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>Tolstoy’s analysis of these statistics does much to revise our understanding of the war on the Eastern Front, as he demonstrates that these high Russian military casualties were largely due to the Soviets’ crude methods of waging war. “Penal battalions” composed of “enemies of the people” (i.e., inmates of prisons and camps, and luckless peasants, including women and children) were hurled in waves against German defensive positions. Frequently unarmed and at times deprived of camouflaged uniforms to better draw enemy fire, they were often used to clear minefields. With NKVD machine-gunners poised behind them, they were forced across minefields until a path was cleared. The wounded were killed off by the NKVD. General Ratov, chief of the Soviet Military Mission to Britain, actually declined an offer of British mine-detectors, remarking that “in the Soviet Union we use people.” SMERSH (from the initials “Death to Spies”), the NKVD’s special murder arm made famous by Ian Fleming in his James Bond thrillers, was created in 1942 as an additional guard on Soviet front-line troops. The NKVD placed large heavily-armed formations at the rear of Soviet units to discourage withdrawals and to pick off “stragglers” and “cowards.” In a number of instances, NKVD units fought pitched battles with Red Army detachments trying to retreat in the face of superior enemy forces. Stalin continued to purge his armed forces even as the Axis advanced. It is likely that hundreds of thousands of Russians were killed in such actions.
>As for the POWs who died in German captivity, Tolstoy reminds the reader that the Soviet government refused to sign the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, refused to cooperate with the International Red Cross (the Nazis allowed the Red Cross to visit concentration camps), and rebuffed German feelers forwarded through neutralist concerning compliance with the Hague Convention. A 1941 directive ordered Red Army men to commit suicide instead of surrender and Soviet law regarded Russian POWs as traitors. Besides their own “penal battalions,” the Russians occasionally used POWs to clear minefields.
>German attitudes toward the Russians were further colored by evidence of NKVD massacres encountered at such places as L’Vov, Vinnitsa, and Katyn. They found not just piles of corpses, but apparently mass-produced torture instruments, including devices for squeezing the skull, another for the testicles, and tools used to skin prisoners alive. Ice picks, broken bottles, or whatever else was handy or preferred were also used. Tolstoy observes that “Soviet cruelty far outstripped that of National Socialism. . . . Torture in the USSR was (and is) employed on a mass scale as an important punitive means of overawing a resentful population.” He goes on to explain that these ghastly scenes of state-sanctioned depravity “confirmed the German view that Bolshevik Russia was irredeemably savage and backward.” Considering how civilians and POWs were treated by the Communists, the Germans felt no obligation to show much consideration for Russian POWs. According to the author, there was a purpose behind all of this cruelty:
>“Stalin went out of his way to invite Nazi ill-treatment and later extermination of Russian prisoners-of-war. . . . It is quite clear, therefore, that the deaths of over three million Russians in German custody was a piece of deliberate Soviet policy, the aim of which was to cause the liquidation of men regarded automatically as political traitors, whilst directing the anger of the Soviet people against the perpetrators of the crime. . . . It should not be forgotten, either, that Soviet cruelty greatly prolonged the conflict, costing all belligerent nations millions of lives. . . . This evidence of how the Soviets treated their own people, coupled with the harsh treatment they visited on prisoners-of-war, was the major cause of Germany’s obstinate determination to fight on to the end, long after it had become clear her cause was doomed.”
>Having accounted for the 7½ million military casualties, Tolstoy states that four million Russian civilians were killed by the Germans (although this includes those involved in anti-Partisan operations, military sieges of such cities as Leningrad, and 750,000 Jews). This leaves 18-20 million additional Russians killed in the course of Stalin’s “secret war” against his own subjects.” (Lutton, Charles. Book Review — Stalin’s War: Victims and Accomplices, Journal of Historial Review)