MODERN DOCUMENTS
s.
T.*
THE MORALE OF THE RED ARMY IN GERMANY
Symptoms of what is called in our army moral and political
disintegration appeared with particular clarity after we had entered
Poland and discovered that the local population's standard of living
was relatively high. Our soldiers' reaction to this discovery was re–
flected both in their readiness to fall under "bourgeois influence,"
and in the cruel excesses they perpetrated against this population.
In Germany proper, these symptoms became more widespread and
more acute. The whole army, from privates to generals, was stricken
by a true epidemic of "junk collecting" (the Russian term coined
for the occasion,
barakholstvo,
became official; it was soon used in
army orders). Almost every soldier provided himself with a horse–
drawn wagon, on which he loaded his "war trophies," consisting of
bicycles, feather beds, or kitchenware-in brief, everything he could
lay his hands on. The Russian infantry units began to look like trav–
eling gypsy camps. At the head rode the company commander, usually
in a carriage, drunk, wearing a motley costume contrived out of
Russian and German uniforms; at
his
side there was almost always a
woman, often garbed as a Soviet nurse: He was followed by a long
line of junior officers and privates, in their britskas, which were often
so piled with junk of every description that no guns could be seen.
Naturally, there were many laggards, who for months on end pre–
tended to be trying to catch up with their units, and who plundered
as they went.
Such slogans as "When you see a German, kill him," supplied
the ideological justification for the perpetration of absolutely mon–
strous crimes, most of them sexual, against the local population. The
invasion routes were strewn with barbarously mutilated corpses of
*
S. T., an economist by profession, served as a major in a Guards regiment
of the Red Army. He left the Soviet zone of Germany early in 1948.
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