In autumn 1944, Ilya Ehrenburg wrote of Roza Shanina, “Let the Russian mother rejoice who gave birth to, brought up and gave this glorious, noble daughter to the Motherland! Yesterday Sniper Roza Shanina in a single outing exterminated five Nazis. Congratulations on your military achievement, Comrade Shanina! The personal tally of this fearless young woman is now fifty-one dead Hitlerites and three she has personally taken prisoner.”310
Roza gave the press a brief description of how she had captured the Germans. “One time, after a vicious skirmish, I came across a severely wounded Red Army soldier. I bound up his wound and went on. I had taken only a few steps when a German appeared. I prepared to shoot, but on the spur of the moment decided instead to take him alive. ‘Hände hoch!’ I shouted. Imagine my surprise when, instead of two hands, I saw six go up. I brought the three Fritzes back to headquarters.”
In her diary Roza gave a far more interesting account of the episode, with her characteristic bluff humour.
I went back to the front line but was not concentrating. I forgot I was somewhere dangerous. Walking over a bridge, I happened to look down into the overgrown ravine and saw a Fritz standing down there, so I yelled, “Hände hoch!” Six hands were raised. One was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t understand. The only other words I knew were “Quick! Out!”, so I shouted that. They crawled out of the ravine. I confiscated their guns, watches, cream, mirrors and so on. I guarded them for about a kilometre and a half, looked down and saw that one Fritz had only one boot. He had been asking me in the ravine to let him put his boot on.
Towards the end of their march, on the outskirts of a village, the Germans had recovered their wits enough to ask Roza what would happen now: “Gut or kaput?” “It will be gut,” she replied, feeling very proud that “in snow camouflage, with a flick knife, some hand grenades and a rifle at the ready, like a bandit queen”, she was leading three Germans through a Polish village.
By October 1944, Roza was a celebrity and was seldom seen in her platoon: she tried by hook or by crook to be at the front line. For her fellow snipers her periodic reappearances were generally accompanied by surprises: “One day she might bring back several prisoners, another she might come wounded, then again she might suddenly appear from headquarters bringing warm clothing and felt boots for all the snipers.”
“Now Roza Shanina has dozens of dead Germans on her tally,” war correspondent Major Miletsky wrote in a long feature about Roza and her comrades (but, mainly about Roza, since that was what had brought him to her regiment). Rabotnitsa (Woman Worker), a Soviet women’s magazine, portrayed Roza as a folk-tale warrior maiden, wearing a skirt and patterned boots, but also the helmet and armour of an ancient Russian warrior, plus a pair of binoculars and an assault rifle (the illustrators of a women’s magazine evidently were not au fait with the specification of a sniper’s rifle).
Unlike most of her fellow students at the Podolsk snipers’ school, Roza had wanted from the very beginning of the war to fight only as a sniper. She wrote to her great friend Pyotr Molchanov, the editor of the army newspaper, “Please pass on ‘to whom it may concern’ and give me your support. If you knew the passion I have to be with our soldiers right on the front line and to exterminate the Hitlerites! Instead, imagine it, I am in the rear. We have lost another four black and one red.311 I so much want to avenge them. Do, please, have a word with the right person.”
Soon Roza and the soldiers of her unit had the opportunity to take revenge on the enemy on German soil: on 18 October their unit “breached the frontier . . . we are already wandering about on German territory,” Roza noted.312 That offensive stalled, but in October 1944 Soviet troops at last crossed into East Prussia. What a long-awaited day that was!
Leonid Rabichev, a signals officer with 31 Army, recalled: “One of the divisions of our army breached the defensive barriers on the border. Sappers filled in a great ditch, destroyed five lines of barbed wire entanglements, and neutralised another ditch or rampart. That opened a fifteen-metre gap through which a country road led from Poland into East Prussia.” The signaller arrived at the smart estate of Gollubien (Rabichev heard from someone that it had served as a hunting lodge for the King of Prussia) in the wake of the infantry and tank crews, who had clearly been “awed” by the German prosperity on display. “Mirrors in gilded frames had been smashed, duvets and pillows ripped open, a painting titled The Birth of Aphrodite had the word COCK daubed on it in black paint. In the courtyard the soldiers caught chickens, wrung their necks, plucked and gutted them, and thew them into a huge cauldron.”313
This was only the prelude to an orgy of destruction on an incredible scale that was unleashed on East Prussia in January 1945 and continued until May. Now everything was different: if at first they had been liberating their own country, and then other countries occupied by the enemy, they now had beneath their feet the land from which the enemy had advanced against them.
Already in 1942 the fanatical Ehrenburg who, in the words of Alexander Werth, wrote “brilliant and eloquent diatribes against the Germans”, urged: “We have realised that the Germans are not human. Henceforth the word ‘German’ loads a gun. We shall not talk. We shall not become indignant. Let us kill! If on one day you have not killed at least one German, your day has been wasted. If you think your neighbour will kill the German for you, you have not understood the threat. If you do not kill the German, the German will kill you.”314 Two years had passed. The Motherland was no longer in peril, but a terrible price had been paid for that. Now, almost every soldier had something personal to avenge. “Hate propaganda” added fuel to the personal scores almost all of them had to settle with the enemy.315 Now, on the territory of the enemy, not only German soldiers but also German civilians would pay the price for this. The army’s commanders would close their eyes to everything until, six months later, the troops were finally brought to heel.
Meanwhile, in October 1944, alongside the combat units crossing the border of East Prussia came reporters from front-line newspapers, artists and photographers. Their task was to create an image of enemy territory for the soldiers, to show them the “repulsive interior of the lair of the German beast”.316 Ex-soldiers recalled how “On the eve of our entering the territory of the Reich, propagandists were sent to incite the troops. Some were very high-ranking. ‘A death for a death!!! Blood for blood!!! Forget nothing!!! Forgive nothing!!! We shall be avenged!!!’ and so on. Before that Ehrenburg, whose crackling, trenchant articles everybody read, had been giving it his all: ‘Daddy, kill the German!’”317 Hatred and revenge were to motivate the soldiers to advance fearlessly. “I remember how much we needed Ehrenburg’s articles. Hatred was what drove us forward, otherwise how could we have kept going?”318
The elation the troops experienced when crossing the border was to be intensified by propaganda. Prussia was the den, the hornets’ nest, the breeding ground of wild animals and brigands, inhabited by savage dogs, wolves and predators.319 “Germans are not human beings.” Ehrenburg had little trouble persuading Soviet soldiers and civilians of that: what human being would torture prisoners and abuse the civilian population? The propagandists found a receptive audience: in one regiment alone among those which crossed the frontier in October 1944, “158 soldiers had had close relatives tortured and killed, 56 had had their family members deported to Germany, 152 had had their families left homeless, and 293 had had their property looted and their livestock stolen.”320 Even soldiers whose families had not been affected had seen enough while liberating Byelorussia or Ukraine to be ready to take revenge pitilessly.
*
Returning to his native village in Ukraine after the Germans left, seventeen-year-old Leonid Shmurak helped his father and uncle exhume the remains of murdered Jewish relatives, including little children. After seeing the children’s belongings and clothes, the boy went to the enlistment centre. He had no desire to defend the Soviet regime, which had expropriated his family’s possessions and sent them into exile. He wanted to take revenge on Germans. The colonel in the centre took one look at his birth certificate and told him to go away and play football. Shmurak said: “I’ll play no football. I’ve come here to kill Germans.” Before long he was at the front shooting them, whether or not they had their hands up. “I had a great anger,” he recalled decades later. “There was no fear I might be killed or wounded. All that was in my mind was that I must be avenged, that I must see myself killing that German.”321
*
Shortly before her death, Anna Sokolova, who arrived at the front with the second cohort of the Central Women’s Sniper School and fought in 70 Infantry Division, told a reporter from Moskovsky Komsomolets about an encounter with a captured German girl sniper. Scouts had caught her in the woods where she was camouflaged up a tree. She was the same age as Anna and looked similar; both had the same boyish haircut.
Anna Sokolova was ordered to shoot the German girl, and unhesitatingly led her to a ravine. “After all, if I had been in her place she would not have spared me,” Sokolova claimed after the war.322 The German sniper was Sokolova’s eleventh kill, but she did not include her in the tally as she had shot her at point-blank range.
The only snag with this story is that there were no women on the front line in the German army, let alone snipers; and there were no women, not even nurses, among the collaborating Vlasov forces. The most likely explanation is that this girl was a figment of Sokolova’s imagination and, if so, it is something for the psychologists to consider. Thinking back to the days of her youth, to the war, an elderly woman imagines an enemy girl like herself, and kills her with the same cruelty she expected the enemy to use against herself.323 Many decades after the war the sniper veteran was still mentally taking revenge on the Germans.
*
During the first six months of their war, Roza Shanina and her comrades took almost no part in attack operations. First there was a defensive position at Vitebsk, then pursuit of the retreating enemy. They would only face real, fierce fighting when they reached East Prussia. On 3 November, Roza noted, “I came back from the front completely exhausted. I am going to remember this war. Four times the village was taken and retaken: three times I got out right under the noses of the fascists. Fighting the enemy on his own territory is not to be taken lightly.”324
They had to “gnaw through” the German positions, a veteran of 17 Guards Division recalled. “Our troops took the town, but many of them were killed,” Roza noted in her diary. “Only one man from the penal company came back: the rest were all killed.”325 Roza believed she killed at least fifteen Germans in that battle, although that was not recorded in her sniper’s book as it occurred during an attack. Fighting off a “Fritz” assault, she shot at the helmets of crawling soldiers from a distance of 200 metres using tracer bullets, and could clearly see in her gunsight the bullets ricocheting off. When they had advanced to 100 metres, the Germans stood up but Roza kept firing. She and her friends ran for it when the Germans were very close. “In a little grove of trees by the forester’s house, a small group of Soviet soldiers took on an enemy tank attack in an unequal battle,” a participant recalled.326 “We were heavily outmanned, with ten times the number of enemy troops to our handful of soldiers. We began slowly to retreat to avoid encirclement. Shortly afterwards we received the order to attack.”327
“We crawled forward and reoccupied the house, driving the Germans out,” Roza wrote. 328 Later she returned to the regimental command point where “for the first time I had a chance to eat, and fell asleep.” Roza was reluctant to show her face “back home” in the sniper platoon, because the girl snipers were not supposed to be in the first line of an attack and the decision to take them there had, of course, been hers. “That time Sasha Koreneva was killed, and two others, Valya Lazorenko and Anya Kuznetsova, were wounded. The girls would put all the blame on me.” Roza was dissatisfied with her comrades. When the Germans counterattacked, “the girls all proved to be cowards and ran away.” The exception was Kalya Petrova who “was the only brave one”.329
Roza wrote about this skirmish, as about all the most significant scrapes she found herself in, to the editor of the front-line newspaper, Exterminate the Enemy, Pyotr Molchanov: “The day before yesterday we buried my comrade-in-arms, Sasha Koreneva. Two other girls were wounded: Valya Lazorenko and Zina Shmelyova. Perhaps you remember them.”330 Roza’s fearlessness made a big impression on Molchanov, who preserved all her letters. After she was killed, he was given her diary too and did much to perpetuate the memory of this daredevil who always wanted to be in the thick of the action. Valya Lazorenko, a beautiful blonde who loved horses and dreamed of joining the cavalry after the war, returned to the regiment after getting out of hospital. She and Roza were great friends, and they signed an agreement never to use “front-line language or even a single unprintable word”: if either of them broke their word, they would forfeit their sugar ration for a fortnight. All the other girls swore unapologetically.331
After the incident at Pillkallen, Roza never again took the whole platoon to the front line but went there on her own, returning “home” to rest, eat and change her clothes. More and more often, unable to abide being in the rear and not wanting to rest, she returned to the front on her own initiative.
You should know that throughout my life at the front there has not been an instant when I have not longed to be in battle. I want to be where the fighting is fiercest. I want to be there with the soldiers. I would give anything to go right now with them into the attack. Oh, gods! Why am I so peculiar? I just cannot understand it. I long for battle, for fierce fighting. I will give anything, including my life, if only I can satisfy this quirk. It pains me. I can’t sleep soundly.332
Her platoon, although not constantly on the front line, was suffering more and more casualties. “I no longer have a heart. I am cold-blooded,” Roza commented in her diary, remembering with her friends some girls the Germans had captured.
The incident occurred in Lithuania in the autumn when they were on the defensive. There was heavy fog that morning and, as hunting was impossible, the girls were standing in a trench at a lookout post with some soldiers. The fog enabled the Germans, a reconnaissance group looking for a squealer, to steal up on them. It all happened very quickly: the girls were talking and suddenly, “like a bolt from the blue, the fascists burst into the trench and seized three of our girls. Of course there was a fight,” Sima Anashkina recalls.333 In fact, four were seized, but two managed to get away.
In good visibility the snipers would have had no trouble shooting the Germans as they were dragging their comrades off, but in the thick fog they did not want to risk firing, even though Anya and Lyuba were shouting to them to do just that: they would have preferred to die. Dusya Kekesheva and Dusya Shambarova were lucky: one of the Germans stepped on a mine and in the ensuing commotion Kekesheva was able to run back to their trenches. Dusya Shambarova was wounded and pretended to be dead. The Germans continued running with her two captured friends and she, “covered in blood”, crawled back to her own side.334
Kalya heard later that the doctors extracted fifty-three pieces of shrapnel from her.335 Nevertheless, shortly after the war, she died from her wounds. Kalya Petrova’s platoon heard about this horrifying incident that same day. Kalya remembered they themselves had not gone out hunting, so they had a rare opportunity to wash their hair in a nearby lake. They had just finished when someone brought news that the Germans had dragged Anya Nesterova and Lyuba Tanailova away. “Dusya Kekesheva saw it all. She managed to get free, but are the other two still alive somewhere? In the hands of those butchers,” Roza Shanina wrote later.336 The fate of girls who fell into the hands of the Germans did not bear thinking about: newspapers, leaflets and the political officers in their talks described the horrible treatment the Germans meted out to Soviet prisoners of war, and in addition Anya and Lyuba were girls, and girl snipers at that. According to the articles in the Soviet press, army girls faced rape and torture if captured by the Germans. As for snipers, they were hated and were likely to be tortured and killed if caught, irrespective of their sex.
“And, despite everything, Nesterova and Tanailova revealed nothing when the Fritzes tortured them. Good for them, even though the Germans called them support staff,” Roza recorded on 7 December. She saw photos of the girls (“old ones, from their Red Army record books”) in German leaflets dropped on the Soviet positions. It is unclear why Roza believed her comrades had been tortured. After that German leaflet, no more was heard of them. Their platoon assumed the Germans had murdered them after failing to secure any information during the interrogation.
Kalya Petrova would have to wait until twenty-five years after the end of the war to discover that this was not the case. At that time attention suddenly began to be paid to war veterans, and meetings with front-line comrades and veterans became customary. At one of these Kalya spotted Lyuba Tanailova. She had been imprisoned in a German concentration camp but survived until it was liberated by the Americans. Nesterova, though, died there. Upon returning to the U.S.S.R. Tanailova was sent to a Soviet prison camp, a fate that befell so many Soviet servicewomen captured by the Germans.337 The conditions in these camps were little different from those in their German equivalents. In Camp PFL 0308, where the inmates included women from the liberated territories and women who had been in German captivity, a commission of inspection found that “the soup was cooked from unpeeled and partly rotten potatoes, and accordingly smelt fetid and was extremely unpalatable . . .” There was a water shortage at the camp, so the premises were never washed. Nor was there any washing of the “special cargo”, the prisoners. At the time of the inspection they had not been to the bathhouse or had their hair cut for two months. The prisoners were weak, louse-ridden and suffering from skin diseases. Sick prisoners were not admitted to hospital. The “special cargo” had to walk 2–3 kilometres to work in the mines “without warm winter clothing”. Dystrophic prisoners were forced to labour alongside all the others.338
Some of those who had been in German captivity were saved by having medals or a distinguished combat record before being captured or, more often, by having seen active service – with partisans or the regular army – after escaping from captivity.
Anna Yegorova, the pilot of a ground assault IL-2 aircraft, was shot down near Warsaw. Her gunner and radio operator, Dusya, was killed but, by a miracle, Anna was thrown clear of the burning plane at the last moment. She managed to pull her parachute’s ripcord when already close to the ground and survived, but was barely alive when she was captured, having suffered terrible burns and fractures when she hit the ground. Her parachute had opened only partially. She would have died but for a Soviet nurse, Yulia Krashchenko, who stayed by her side on the journey to the camp and in the Stalag III-C P.O.W. camp in Küstrin in Poland, where a captive Soviet doctor treated the wounded pilot. Prisoners of many nationalities, impressed by Anna’s courage, gave her presents of pieces of bread and sugar, sewed slippers for her, and even wove her a straw bag decorated with a red star. After Küstrin, Yulia Krashchenko was transferred to the fearful Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp, but survived and met up with Anna after the war. At the risk of their lives, the prisoners in Küstrin had hidden Anna’s medals and Party membership card. She had been greatly moved by the courage and humanity of these exhausted, louse-ridden, famished people, her fellows in misfortune.
The SMERSH major who processed Anna in a “filtration” centre after her liberation from the Germans could see perfectly well that she could barely stand and that the thin skin which had grown over her extensive burns was cracking and oozing blood, but he did not allow her to sit down. He would not call this pilot released from enemy captivity anything other than a “German sheepdog”. Where had she got those medals and the Party membership card from? Why had she surrendered? What mission had the Germans given her? Who was she to get in touch with in the U.S.S.R.? The nightmare went on for ten days. The officers and guards insulted her constantly, she was allowed to go to the toilet only under escort and she received one meal per day.
Anna Yegorova was saved by the fact that former prisoners and doctors from the Küstrin camp, when they learned that she was being interrogated by SMERSH, wrote to that agency and told everything they knew about her, including the physical state she was in when captured and her uncompromising behaviour in the camp. The SMERSH officers informed her that she had passed their “filtration” process and was free to go. She then had great difficulty obtaining a certificate confirming that she was “clean”. Needless to say, despite the fact that she could hardly stand, nobody helped her to find transport back to her unit, but that seemed a minor matter. She was soon back in her own regiment.339
The only conscientious biographical publication (the rest should be considered as propaganda) about Roza Shanina notes: “In the battles for the Motherland the following snipers perished: Alexandra Koreneva, Alexandra Yekimova, Anna Nesterova, Lyubov Tanailova . . .”340 The saga of Nesterova and Tanailova was either unknown to the authors, or they decided not to stir up the embers of an inconvenient topic. The historians writing about the Podolsk snipers’ school and the platoon in which Roza Shanina fought kept quiet about the fact that Tanailova returned from captivity. It was better for the public not to know her fate after the war. Reporters took no interest in her and, unfortunately, all we know is that, after her stay in a Soviet prison camp and subsequent exile to Kazakhstan, Lyuba Tanailova returned home to Chelyabinsk Province and worked on the same collective farm as she had before the war. About how she fought during the war, what she endured in German captivity and, after the war, in the U.S.S.R., nobody has written a word.