‘You who are alive, look at us!'

These words in Dovzhenko's film reached audiences the world over. From early on, Soviet leaders sought to bring information about the extent and nature of Nazi crimes beyond Soviet borders, to shore up hatred against Germany and to solidify the anti-Hitler alliance.

Witnessing and Fighting Nazi Violence toured US cities in summer 1943 to raise funds for the Soviet war effort they drew huge crowds. The efforts of the JAC to collect documents on the annihilation of the Soviet Jews contributed to the publication in the United States of a ‘Black Book'. The publication featured an epigraph by JAC leader Itzik Fefer: ‘The globe is too small to hold both mankind and fascism.'^[516]

Shown in Allied countries during the war, Soviet documentary films detailing Nazi violence made a powerful impression. Moscow Strikes Back, a film devoted to the first liberation campaign in December 1941 and January 1942, came out in US movie theatres in August 1942 and won an Oscar in 1943. A critic for the New York Times described the film as at heart ‘a picture of the brutal desolation wrought by war, of the monstrous desecra­tion of humanity that the Nazis unleashed throughout the world.

The British and US governments contributed to the outpouring of popular sympathy with the Soviet ally by toning down or even actively countering references to the violent nature of the Stalinist state. The British Ministry of Information issued a manual, ‘Arguments to Counter the Ideological Fear of Bolshevism', instructing journalists to think of notions such as the ‘Red Terror' as figments of the Nazi imagination.^[520] The Roosevelt administration enlisted director Frank Capra to produce propagandistic films that portrayed the Soviet Union solely in a favourable light.

These attitudes were put to the test in April 1943 when the German government started a campaign to inform the world about the ‘real face of barbarous Bolshevism'. In a Russian forest near the village of Katyn, the Germans had discovered the remains of over 4,000 Polish officers, who, they established, had been murdered by Soviet security forces in 1940. Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels embraced the discovery as an ‘excellent opportunity...

If, after Stalingrad, the discovery of mass grave after mass grave in liberated areas of Russia and Ukraine had dwarfed prior Soviet notions of Nazi crimes that had formed in 1941 and 1942, the Red Army's move into Poland in 1944 disclosed German atrocities in yet another previously unthink­able register. Upon seeing the Majdanek death camp, director Roman Karmen wrote that the gas vans that the Germans had operated in Russia were but an ‘artisanal form of murder', compared to the brutally efficient ‘conveyer belt method of human annihilation' practised in Majdanek. Karmen pointed out a ‘shocking detail': the Germans had used the bones and ashes of the victims to fertilise cabbage that they grew on nearby fields. A de fining feature of Majdanek for him was its ‘pan-European significance': trainloads of people from Denmark, Norway, Czechoslovakia and France were ‘brought here, only to be annihilated'.

Majdanek. The camera dwelled on rows of thick cabbage growing on a field in the shadow of the camp towers, and it zoomed in on the passports of camp inmates - French, Italian, Dutch, Greek and Polish - to reveal its Europe­wide significance. While the film certainly portrayed Europe as a victim of Nazi violence in order to underscore the Red Army's stature as Europe's liberator (and counter German claims to the contrary), Karmen's notes also brimmed with an ethical concern: ‘The entire world, all future generations, must know about what happened behind the barbed wire of the German death machine... in which Hitler's henchmen killed more than a million free people.'^[525]

The response that the Soviet discoveries and appeals met throughout the world was mixed, however. When correspondent Alexander Werth sent the BBC a detailed report on the discovery of the Majdanek camp in August 1944, his editors in London turned it down, thinking it was a Soviet propaganda stunt.^[526] In the United States, popular empathy with tales of Soviet suffering appeared to be fading. When Ukraine in Flames came out in American theatres in spring 1944, a reviewer described it as ‘yet another documentary film on the war in the Russia... all about dead bodies, burning cities, weeping women'. ‘Perhaps it is the duty of every American to see with their own eyes the horrors of the fascist invasion', another reviewer noted, ‘but it is an unpleasant duty.'^[527] These reactions strikingly differed from how Moscow Strikes Back had been met two years earlier. All the more noteworthy was a New York Times article of October 1944 that presented as a major news item the fact that W.

The atrocities in the east, he explained, were entirely different from those committed by the Germans in western Europe. While the shooting of hostages in the west was shocking, he pointed out, these incidents were relatively less than the killing of large masses of people, especially Jews, in the east. He mentioned in this connection the reports from Lublin, Poland, where Soviet and Polish authorities have estimated that as many as 1,500,000 persons were killed in a ‘slaughter house' operated by the Germans at Majdanek.^[528]

Beyond backing the factual truth of Soviet atrocity reports, Harriman's account echoed the moral understanding of German violence that charac­terised Soviet responses to Nazi crimes in the East.

In Berlin, military intelligence specialists at the Fremde Heere Ost office (FHO) avidly studied Soviet media publications, filing many articles in folders entitled ‘Soviet hatred and atrocity propaganda'. The Germans were as incredulous as the officials at the BBC. An internal October 1944 memoran­dum reported on Soviet coverage of the ‘so-called “Majdanek annihilation camp near Lublin”'. ‘Aside from Jews', the report read, ‘representatives of all European nations are said to have been liquidated using ostensibly the most refined methods.'^[529] The FHO specialists understood the Soviet reporting as an ‘exaggerated propaganda action' aimed at countering the earlier German revelations about Katyn. The other purpose they noted was the incitement of hatred. Captured Soviet soldiers confirmed to their German interrogators that ‘the constant atrocity propaganda filling the Soviet press is stirring up civilians as well as soldiers to a boiling point. All they seek is revenge.'

In February 1945 the FHO specialists faced a new flood of Soviet reporting - this time on the Auschwitz death camp, which the Red Army had liberated a few weeks earlier. Replete as they were with detailed information about the history and anatomy of the camp as relayed by individually named survivors, the reports appeared to challenge the disbelief of their German readers: the intelligence officers no longer provided distancing commentaries of their own, allowing the Soviet documents to speak for themselves. The translated materials included an editorial from a Soviet army newspaper which stated that the Germans had burned about 6,000,000 people in Auschwitz (‘Killing, burning, poisoning - those are the German professions') and appealed to its readers: ‘Comrade! You have seen a lot on your glorious advance since Stalingrad. Everywhere one finds bloody traces of German crimes. You have seen and experienced a lot, but Auschwitz surpasses this all as the most cruel testimonial of German atrocities.'^[530]

As they read enemy reports, the FHO officers paid particular attention to the works of Ehrenburg. Their dossier for 1944/45 contains several full translations of his pieces, without commentary. One of them, penned in mid August 1944, discussed the retrenchment of German troops into East Prussia ahead of an anticipated Soviet storm.^[531] Ehrenburg began by quoting an order by the commander of a tank army instructing subordinate commanders to enforce a

fundamental break with all hitherto existing rules and habits. Russia's expanse gave the German Wehrmacht a freedom that is no longer appro­priate in Germany... Everything necessary could be taken where it was found... Everywhere the German soldier was the master. In German cities and villages, the situation is the opposite. The people with whom we are dealing here are our fellow people. To respect and help them is our duty.

Ehrenburg commented:

Shamelessly, the Commander of the 3rd Tank Army, General Reinhardt, admits that his soldiers wreaked havoc and plundered in Russia like barbarians... The bandit general speaks to his chaps: ‘Remember, Germany is not Russia!' Very well! We will firmly remember the German general's words. We will repeat them in Konigsberg and Berlin. We were liberators until we reached the German border. Now we are judges.

Ehrenburg reminded his readers of the flurry of orders issued by German commanders during the occupation of Soviet lands, orders that had been fully implemented if judged by the sight of razed towns and ravines overflowing with corpses that the Red Army had encountered on its path of liberation:

After three bitter years, we are advancing on Germany past Ukraine, past Belorussia, past the ashes of our cities and the blood of our children. Woe is the land of the murderers! Not only our troops have reached the German border. Advancing with us are also the shadows of the dead. Who is knock­ing on the doors of Prussia? The dead and murdered, killed by gas or fire, the old people from Trostianets, the children from Babi Yar, the martyrs from Slawute, the dust and ashes from the ovens in which millions of helpless people were burned^[532]... Where are these shadows moving toward? Toward Konigsberg, toward Berlin. Right behind them follow we, the living. Nothing will stop us now. We can't sleep because of our sorrow and anger. Woe is the land of the wrongdoers. Woe is Germany!

The FHO officers singled out Ehrenburg as a signal author of atrocity propa­ganda on the enemy side. Had they read more widely they would have noticed a veritable outpouring of soldierly declarations of grief, outrage and revenge steeped in detailed evidence of horrors personally witnessed or experienced, which filled Soviet army papers in the last phase of the war. Letter writers included seasoned soldiers who had seen evidence of atrocities pile up on their westward march: ‘The Hitlerites mocked the Jewish population with particular cruelty. In Artemovsk they forced virtually all the local Jews together, stripped them naked and drove them into underground shafts. They sealed the entrances to leave the people to die slowly and painfully from asphyxiation.’ Some of them had escaped German captivity and talked about life in Nazi camps:

The fascists taunted the POWs in various ways. They forced the sick, wounded and exhausted soldiers to sing the song ‘Katyusha’, and shot those who didn’t sing along. They made Jews jump onto barbed wire. Every day they gathered the entire camp population in line formation and shot between 50 and 60 people. Then we would be dismissed. They threw morsels of foul horsemeat into the crowd of hungry POWs and opened fire onto those who tried to grab a piece. How many humiliations I endured over twenty days! But I know who abused me. I’ll enter the fascist den and will get even with the abusers.

Others were survivors of German occupation who had recently enlisted into the Red Army: ‘Dear editors! We, Communist youth from the occupied regions, have borne on our shoulders all the burdens of German occupation, we have seen hundreds of fascist crimes. Herewith we are sending you accounts about German atrocities by Communist youth members from the unit of Senior Sergeant Voloshchuk and Senior Sergeant Chabanov.’^[533] What all the letters bore in common were trappings of Ehrenburg’s documentary style and accusa­tory stance, with which their authors were undoubtedly familiar. The letters also confirmed Ehrenburg’s central point: the memory of those who had suffocated in gas vans, or were tortured, burned or hanged, was alive. It lived on in the Soviet soldiers who advanced towards Berlin, thirsting for a reckoning.