On 13 January 1945 the offensive against East Prussia was relaunched. 39 Army, and within it 152 Fortified District, which was provided with a company of snipers, attacked Königsberg as part of the Third Byelorussian Front. The fortress city that the Germans had prepared for a long siege held a great importance for them, both strategic and political, as the capital of East Prussia and a major civilian and military port. The advance was slow because the Germans had fortified East Prussia strongly, and they resisted desperately.
Four days later the Soviets moved on the town of Lasdienen. Klava Loginova and her partner, Tosya Tinigina, spent the night dragging crates of shells for grenade-launchers and cartridges to the front line. This was very hard work: they could only move by crawling, dragging the crates weighing 10 kilograms or more behind them. When Klava went back for another crate she heard that Tosya had been wounded and taken to the hospital. Another loss for the platoon.358
Soon there were more casualties, more often as a result of carelessness than of combat. Just over half the platoon’s members were still operational: five had been lost after the terrible incident with Nonna Orlova and the machine gun (including Nonna); several were killed or wounded at Suwałki; a beautiful gypsy girl, Faya Borisenko, was taken to perform in a band; and Klava Mitina was moved to the headquarters staff. Immediately after the taking of Lasdienen, from which the Germans retreated without a fight, the platoon was transferred from 152 Fortified District to 174 Division in 31 Army. Nina Isaeva, the commander of a platoon from the first cohort of the Central Women’s Sniper School, a battle-hardened sniper and officer, came to collect them. She led them through the woods, giving them strict instructions that they must follow in the footsteps of the person in front because there were mines around. Someone, nevertheless, lost their footing.
Klava was at the back, almost the last in the little column. Suddenly there was an explosion ahead and the girls were screaming. That took out four more snipers. Anya Zamyatina was killed and another girl died of her wounds; two survived but did not return to the front.
When they did finally reach 174 Division, having taken their wounded to a field hospital, they were given a warm welcome and even a special sit-down meal. Then they were split up into groups and taken to different regiments. Klava, with her fourth partner, Zina Novozhilova, was allocated to 494 regiment and shown the front line.359 Klava fought as a member of this regiment through to the end of the war.
Klava Loginova would not meet Commander Nina Isaeva again until twenty years after the war, because shortly after the girls’ transfer to 494 Regiment, Isaeva was seriously wounded. She later recalled the circumstances. On her way to the front line, she saw a shiny new pin on the ground. It was pointing at her, which was a bad omen in Russian folklore. She could not resist, however, picked it up and pinned it to her tunic. While hunting she felt what seemed like a blow to her head and lost consciousness. A German sniper’s bullet had damaged her eye socket and jaw.360
The man who had fallen in love with Nina at the front remained true to her, despite her disfigurement. He was the commander of 174 Division, forty-year-old Colonel Nikita Demin. He left his family for her and she lived a happy life with him.
*
Klava Loginova raised her tally within a couple of days of arriving in her new regiment, firing from a loft somewhere in the Masurian swamps. The Germans counter-attacked and surrounded their unit. The girls fired armour-piercing ammunition at the tanks closing in on the village, trying to hit the fuel tanks. They failed to set any of them on fire, but Klava managed to get a shot into the driver’s slot. The tank fired a shell at them and missed, but the blast threw the girls down from the loft.361 Klava got away with a few bruises but Zina was badly hurt. The encirclement was soon over: they radioed to other units and the Germans were driven back. After that Klava fought with Olga Nikolaeva, her fifth and last partner. 31 Army pressed on towards Königsberg.
*
In her year and a half at the front, Klava Panteleyeva found herself on the defensive twice. The first time was right at the beginning, at Orsha; the second was in the Baltic states, at Memel. For two months the snipers did what they were trained to do, or at least for as long as they had boots to wear. One night they all, without exception, lost their boots. After moving to a new location, the snipers’ section was accommodated in a wooden house next to the regimental command post. Bunks had been constructed for them and, like well-brought-up girls, before going to bed they put their boots in a row by the door. In the morning they were gone. The problem turned out to be their new neighbours, a penal company, who had already exchanged the stolen boots for vodka. The girls were due to go on duty in their trench, but none of them had anything to wear on their feet. Their sergeant cursed. “Where am I supposed to find you so many boots?”
Boots were, nevertheless, found, and Klava heard shortly afterwards that all the soldiers in the penal company had perished during an attempt to break through the defences of Memel. Their bodies lay in no-man’s-land, and when the girls were in the trench the terrible stench of decomposing corpses only metres away from them made them feel sick.362
Memel fell on 28 January after two days of heavy fighting. The remnants of its defenders retreated along the spit of the Kurische Nehrung to Königsberg, and the girls, along with the rest of their army, followed in pursuit. By now there were only half a dozen of them left in the section. Klava Monakhova was no more. Her comrades loved her like a big sister, and when she died during a German counter-attack, her friends crawled out on to the battlefield for the next three nights, eventually finding her body and bringing it back for burial.
In those battles Klava Panteleyeva again suffered concussion: one half of her head no longer seemed to belong to her, and her eye was not seeing properly. She did not report to the medical battalion, however, afraid of falling behind her friends, but complained only to her partner Marusya Kuznetsova, with whom she had become firm friends. After Memel they would not hunt again during the war. While 344 Division was clearing the spit of Germans and moving on towards Königsberg, the girls learned to bandage neatly as they attended to the wounded.363
*
Lida Bakieva had no intention of becoming a nurse: she considered that her job in the war was shooting. On 28 January 1945, she crawled out on to no-man’s-land. The Germans were about 600 metres away, too far for targeted shooting. Although the girls had permission only to hunt from their trench, Lida decided she needed to get closer. Having chosen her position the evening before, she crept forward fifty metres at dawn and lay down in the snow behind a fallen tree. On top of her padded coat and trousers (inside the coat there was an extra patch of sheepskin to dampen her gun’s recoil) she had white camouflage trousers and jacket. Lida had put dried bread and sugar in one pocket and a captured pistol in the other. There would not be time to fire a rifle in every situation, and they always kept a last bullet in the pistol for themselves, in case it came to that.
Bakieva had always tried not to waste her time on soldiers but to go for the plum targets of officers or observers, but recently it had been so difficult to shoot anyone (the Germans were far away and being cautious) that she had no choice. This day, Lida was lucky almost immediately: she saw a German in a peaked cap, an officer. After she shot he sank down and hung on the parapet, before sliding or being pulled back. Immediately, as often happened after a sniper’s successful shot, especially if the victim was an officer, the Germans launched a mortar bombardment. It was impossible for her to crawl away, and while mortar shells were exploding all around, Lida became steadily more frightened. Fortunately the Germans did not see her or she would have been in serious trouble. Lida lay in the snow until dusk. When the pressure became unbearable she had to piss in her trousers.364 Often when they came back from hunting one of them would hand a pair of damp trousers over to whoever was on duty and ask, “Dry these, please!” There was an order in force in 31 Army requiring that girl snipers should be provided with “skirts or a second pair of summer trousers as, when returning to their accommodation after being on the front line, the girls are unable to change padded trousers in need of drying”.365
In the twilight, numb with cold, her clothing frozen solid with melted snow and urine, she crawled back to their trench. The soldiers swore at her for subjecting them to a German shelling, and she quickly ran back to the girls to finally warm up, have something to eat, and drink some hot tea, or just hot water, but at least with sugar. She was “exultant, elated”: today she had added an officer to her score!
A Soviet officer had taken a shine to Frida Tsygankova, Lida Bakieva’s sniper partner, and Frida also liked him. Lida, however, haggard and taciturn, with a dark, weather-beaten complexion and short hair, was not pestered by men. People who did not know her had been known to call her “Laddie”. So much the better, she decided. That was not what she should be focusing on right now.
Lida Bakieva ended the war with a tally of seventy-eight in her sniper’s record book. When asked, she would readily admit that this was an approximation. In a defensive position you could never be completely sure whether a German who fell after you had shot him was dead or only wounded, and during attacks nobody was keeping the score. Roza Shanina explained in her diary, “The way it worked was that you might shoot many times at targets when on the defensive, but it was impossible to tell whether you had a kill or just a wounding.”366 In target practice, she reflected, she always hit the mark from that distance, but now she was shooting mainly at standing or walking figures. As for runners (soldiers who were not walking but running in a stooped position), she shot at them only to give them a fright, because it was difficult to hit them. So in her record book “they would sometimes put no entry at all, or give me the benefit of the doubt, or include something highly questionable.”367 Overall, she thought this averaged out and that the tally in the book was probably close to the truth, albeit excluding kills during offensives. Here the kills were in the dozens, but were never registered. “I helped fight off counter-attacks using perhaps seventy rounds a time. During that attack when I was firing at tanks I put paid to the lot of them.”368 When she was firing from a distance of about 100 metres with tracer bullets, even though the bullets were not penetrating the helmets but ricocheting skywards, she could see she was hitting the target every time, which she thought meant that her rough estimate was pretty accurate.
Lida Bakieva also shot with her sniper’s rifle during attacks, sometimes at close range. After the war she would sometimes try to add up how many Germans she had killed or wounded in all. One hundred and fifty, two hundred?
In a year and a half of war, Lida had no end of occupations, in addition to hunting while on the defensive and participating in attacks. In the Baltic states in December 1944 her 32 Siberian Infantry Division got into a mess. The Germans were resisting fiercely and, very much to everyone’s surprise, the division found itself in a “cul de sac”, surrounded in front and to both sides but with an opening for retreat. The regiment that was supporting Lida’s platoon had been decimated by casualties, and when their communications link was broken the only person they could find to repair it was a seventeen-year-old Byelorussian boy, who was scared to death.369 He had only just arrived at the front, evidently conscripted from recently liberated territory and, after a few days’ training, had been thrown into battle. Roza Shanina had people in that situation in mind when she wrote after the fighting at Pillkallen, “But all the ‘Slavs’ ran away . . .”370 Seeing how terrified the boy was at the prospect of going out into the open from their bunker, Lida decided to go herself. The Byelorussian twice opened the door, saw shrapnel flying everywhere, and immediately closed it again. Lida pushed him aside, dashed through the door, fell to the ground and started crawling. She had a pistol and a dagger, both captured. She was particularly fond of the versatile dagger, which could be used for slicing bread or sharpening a stake, or instead of a pair of scissors. The cable that had been severed was covered with snow and ice, and Lida slowly edged forward, raising it with her mitten. She crawled as far as a crater, where a shell had severed the wire. Finding the other end, she felt for her dagger but found she had lost it while scrambling over the ground. She gnawed through the insulation with her teeth, fixed the cable and crawled back, only to be reprimanded by the commander: “You haven’t got a clue but you want to risk your life!” Lida, however, knew that she understood as much of the technicalities as the boy. She believed a soldier, regardless of gender, should try to learn as many specialities as possible at the front, and did not take kindly to being sent to do “women’s work”, regarding it as a humiliation. She had been sent to the front as a sniper, not as a cook or a cleaner.
One time, after two and a half days of fighting, the girls’ platoon was put up in a shed that did not even have proper walls. Instead there were screens of woven wicker. An icy draught blew through it, but the girls were past caring. They put their rifles to one side, lay down close to each other and, after two sleepless nights, were soon fast asleep. Shortly afterwards Lida, who was the deputy platoon commander, was woken by a courier with orders to report to the deputy political officer. Cursing the officer, she got up. It transpired that this small 45-year-old man was in urgent need of two girls to clean the wooden floor of the house where the officers were staying. “Silly bastard,” Lida reflected as she went back to their icy shed. She tried to wake the girls, but they would have slept through cannonfire. She decided to try again a little later, sat down leaning against a wall, and promptly fell asleep herself. Half an hour later the courier was back for her. “Who did you order to wash the floor?” the officer bawled. “Myself,” Lida said. “Why have you not done it?” “Because we have been fighting a war on equal terms with everybody else and have had no sleep for two days.”371
This made the deputy political officer even more cross and he gave her five days in the guardhouse, a sentence to which Lida reacted philosophically. It could hardly be colder than their shed, and she would finally get to catch up on her sleep. When the soldier was taking her to the guardhouse, minus her belt and rifle, they encountered the chief of staff on the road. “Where are you going?” he asked in surprise. After finding out what was up and who had issued the order, he said only, “Forget it. Go back and rest.”
She supposed she would have time enough at home after the war to wash floors. On one occasion, because there had been so many casualties in the regiment, Lida had to help hold off a tank attack until reinforcements arrived. The entire platoon was sent – even the staff officers – because there was no one else. Some officer shouted at the girls to fire at the tank peepholes, but Lida doubted the sense of that. She did not entirely believe snipers who boasted in the newspapers that they could hit that slim target. A number of tanks came too close and two snipers, girls a little younger than Lida, took fright, jumped out of the trench and ran for it: a sure recipe for disaster. People shouted to them, “Get down! What are you doing?” but they continued running, until they were mown down by machine-gun fire from the tank. Lida tried not to lose her head and waited. She had a grenade, and she thought she would throw it when the tank was very close. Just then, however, one tank was hit, caught fire and, when the crew started jumping out, Lida went to work. Another tank was hit, and then the rest retreated.
*
“Yes, it was a cruel time, an iron time,” front-line correspondent Vasily Grossman wrote in his diary, after observing a grim scene in an aviation regiment. Human flesh was being removed with a rasp from the propeller of an aircraft that had returned from attacking a convoy of vehicles.372 A doctor, invited to examine it, pronounced gravely, “Yes, Aryan meat.” Everyone fell about.
Many episodes at the front still struck the women snipers as comical decades later. Lida recalled that she and her partner, Anya Shavets, had positioned themselves in a windmill in East Prussia. The girls were observing “a burly Hitlerite” who had climbed out of the trenches. By this time Lida, an experienced sniper, was reluctant to waste her time on ordinary soldiers, but the sight of the German’s fat backside as he bent down to collect firewood was getting on the nerves of her partner. Having got this part of his anatomy in her sights, Anya tried to persuade Lida they ought to shoot. She was not convinced, because they would then have to give up a good position and move elsewhere. Finally Anya could contain herself no longer and fired, hitting the German in the rump. Clutching his wounded bum, the victim “quickly hobbled back into his trench”.373
If you can laugh at the enemy, he will seem less frightening. The wartime newspapers were full of such anecdotes. “An interesting technique,” the famous Georgian sniper, Noy Adamiya (who vanished in 1942), confided to a newspaper, “is to wait until a German goes to relieve himself, squats under a bush, then fire. We say he was hoist by his own petard.”374
After killing your first German, and the sudden unbelievable and horrifying realisation that you, a young girl, only yesterday a pupil at school, have taken a man’s life, the world is changed for ever. Having successfully hit a living target, the girls crossed a line, entered a new territory where the most valuable thing in the world, a human life, became the material they worked with, a topic for jokes and games. Ziba Ganieva, who before the war was studying at drama school and in the war was first a nurse and then a sniper, never felt pity for the enemy again after killing her first German. She talked about her job to Peasant Woman, relating how one day, after waiting in the melting snow from eleven in the morning until four in the afternoon, she was told by the spotter (a soldier watching through binoculars from an observation post for any signs of danger, or opportunities that might be exploited) that the Germans were beginning to have dinner and “some of the more brazen ones were walking about upright.” Looking out from the bushes Ziba saw two Germans, one of whom was carrying a thermos on his back with dinner for his comrades. Ziba fired and “the German with the thermos fell. The other fled, and a third jumped out of an emplacement to help the wounded man. ‘I’ll give you two more minutes to live,’” Ziba decided. As a sign of magnanimity, she not only did not finish off the wounded man right then, but allowed the soldier who had come to his aid to drag him back to the trench. Though she did then go on to fire at the soldier who was helping the wounded man before he got down into the trench.375
*
“Constant battles, marches, attacks, wounded people, dead people, blood . . .” That was how, many years later, Yulia Zhukova recalled the offensive in East Prussia. Little remained in her memory from those days, just the endless marches, and the fighting when they were “capturing various towns and villages”. A nineteen-year-old girl, she remembered only what was most vivid, and for her that tended to be moments of “everyday, not military, life”. Like many others, she was astonished by the amazingly high standard of living of the Germans, particularly the excellent farms. They had never imagined villages could be so rich. On a big, empty farmstead, Yulia and her comrades found a great variety of jars in the basement of a brick-built house: pickles and jams preserved for the days ahead. Although they had been warned not to eat anything (because the Germans might have poisoned them), the girls could not resist the temptation and gorged themselves. How unbelievably delicious! The abandoned farm was so clean and sparkling, and its inhabitants had just fled, leaving all this property behind them! Yulia was greatly impressed by the blued and starched linen neatly folded in a cupboard, and mended “as if it was the work of a jeweller”. The trunks of the trees growing along the highway were meticulously whitewashed. After what they had seen in Byelorussia, Yulia and her comrades did not find this touching, rather “it provoked a reaction”.376 “Why did the Germans invade us? What did they lack?” the soldiers wondered, confounded and enraged by the sight of Germany’s prosperity. Were all these riches not enough for them?
On the outskirts of a town, terribly tired, hungry, tormented by thirst, Yulia and her companions came upon a dairy. There was no water there, but the girls drank their fill of milk and washed in it. There was no bread either, but so what? They made sandwiches of cheese and butter, and marched on.
In a city whose name Yulia would soon forget, they happened on a big, beautiful house. In a great room on the ground floor an old German was sitting in an armchair with his family gathered around him. When Yulia looked into the ballroom the adults were frightened, but a sweet, blue-eyed boy of three or four ran to her and Yulia took him in her arms. That probably saved the family’s life. A Soviet officer who came in after her turned ashen-faced, and aimed his pistol at Yulia and the child, but then hesitated for a moment and left, slamming the door behind him. Yulia was told afterwards that his entire family had been wiped out by the Germans.377
*
In the towns of East Prussia – Rastenburg, Löwenberg, Königsberg – Anya Mulatova helped herself to postcards as souvenirs. Some she enclosed in letters home, others she carried with her, like a collection. German postcards were quite unlike the Soviet equivalent.378 Soviet postcards depicted the transformation of Soviet cities, hydroelectric power stations, athletic sportswomen in front of portraits of Stalin, collective farm workers learning to read. New Year’s cards did not exist, so for New Year 1945, front-line soldiers sent German Christmas cards home.379 German postcards showed pretty children, flowers or kittens. Anya brought her little collection home from the war and would later show it to friends.
There was just so much stuff in these prosperous abandoned homes! You could not fit much in a soldier’s knapsack, but after so many hungry years they stuffed themselves with delicacies. Many of the soldiers had never eaten their fill in their lives before. “You would open a larder and just wonder what to take!” Anya recalls.380 But it was unwise to grab too much: every extra item in a knapsack added to your suffering on the march.
One girl soldier on the advance into East Prussia recalled the extraordinary night they spent in a German castle. There were “so many rooms . . . such grand halls!” The wardrobes were full of clothes, and every girl chose a dress. She particularly liked a yellow one, and a night gown of ethereal beauty, long and as light as a feather. The girl and her friends were terribly tired, it was late already and, wearing their new dresses, they promptly fell asleep. She slept with this magical robe over the dress. In the morning, “We got up, looked again at ourselves in the mirror, then took it all off and put on once more our tunics and trousers. We took nothing with us. On the march even a needle is too heavy. You push a spoon into the top of your boot and you’re off.”381
A few individuals did manage to send parcels, but parcels were, in the main, a privilege reserved for officers. Ordinary soldiers had few rights. The parcels Vera Chuikova and several of her friends sent were opened by the woman who worked at their post office, who helped herself to what she liked and threw the rest away. Vera, of course, knew nothing for certain, it was just what somebody told her, but when she finally got back home she found that the parcel had never arrived.382 The officers? Oh, yes, they could send parcels, and as for the generals . . . it was said they sent back loot by the wagonload.
Apart from underwear, the girls might take a headscarf, and perhaps a gold watch if the scouts gave them one. One time the lads brought Anya Mulatova a fur coat. They had far more opportunities than the girls to rifle through German homes. At first Anya was minded to refuse: “Where could I put it?” But the rabbit fur was so beautiful, and she so fancied coming home and wearing this soft coat in the winter, that she gave in and accepted. She struggled with it, hauling it along in her knapsack but then, in late April, in the Carpathians, she lost everything that she had been carrying for so long. The girls had put their bags on a cart, but either the driver fell asleep or the horse was frightened and bolted. The cart, along with the horse, fell over a precipice. The horse and driver were killed, and the cart and all their belongings lost. The fur coat was the least of her troubles: along with her knapsack she lost her sniper’s record book and, although she was later given a certificate on which they entered her tally, she was never issued a replacement.383
*
“I saw German Fraus for the first time and did not like them,” Roza noted.384 Beautifully dressed, well groomed and coiffured, the German women gave many girls in the Soviet army an inferiority complex. For Soviet men, many of whom had not had a woman for four years (and many of the younger ones were still virgins) raping a blonde German woman was also an act of subjecting to their will a more advanced civilisation, like defecating on the carpet in a beautiful palace. Roza did not pity the women. “Now our guys will take revenge, but I don’t give a damn. I am cold-blooded about everything,” she wrote in late November 1944 when units of the Third Byelorussian Front first crossed the East Prussian border.
Today, a lot is said and written about the rape and murder of women by Soviet soldiers in East Prussia, but less about the murdering of children, including babies. Some of the Russians were taking revenge on Germans on behalf of their family, or more generally for their country, but some used protestations of sacred hatred as a cover for sheer sadism. War removes restraints. When Hans Kinschermann, a German machine-gunner, told a friend about how at Stalingrad a Corporal Schwarz “shot wounded Russian soldiers in the head”, he was told that “people who kill unarmed human beings unquestionably have sadistic proclivities, and war allows them to show these openly under the pretext of defending their compatriots.”385 Many East Prussians would learn the truth of this at first hand during the terrible days of the Russian invasion.
*
Orders were given by the Nazi authorities to evacuate the civilian population from Löwenberg in East Prussia only on 13 February 1945, when the Russians were already very close. The roads were clogged with refugees. Many, like Hedwig Rosenberg and her children, were unable get out of the town and returned home. For a whole night there was artillery fire and people hid in their cellars. At seven in the morning Russians burst into the house. Opening the larder, they emptied out on the ground the preserved food and looted the shoemaker’s shop attached to the house. In the terrible uproar the screams of women were heard as they were raped. No one was spared, and if anyone resisted or relatives tried to protect them it only seemed to exacerbate the situation. Entering the German houses in search of hidden soldiers, the Soviet troops, whether or not they found any, were at times likely to open fire on civilians.
In Löwenberg, Anya Mulatova was with a group of soldiers doing a house-to-house search. They checked them from top to bottom. When they came to the first one with a locked door, a soldier began smashing the lock with his rifle butt. The safety catch was dislodged and a round of bullets whistled past Anya. She had no time to be frightened. Having broken the lock, the soldier turned his rifle round and entered the house. In a ground-floor room were several beds on which women and children were sitting or lying. The soldier opened fire with his rifle. Anya closed her eyes. What could she do? No German soldiers were found in the house.386
Anya had seen a lot that was bad in her ten months at the front. Her elder brother Vanya had been killed in the battle of the Kursk Bulge; her family barely survived in the rear and the privation caused the death of her infant nephew, but what she saw at Löwenberg was, in her opinion, not just savagery but “monstrous evildoing”. In another house the soldiers found an old woman with a baby. They spared the baby, killing only the old woman. As they were leaving, they saw the baby crawling on to its dead grandmother. Anya was overcome and began to cry. “What you on about?” one of the soldiers demanded. “Forgotten what they done to our people? Locked ’em in a barn and set it on fire, didn’t they!”
What could she say to that? She herself had seen the charred embers and human bones in Byelorussia, and the half-decomposed body of a small child on a road in Byelorussia “with its little hands and feet in the air”. But the atrocious images of East Prussia were to remain forever “an open wound in my heart”; a wound about which, nevertheless, she kept silent for a lifetime.