Reviews of the Week
The Germans in Russia
Dance of Death. By Erich Kern. Translated by Paul Findlay. (Collins. los. 6d.)
Jr is just ten years since the German armies, killing and burning as they went, swept across the Russian frontier through the fields of high summer. Life in those days had a beautiful simplicity. There was only one problem: how to kill Germans. The Russians looked like killing a great number, and so the Government which until the day before had been quietly assisting in our own destruction, became overnight our ally. Caught up in this colossal process, very soon I myself was in Russia, as part of a military mission ; and almost at once we were being treated to a private pre-view of the Kremlin's way with foreigners which has since nearly driven the world to despair. It Made us pretty desperate at the time. But the Russians were killing Germans ; and, the •Kremlin notwithstanding, we in Moscow were filled with a profound sense of community with the Russian people then suffering intolerably at the hands of a nation which seemed to think that trampling down other people's corn, burning their houses, killing and torturing anyone who resisted, was the proper way to solve the more complex human problems.
.Later in the year, I remember, when dusk fell early to begin the deadly nights of the most terrible winter for a century, I would sometimes watch the endless bus-loads of Russian wounded, still filthy, unshaven, and with ffist field-dressings soaked in blood, being unloaded in the snow at the steps of a Moscow hospital ; and I would comfort myself with the thought of the Germans at that very moment miserably freezing on the bare and windswept plain which stretched away from the city. Among them was the author of this book.
This is what he felt like that summer, ten years ago, when he moved with his division into Russia: "But soon our nostrils were filled with the stench of burning villages. The air trembled with the distant rumble of guns. Our hearts beat faster, seasoned though we were to war. Tomorrow's battle never fails to put a clamp round the heart. We wrote our first postcards home."
It had to be stopped.
Life, alas, is less simple today. Russia has become the enemy, and we see that in a sense she always was the enemy. We tend to overlook the distinctions between one enemy and another. Instead, we find ourselves sighing for the lost certainties of war—some of us so deeply that to save the pain of thinking we would plunge tomorrow into the cooling oblivion of the great illusion, moving more than half-way to self-destruction. I can think of no better antidote to this sort of mood than this book by a soldier, intelligent, likeable and serious, who is so perfectly identified with a race which has sought again and again for cut-and-dried solutions to the insoluble, for short cuts to impossible ends. This, told with extreme vividness and considerable narrative power, is the story of one of the short cuts. Its author, chastened but still uncompre- hending, is now looking for another. He was a young sergeant of the Waffen SS, a peace-time journalist, a convinced Nazi. serving in the crack division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler ; and although he was always being sent off on special mis- sions to do with SS affairs, he saw a great deal of heavy fighting in various parts of Russia. He could think for himself, and he differed violently from his superiors in a number of ways, even to jeopard- ising his whole future by protesting about the Rosenberg policy of subjugation, exploitation and atrocity. This was not because it seemed wicked to him, but because it was inexpedient. He believed, probably correctly, that if the Germans had treated the Ukrainians as human beings they would have won the war. He would not have regretted this. He saw the whole Russian campaign not as an act of wickedness but simply as a mistake. It would be a tenable point of view were it not spoilt by the fact that it is not extended to the other side. For example, Sergeant Kern considered the Kremlin very wicked to condemn Leningrad to the horrors of its long-drawn- out siege. And he can describe with bitterness the shooting of six German prisoners by the Russians and with no emotion at all but a sense of strangeness and incomprehension the bearing of the 4,000 Soviet prisoners who were lined up and shot in reprisal for that action He remains, proudly a Nazi betrayed by his leaders. But if this book is invaluable for its unconscious revelation of certain aspects of the German mentality, it will be read mainly as a first-hand account of the fighting on the Eastern front as seen from the German side, and for what it has to tell about the Russian people and 4heir army under stress of war. The swift narrative of the apocalyptic struggle against the background of forest and steppe is moving and enthralling ; some of the set scenes, like the tremendous withdrawal to the non-existent Dnieper line, are superbly done and stamp the memory ; the evocation of the dis-, integration of the whole German army before Malinowski's final drive on Budapest and Vienna has a quite extraordinary power. But even more fascinating than the record of the fighting is the picture of the Russians as seen from the other side. All the ingre- dients are here for an understanding which the author himself comes nowhere near achieving. In a thousand glimpses from real life. recorded with vividness and fidelity to fact, we enter into the endless paradoxes of Russian behaviour, and are given the raw material to construct an image of the whole for ourselves: the mindless auto- mata, products of the Stalin r6gime, who suddenly reveal in each and every individual the human spirit shining at its brightest ; the sur- rounded company fighting with desperate *stubbornness to the last round, and then surrendering with total submissiveness and a sort. of naive delight in their captors ; the prisoner who, lined up for execution, seizes a shovel to split the skull of the commissar stand- ing next to him—and then, when offered release, proudly steps back into the ranks to be shot with his comrades ; the mass desertions and the heroic stands ; the loathing of countless individuals for the regime which goes side by side with acceptance of it as the cross the beloved country has to bear. • German character, Russian•ceality, the war in the East: this book may be read for its light on all these things. It is also, in a sense,
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