Ali’s Reviews > The Fall of Berlin 1945 > Status Update
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The term ‘Traitor of the Motherland’ did not just cover soldiers recruited from prison camps by the Germans. It was to cover Red Army soldiers who had been captured in 1941, some of whom had been so badly wounded that they could not fight to the end. Solzhenitsyn argued in their case that the phrase ‘Traitor of the Motherland’, rather than ‘Traitor to the Motherland’ was a significant Freudian slip.
— Dec 03, 2024 03:53AM
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Dec 03, 2024 03:53AM
“...‘They were not traitors to her. They were her traitors. It was not they, the unfortunates, who had betrayed the Motherland, but their calculating Motherland who had betrayed them.’ The Soviet state had betrayed them through incompetence and lack of preparation in 1941. It had then refused to acknowledge their dreadful fate in German prison camps. And the final betrayal came when they were encouraged to believe that they had redeemed themselves by their bravery in the last weeks of the war, only to be arrested after the fighting was over. Solzhenitsyn felt that ‘to betray one’s own soldiers and proclaim them traitors’ was the foulest deed in Russian history.”
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“There was a samizdat song about SMERSH, still often referred to by its pre-1943 name of the Special Department:The first piece of metal made a hole in the fuel tank.
I jumped out of the T-34, I don’t know how,
And then they called me to the Special Department.
‘Why aren’t you burnt, along with the tank, you bastard?’
‘I’ll definitely burn in the next attack,’ I answered.”
