Wilhelm and Alfred Meet Stalin March 25, 2018
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
Wilhelm and Alfred
This post is written not with a sneer still less with pleasure, but with real sympathy for two men who saw their courage relegate them to a thousand footnotes. Welcome from left stage Wilhelm Korpik and Alfred Liskow. A light ripple of applause fills the auditorium.
German Attack
Wilhelm and Alfred had three things in common: they were German (Liskow was a thirty-year-old joiner in a Bavarian furniture factory, Alfred was a labourer from Berlin); they were in Hitler’s invasion force that was, the night of 21 June, preparing for a dawn attack on the Soviet Union (Liskow was 221st Sapper Regiment, 15 Division and a lance corporal, I’ve been unable to establish which unit Korpik belonged to); and, oh yes, they had communist sympathies.
Now let’s for a moment recreate the situation. You are a young German on the eve of one of your country’s ‘great adventures’. Your officers have pepped you up and told you that tomorrow the crusade against the Soviet Union begins, that you will be part of the army that destroys communism, and much of Russia’s civilian population. The only thing is that you are a communist. What might you do?
Well, Wilhelm and Alfred were certainly not the only communists or communist-sympathisers in that army of almost four million (including allies). But they were only to have the strength of character and sheer bloody naivety to do something about it. Both deserted, separately, from their units and crossed into the Soviet Union. Alfred actually swam across the River Pruth: you have to respect this kind of dedication to world revolution. Wilhelm crossed, meanwhile, on the border near Kowel. Both apparently went over the night of 21 June; though I’ve read one claim that Wilhelm crossed 18 June.
As they pushed through the fronds of trees towards the border, they probably had images of being greeted, in some not too distant future, by Stalin himself as saviours of ‘the true fatherland’. Perhaps tears dribbled down their faces as they saw, in their mind’s eyes, the troops saluting them in Red Square; women with large breasts and baskets of flowers threw petals at them; ships were named after them; moon rockets carried their sons out of orbit in the name of class struggle.
Soviet Reaction
Now let’s look at things from the other side. You are a front-line Soviet Commander and for days and days you have been handed clue after clue that the Nazis are about to attack in force. There is the noise of a massive concentration of German troops just across the border and German planes fill the sky. Suddenly, there arrives a young German communist ready to confirm your suspicions. What do you do?
Well, being the Soviet Union you look for someone else to take responsibility. The news of these two deserters was sent up the food chain and actually arrived in Stalin’s office on the night of the 21 or very early on the morning of the 22. Stalin had, too, been hearing lots of suggestions in the previous days that the Germans were about to attack: but he had decided that this was not true – it will be remembered he didn’t even believe the first reports of an attack when German tanks had entered the USSR. So what did he do? Well, he had them shot as agent provocateurs.
As it happens we have an account from Khrushchev saying that one of the men was shot immediately. This was probably Wilhelm who we might imagine thought that he was being taken outside to drink schnapps and toast the stars: isn’t that what they did under lived socialism? At least, according to other accounts Alfred was still being interrogated when the German attack begin. Of course, that does not mean that he was not shot on the spot anyway.
Pity those who have to deal with totalitarian states: from the frying pan to the fire; from Auschwitz to the gulag.
Challenge
These two unlikely heroes have long lived in Beach’s mind. Can anyone provide any other information. They deserve to be celebrated even as just a warning to those who would let dubious ideals get the better of them: drbeachcombing At gmail DOT com Photographs, more biographical information, sonnets…
31 Mar 2018: Bruce T ‘I wish I had the info you’re looking for, but I probably ran across the two of them in the same place you did, Khrushchev’s memoirs, shortly after you left diapers. We had to read Soviet writers and dissidents on campuses in history and poli-sci in those long ago Cold War days, and the writing of these men about the war years is full of these incidents of shooting deserters from the other side. Wilhelm and Alfred ,were, if not the first, some of the first German deserters the Soviet’s had to deal with. This was following a military purge just months before. The officers along the front would rather get all the info they could get from deserters then put a bullet in the back of their head. You’re safe, Stalin is happy, and too bad about the Germans. The thing that intrigues me about the nights before the invasion of the Soviet Union is wondering how many German soldiers made the same decision? “I’m not dying for that lunatic in Berlin.” had to be a common thought along that front in the week or so leading up to the German invasion. And on the Soviet side re; Stalin. However our madman in Moscow was a veteran of War Communism, he had patrols of commissars hunting & shooting deserters for tens of miles behind the lines. And the Soviet soldiers knew it. Perhaps one of the writers of the Dissident era covered the incident? There are number of similar “German deserter” stories in the pages of the WWII vets among them.’
