Retribution

translated by N.Denisova, an attache of the Representative Office of MFA of Russia in Kaliningrad

I have spent two weeks in the smoke of terrified and burning Germany. The Germans are trudging along snowy and muddy roads. These roads are littered with furniture, utensils and rugs. Their cities are burning. Feral pigs enter the deserted town halls. The wind flutters the tatters of city banners with eagles, lions and deer. If we were malevolent, we could have said: “To each what he deserves”. But we have risen above it. We are inspired with the triumph of justice. When speaking of the retribution, a lot of people were thinking about the paragraphs of the upcoming treaty only. I have no idea on the verdict of diplomats. Undoubtedly, fascist obscurantism will find its defenders, the zealots of the "balance" between light and darkness. Whatever the future world may seem to us, the only thing is clear: retribution has already begun, Germany has learned what the war really means. I wonder if the Germans are going to remember these weeks and months of war in their land much more than all the obligations of the peace treaties 

There have been street battles in Elbing for several days. When they were over, I saw a rather picturesque queue: the Germans were standing by the prison gates — the line was endless. No one forced them to come. However, the prison seemed to these "superhumans" to be the most peaceful and even a cozy place... 

They are desperately resisting, they are shooting from every house, they look irreconcilable. However when their officer is killed or they are running out of weapon, the "irreconcilable ones" immediately salute not only our riders but also our horses. They begin proving their innocence to the conquest of the world. It's not just the Krauts, but Colonel Heinskenk is changing right in front of our eyes. At first, out of inertia, he repeats: "Germany is invincible," and then, as if he got immobilized, he adds in a different voice: "Am I a Nazi? I was married to a Jewish woman..." 

The population is trying to escape. Thousands of wagons are moving west. All sorts of things are stuffed inside— chests, feather beds, furniture, moustache trainers, and (under the hay) several Italian carbines, knives with the inscription: "Everything for Germany" or "Blood and honor". Germans should kill Russians with these knives. And now the Red Army has cut their way. Not only the arm chairs have been abandoned, but even the moustache trainers. Thousands of feather beds are lying around (Germans use them as blankets); and the down of all geese from the Bismarck era to the present day blizzards East and West Prussia. As for the ordinary Germans, who have been caught red...they are trying to get rid off their past saying: "I am French... I have non-Aryan blood... My mother is Dutch... I'm half Polish, half Lithuanian..." They hurriedly curry favour with us. Their young women look at our passing soldiers ingratiatingly and lasciviously, as if they are not the daughters of burghers, but the waitresses in a night cabaret. The Germans know by heart all the orders of our commandants; they repeat in prayer: "This is the order of the lord, the Russian commandant!" I've seen a lot of forests, they're empty... The Germans who used to rush to the west and vowed to kill the Russians, are zealously marching to the east and bowing low to us. The farther we move west, the more frequently we encounter the German population: there is nowhere to run. In West Prussia I saw residents of the eastern regions ... hundreds of thousands. They're finking on each other.: "The butcher is an active Nazi... Herr Muller used to beat Russian girls... Willy the groom shot the Pole... Frau Schmidt received a commendation from Gauleiter himself..." Everyone is trying to prove their innocence. One of them brought a certificate: eleven years ago, the Nazis kept him in prison for a month. Another one presented a certificate signed by yesterday's slave, a Belgian prisoner of war. The third one found his Social Democratic verein ticket issued in 1928. Here is a German woman climbing up the facade of a house to remove the coat of arms with a swastika. No one ordered her to do this, she is sweating gallons and seems to be glad. In her opinion she has been rehabilitated now. Don't even dare to ask her how she bullied Galya, the girl... Here the German turns the clock hand two hours forward and says solemnly: "It's exactly three hours and twelve minutes in Moscow." He's beaming: he's ready to live not only according to Moscow time, but Vladivostok time also, as long as we don't ask him how happened that four Frenchmen were working for him from dawn to dusk. A venerable doctor says, "How could I be with the Nazis? After all, I am a doctor, that is, a humanist, and the Nazis are animals." A Vicar General, rubbing his hands, babbles: "The Catholic Church has always condemned Hitler, of course, I couldn't condemn him out loud, but I condemned him to myself. While the evangelical church..." At the same time the Lutheran pastor swears: "We also condemned the God-defying regime..." An engineer in Elbing reports: "As a man of progress, I am against Hitler," and adds with a sly smile: "I can work for the Russians." A worker keeps saying, "Who's going to classify me as a Nazi? My father was a real Social Democrat. I once voted for the Communists myself. Of course, I couldn't speak out against the regime as it was strictly forbidden. But now I agree to speak out even against Hitler..." 

You can't trust any of them. They look like sheep now, but they have always been the wolves, and they still are. They are throwing away carbines and daggers; but who knows what is going happen in a month. The Germans cannot start fighting on their own, they are waiting for the order. Among the confused and frightened crowds, there are people who are charged with arranging sabotage and putschs. They are hiding now: the fear of their compatriots is too great; they need to take a break. And if they are allowed to catch their breath, if they are not examined, carefully checked and enlightened, soon the most submissive, those who shout "rot front" and trample on images of the Fuhrer, will start raving about "Greater Germany" again. For sure, they will take up rifles, bombs, knives if their camouflaged Oberleutnants or Rotenfuhrers give an order. After all, I have not seen true remorse in any of the Germans: I have seen just fear and pretense. 

One can feel sorry only for German babies, distraught unmilked cows and abandoned pets; only these creatures are not involved in the atrocities. Honor and glory to the Soviet man that never believes in the magic of blood. An infant remains just an infant for us. We are not being at war with children and old women — we are not fascists; and we came to Germany not to unburden ourselves but to destroy even the memory of this fascist state. 

The Germans have repeatedly claimed that they got to the warpath out of need, that they had been cramped in Germany. We are sure they kept lying: it wasn't the hunger that made them unleash the war. It was their greed. The war did not mean any deprivation for them but it was profiteering. When the war was raging on the Seine or on the Volga, it seemed attractive to them. They had enough living space and stuff. Here is the house of the rich Prussian farmer. There are spacious rooms with tiled stoves, clocks, oleographs and deer antlers on the walls. A dozen of Dutch cows, pigs, geese. His farm suffered little from the war: the Germans kept eating other people's cows and ravaged other people's huts. I have visited dozens of German cities. A month before the arrival of the Red Army, the burghers were still reveling in their impunity. A German was buying a hotel in Rastenburg. In Gutstadt, a 42-year-old landlady, "a dark brown-haired woman who retained grace" (as the newspaper ad says), was looking for a man. In Deutsch-Islau, a furniture workshop was preparing a luxurious office for a some Mr. Demke. Next to the town halls there are the apartments of the burgomasters, beautifully furnished, with portraits of the Fuhrer and Rhine wine green glasses. Pubs and tables with signs "for frequenters" are also touches to the portrait of Germany. Furthermore, Germans spent most of their income on apartments' decorations, in peacetime they had not spent on entertainment. They dressed plainly but their apartments were filled with sofas and armchairs, vases and pillows, statuettes, cupboards with dishes and various knick-knacks. During the war years, they were bringing various pieces of bric-a-brac, utensils and trinkets from Paris, Rotterdam, Florence, Warsaw, Kiev to fill their homes. Their apartments are thrift stores, as our soldier said jokingly , "Life is livable in such apartments." But that abundancy wasn't enough for them: the greed was pushing them to the Urals and Iraq. Slaves were working for them. In small, remote Rastenburg, not only the rich, but also the working class used to have Russian servants as there was no need to pay for the job done. 

German farmhands looked up on their Prussian landlords; these farmhands were dreaming of land allotments in Ukraine. After all, Erich Koch promised every Prussian a good piece of Russian land. The German workers believed that if their masters captured Russian manganese and French bauxite, then they would also get a piece. Here in Germany, you can see how fascism corrupted hearts, and it's not easy to draw a line between those who fooled and those who were fooled. 

In the saddler's closet there are twelve German bed sheets and two Ukrainian ones -- "son's gift". Why did he need those two? Read the maxims on the wall. Here, "Order is your wealth," and "Useful work during the day means pleasant sleep at night," and finally: "Excess never hurts." It seemed that two stolen sheets would not interfere with the saddler; but the wages of their sins followed: his son was killed on the Dniester, the saddler himself lost the workshop, the bed, and these twelve German sheets... 

You can advance the clocks, you can rip off the Hitlerstrasse street plates, you can't destroy the evidence as it is everywhere. After all, next to the terrified slaveholders, we see shining slaves everywhere: they have just been freed. There are so many French, Poles, Czechs, Belgians, and Dutch here! There are lots of girls from Ukraine and Belarus who have cried their eyes out, Soviet prisoners of war who survived miraculously. A French military doctor told me: "Of course, the Boche tortured us, but we lived much better compared to the Russians. We tried to share food with them, and the Germans sent us to the Graudenz penal camp for this, saying: "If you help the Bolsheviks, you betray the idea of a new Europe." Typhus was rampant in the Russian camp. Corpses were taken out every morning. The Germans were shouting: "Drag those too!" I myself saw that they laid the living with the dead ones, the living ones groaned, and the Germans buried them alive" Clock turning will never end the cases of German crimes! 

The world now knows that the Germans have killed six million Jews. They killed all the Jews, from infants to the elderly. Until recently, the Germans kept the last thousand Jews alive near Elbing: they were killing the Jews with sadistic pleasure. There were Prague architects, a composer from Amsterdam, Kovno doctors, and a professor from Belgrade. They were placed on stools naked and poured with ice water in the freezing cold. Then they killed them. Is it really enough to remove the street name plate to forget such atrocities? 

They come and swear: "We didn't know anything. We are innocent..." The evidence is there. They were fleeing so hastily that they left not only the city banners, the seals and archives of the police, they even left their personal papers. Here are the memos by Erich von Bremen. This is not an ardent young man, he is 57 years old. After reading his autobiography, I learned that he is married to Ursula von Ramm and that his two sons took part in the conquest of the world. The well-bred German left two memos at his escape. One of them is dedicated to the colonization of the Baltic States, the other one - to the development of the Caucasus. Here is an excerpt from the letter: "We must have the Caucasus, because we need oil from Grozny and Baku to improve our economy. Thus we will free ourselves from America... The bread of the North Caucasus will be provided by Transcaucasia, while we will be able to export, in addition to oil, wood, fruits, canned goods, wine and tobacco. Thus, the Caucasus will become a German colony." I assume that somewhere near Stettin the Red Army will find Erich von Bremen. So, the author of the report on the Caucasus will undoubtedly say: "I am against Hitler and I am switching the clock to Moscow time." 

Next to prosperity, we see savagery everywhere. There is a library in every apartment. What wonderful covers! Just don't open the books —"Mein Kampf" by the ogre, a collection dedicated to Himmler, "Campaign against Poland", "Racial Hygiene", “Jewish Plague", "Russian Subhumans", "Our Faithful Prussia"... What a squalor and spiritual poverty! However, it was obvious that these books were little read; the volumes were furniture, like vases and porcelain kittens. I searched in vain for city libraries in Letzen, Rastenburg, or Tapiau: there were none. I found the only museum, in Bartenstein. What was exhibited there? Portraits of Hindenburg and shoulder straps of an officer of the Tsarist army with the caption: "Victory at Tannenberg." Polish officer's uniform and photos of the destroyed Warsaw: "A trip to Poland." A monkey skeleton, at least a hundred images of Hitler, a beer mug from the Bismarck era, a mock-up of barracks and photographs of the city's benefactors. That's it. There's a Nazi Party club in Heilsberg; it's merely a pub with a beer stand and a few bloodthirsty books. Huge police buildings are everywhere: here the Germans thought, made up, fantasized and repented. Maps of the world with faded paper flags still stuck in El Barani and in Maikop. The school building in Letzen is excellent, and I found a songbook there. I will quote several songs for young superhumans: "Bombs, fall merrily, on England...", "May Jewish blood splash under the knife...", "Let the Bolsheviks writhe from the roar of our drums...", "We pushed the French pigs from Strasbourg..." And a huge photo: The Fuhrer, and in front of him is a kid of about five or six with a toy gun. No, you can't live in such a den! Culture is not determined by vacuum cleaners and meat mincers. We see the awful face of Germany, and we are proud that we turned inside out the awful beast's den. 

I have no idea what the diplomats are going to talk about at a round, oval or long table; but I know what people from ten countries are talking about on the roads of Germany, people liberated by the Red Army, the French and Poles, the British and Czechs, Belgians and Serbs, Dutch and Greeks, Americans and Australians. I spent many hours talking to them. I have seen the talkative and the silent ones, the light and the dark ones, the severe and the laughing ones, but I have not seen any single supporter of the Germans. If there are still people in Paris who are inclined to restore the climate of Munich, the French I met say one thing: "Let them send us to Germany!.. And let there be no Germany..." I spent an evening with the British. These people have been through a lot. It would be nice to bring them to London and show them the honorable deputy who has recently called the Germans "brothers." I'm afraid they wouldn't be fraternal to this kind-hearted gentleman. People who have survived the German concentration camps, all these oflags and stalags have an idea of real Germany. People liberated by the Red Army know well what Soviet Russia is. People from ten different countries on the roads of Germany are eagerly waiting not for a suspicious "balance" between evil and good, but for the triumph of justice. That's why you so often I hear the same words in all languages in Germany: "Death to the Germans! Long live the Red Army!" 

The retribution has begun. It will be completed. Nothing will save rogue Germany anymore. The first words of the treaty, which will be called the peace treaty, are written with the blood of Russia. Germany hears these words now. But for me, as a Soviet citizen, as a Russian writer, as a man who has seen Madrid, Paris, Orel, Smolensk, it is my greatest happiness to trample on this land of villains and know that it was not chance, fortune, speeches or articles that saved the world from fascism, but our people, our army, our hearts, our Stalin. 

March 1, 1945