Ukraine War Day #807: Not All Heroes Drive A Tank!

Dear Readers:

Continuing my review of this story by reporter/historian Vladimir Nagirnyak. As World War II ground to an end and the Red Army moved on Berlin, German civilians found themselves at risk for death by starvation and disease. This was the horrible end to which Hitler had guided them.

The task of storming Berlin was assigned to the First Belorussian Front. In all, only 22 days were allocated to planning this major operation! By comparison, the Vistula-Oder Offensive took 66 days to plan; and Operation Bagration 88 days. Commander of the Berlin operation was Marshal Georgy Zhukov.

Zhukov

Given the short planning time, Zhukov was worried that the logistics were not properly in place to support such a massive operation. To be able to summon up the supplies required “needed truly heroic efforts on the part of the workers of the rear,” Zhukov recalled. Fortunately, these workers were up to the task, they acquitted themselves of every assignment they were given, no matter how impossible it might have seemed. In this very short period of time, the Soviet “rear workers” (тыловики – “tyloviki”) performed a massive amount of work. As a result of their heroic labor, three regular armies, two tank armies, and a huge number of reinforcements were able to take the capital of Nazi Germany without wanting for a single thing that they needed. Behind every bullet, behind every shell fired by the Red Army men in the streets of Berlin, there stood the modest unheralded deeds of the rear units. And not only that – these tyloviki had the means and experience needed to save the peaceful civilians of the German capital.

Roads And Bridges

The tyloviki had received and unloaded more than a thousand train cars packed with military supplies. As the storming of the city began, 3,000 trucks uninterruptedly delivered supplies to, and evacuated the wounded from, the front line. The railroad workers units played an equally important role. They were able to repair the damaged rail linking Küstrin with Berlin; and this repair enabled supplies to be delivered directly to the Lichtenberg Station in Berlin.

The Berlin-Lichtenberg Railroad Station, as it looks today.

During the course of the Berlin operation, the railroad workers restored 623 km of railroad tracks, which is the approximate distance between Moscow and Leningrad.

The Oder River formed the last stand of the Nazi army. Here the Wehrmacht stood its ground and destroyed bridge after bridge, as they were being built by the Soviet troops. Some bridges were destroyed and rebuilt up to 12 times! Nonetheless, the Soviets kept building bridges, and were able to move two tank armies across the Oder. Something like 1.6 million cars, and over 48,000 tanks and artillery carts were moved over the river during the storming of Berlin.

Meanwhile, the road builders also had to cope with extremely complicated tasks. Their work assisted the movement of Soviet troops within Berlin itself. On May 2, when Berlin was taken, Soviet military photo-reporter Evgeny Khaldei snapped his most famous photograph at the Brandenburg Gates. This iconic photo was called “Traffic Policewoman of the Victory”. It gave the promise of normal life returning, at some point in the future. A peaceful future in which directing traffic at a busy intersection was the utmost task to solve.

Khaldei’s iconic photograph

Even while this woman, and others, started directing traffic, clashes were still occurring within the city. The road builders/repairers followed close behind the storming units. After a block was cleared of any remaining Nazis, the road workers left behind traffic police to keep order at the intersections. Occasionally a repaired road might be damaged again, as pieces of a building collapsed onto it; and then the road workers had to go back in and fix it again.

The Spectre Of Famine

As the Red Army closed in on the German heartland, Nazi propagandists terrified the population with stories of Russian cruelty and acts of vengeance. “The Russian barbarians will not spare anyone,” the people were told. Hitler himself had used starvation as a weapon against the Russians (extermination of the Russian population was official policy and even put in writing); and so the German people expected similar payback.

Fortunately for the Germans, the Soviet leadership had some better standards. The Soviet government issued precise guidelines for the behavior their troops must adhere to, upon entering enemy soil. Even back in 1942 Stalin had declared that the USSR was only out for the annihilation of the Hitler clique, and not the German people per se. Stalin: “Our experience of history shows us that Hitlers come and go, but the German people, and the German state, always remain.”

During the Vistula-Oder Offensive, Soviet troops had encountered terrified and impoverished German refugees on the roads. Soviet commanders ordered their troops to provide food and clothing to women, old men, children, and invalids. But this was just the beginning. Soviet tyloviki soon found themselves tasked with saving the entire population of Berlin from famine; and we are talking about over 2.7 million people!

General Nikolai Zhizhin

You see, 2-3 months prior to the fall of Berlin, the Germans had stopped being able to bring food supplies into their capital. Two weeks before the fall, there was no bread. When the Red Army took the capital, they found a city whose logistics and supply system were completely stalled. All those Nazis who were supposed to be responsible for supplying the capital had fled; as had the owners of food establishments. It seemed that the inhabitants of the city were doomed to death by starvation.

This was the situation facing the victorious Commanders of the First Belorussian Front. From their very first days in Berlin they had to take on the task of saving the civilians from starvation. General Nikolai Zhizhin, who commanded the tyloviki, was put in charge of solving this problem. Over 300 officers from the reserve were put at his disposal. They requisitioned 820 trucks and set about supplying the city. One of the very first things they did was to load up the trucks with 1700 tons of potatoes from certain regions of Germany East of the Oder. These humble spuds may have saved the lives of many Berliners.

Zhizhin’s operational team worked out a rationing system for different categories of the population. A large group (around 1.5 million people) consisted of dependents (иждивенцы) and children under the age of 10. In some cases, the Soviet rations were even more generous than those of the Hitler regime. For example, the Hitler regime only provided “surrogate coffee”, whereas the Soviets provided real (natural) coffee as well as tea. At a certain point, the Hitler regime of rationing had started to replace the meat ration with cheese or cottage cheese. Whereas, under the Soviet rationing system, each German began to receive 60 grams of fresh meat per day.

Soviet soldiers ladle out soup for starving Germans.

Later it was decided to create a produce storage center in Berlin. To help set this up, People’s Commissar for External Trade, Anastas Mikoyan, made the trip from Moscow to Germany, accompanied by General Andrei Khrulev, a Logistics Commander of the rear. Under their leadership, tyloviki from three fronts, in May-June alone (1945) were able to bring into Berlin: 78,000 tons of grain, 18,500 tons of flour, 13,700 tons of meat, 114,000 tons of potatoes.

Soviet efforts in saving Berliners from hunger and epidemics were appreciated at the time, even if forgotten nowadays. Never before had the Red Army conducted military operations in a massive city the size of Berlin. And this was also a unique experience for the tyloviki. In fact, their accomplishments violated existing norms, because they were technically never supposed to be so close to the action as to be almost intermingled with the front-line troops. And yet they did what they had to do, and by so doing saved the ordinary people of Berlin from certain starvation.