser
” and “
Seine Majestät
”.
    ‘He was a colonel on the general staff, and he had learned to type on a Braille machine, so he worked at home. We