March of German prisoners of war in Moscow in 1944

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

July 17, 1944the remnants of the German divisions defeated in Belarus marched through the streets of Moscow. This event was supposed to instill in Soviet citizens the confidence that the enemy was already broken and a common victory was not far off.

Thought it was the end

Surprisingly, the idea of a prisoner of war parade on the streets of the Soviet capital was prompted by German propaganda. In one of the trophy newsreels, a voice-over announced that the gallant soldiers of the German army had already marched victoriously through the streets of many European capitals, and now Moscow was next in turn.

The Soviet leadership decided not to deprive them of this opportunity, but they had to march as not winners, but losers. The German POWs' march promised to be a powerful propaganda stunt.

Eyewitnesses of those events agree that the appearance of the Germans on the streets of Moscow produced the effect of a “exploding bomb”.

Despite the fact that the upcoming march was twice announced on the radio at 7 and 8 am, and was also reported on the front page of the Pravda newspaper, the abundance of Germans in the capital at first caused bewilderment and even panic among some Muscovites.

In total, 57,600 German prisoners took part in the parade of the defeated - mainly from among those who survived during the large-scale operation of the Red Army "Bagration" to liberate Belarus. Only those soldiers and officers of the Wehrmacht were sent to Moscow whose physical condition allowed them to withstand a long march. Among them are 23 generals.

Representatives of different types of troops were involved in organizing the "German march". So, the protection of prisoners of war at the hippodrome and the Khodynskoye field was provided by the structures of the NKVD. And the direct escort was carried out by the servicemen of the Moscow Military District under the command of Colonel-General Pavel Artemyev: some of them rode on horses with bared sabers, others walked with rifles at the ready.

Researchers with access to the archives claim that the Germans were being prepared for the parade all night in a Moscow suburb. The prisoners seem to have no idea what this whole undertaking was for. One of the participants in the march, private Wehrmacht Helmut K., upon returning to Germany, will write: "We thought that we were being prepared for a demonstrative execution!"

The procession of the defeated began from the hippodrome at 11 o'clock in the morning. First, we moved along the Leningradskoe highway (today it is a section of Leningradsky Prospekt), further along Gorky Street (now Tverskaya). Then the prisoners were divided into two columns. The first, consisting of 42 thousand people on Mayakovsky Square, turned clockwise to the Garden Ring. The ultimate goal of the march was the Kursk railway station: the journey took 2 hours and 25 minutes.

The second column, which included another 15,600 prisoners of war, turned counterclockwise from Mayakovsky Square to the Garden Ring. The Germans passed the Smolenskaya, Krymskaya and Kaluzhskaya squares, after which they turned onto Bolshaya Kaluzhskaya Street (Leninsky Prospect). The final point of the route was the Kanatchikovo station of the Okruzhnaya railway (now the area of the Leninsky Prospekt metro station). The whole journey took 4 hours and 20 minutes.

Bloody march

The passage of prisoners of war through the streets of Moscow, as noted by eyewitnesses, did without serious excesses. Beria wrote in his report to Stalin that Muscovites behaved in an organized manner, sometimes anti-fascist slogans were heard: "Death to Hitler!" or "Bastards, so that you die!"

It is significant that the procession was attended by many foreign correspondents. The country's leadership informed them about the upcoming event earlier than the Muscovites themselves. Thirteen cameramen were also involved in the filming of the event. Stalin made sure that information about the march of the defeated enemies was conveyed to the widest circles of the world community. He no longer doubted the final victory.

A symbolic act was the passage of special watering equipment through the streets of the capital, after German columns passed through them. As the famous prose writer Boris Polevoy wrote, the cars "washed and cleaned the Moscow asphalt, apparently destroying the very spirit of the recent German march." "So that not a trace remains of the Hitlerite scum," - so it was said in a newsreel dedicated to the march of German prisoners of war.

Probably, this was said not only in a figurative sense. The fact is that the NKVD, on pain of execution, forbade the prisoners to leave the columns - so they had to relieve themselves on the move. As eyewitnesses testify, Moscow streets after the passage of prisoners of war had, to put it mildly, an unsightly appearance. Perhaps this was a consequence of the increased feeding of the Germans on the eve of the march: they were provided with an increased portion of porridge, bread and lard, after which the digestive tract gave slack. It is not for nothing that another name for the march of prisoners of war - "the diarrhea march" was entrenched among the masses.

A user under the nickname Redkiikadr on one of the forums told how his great-grandmother collided with a captured German, who miraculously passed the guard and ran into Bolshoi Karetny Lane, where he was desperately trying to get food. However, he was quickly discovered and escorted to the others.

In general, there were no seriously injured. After the end of the march, only four German servicemen asked for medical help. The rest were sent to the stations, loaded into wagons and sent to serve their sentences in special camps.

Sounding silence

The writer Vsevolod Vishnevsky, who was present at the prisoners of war march, said that there was no visible aggression on the part of the observers, except that the boys tried several times to throw stones in the direction of the column, but the guards drove them away. Occasionally, spitting and "elite mothers" flew to the defeated enemy.

Looking at the photographs of this event, of which there are many on the network today, one can see the generally restrained reaction of Muscovites to the marching enemy. Someone looks angrily, someone shows a fig, but more often the calm, concentrated, slightly contemptuous look of people standing on both sides of the streets catches the eye.

Honored Worker of Culture of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Pakhomov, who at that time was 8 years old, remembered well that the prisoners tried not to look around. Only a few of them, he said, cast an indifferent glance at Muscovites. The officers with all their appearance tried to show that they were not broken.

On Mayakovsky Square, one of the German officers, seeing a Soviet soldier with a gold Star of the Hero of the USSR in the crowd, pointed his fist in his direction. It turned out to be a scout and future writer Vladimir Karpov. In response, the senior lieutenant painted a semblance of a gallows on his neck with his hands: “Look what awaits you,” he tried to tell the German. But he continued to keep his fist. Karpov later admitted that then a thought flashed through his mind: “What a reptile! It's a pity they didn't nailed you at the front."

The artist Alla Andreeva did not want to contemplate the German prisoners of war, she was frightened off by the "medievalism of this plan." But from the stories of her friends who had been on the march, she remembered two things. The gaze of the Germans at the children who were being hugged by their mothers and the crying of women who lamented "here and ours are being led somewhere." These stories were engraved in the artist's memory by the "humanity that broke through them".

The French playwright Jean-Richard Blok also left us his description of the events, whom Muscovites impressed with their "dignified behavior". "An earthy, gray-black stream of prisoners flowed between two human shores, and the whisper of voices, merging together, rustled like a summer breeze," Blok wrote. The Frenchman was especially surprised by the reaction of Muscovites to washing the streets with a disinfectant liquid: “It was then that the Russian people burst out laughing. And when a giant laughs, it means something."

Many of the eyewitnesses noticed how empty cans clinked in the deathly silence. Someone thought that they were deliberately forced to tie prisoners to their belts to make them look like jesters. But the truth is much more prosaic. The Germans simply used iron cans as personal utensils.

A user under the nickname chess, who left a comment under a photograph of a German POWs march, spoke about other sounds that struck his father then: "He clearly remembered the silence, broken only by the shuffling of thousands of soles on the asphalt, and the heavy smell of sweat that floated above the columns of prisoners."