I Became Stalin?! - Chapter 176:

Chapter 176

The Soviet Union treated Germany harshly.

The other defeated countries were also destined for harsh treatment. But compared to France, where the Communist Resistance seized Paris and proclaimed the Fourth Republic, or Italy, where the monarchy deposed Mussolini at the last minute and the Allies divided the occupation, Germany was ‘wickedly sinful’.

The world was horrified as Germany’s atrocities were revealed one by one.

[Nazi Germany’s crimes exposed: ‘extermination camps’ found in Poland]

[Germany’s human experiment data, a collection of inhuman experiments, revealed]

The Soviet army had a very good excuse to dig up these ‘war crimes’.

They maintained a thoroughly gentlemanly attitude towards the civilians who had committed less heinous crimes.

On the other hand, the perpetrators of war crimes, such as soldiers, scientists who were suspected of being involved in human experiments, or engineers and technicians who could be accused of slave labor, were all singled out.

“Search! We got a tip that he’s here!”

“Yes! You go that way! We’ll break in from this side!”

Many scientists tried to escape, but they all failed. The sharp eyes of the NKVD did not let these innocent civilians get away.

“Wernher von Braun? Is that you?”

“Ah, no! I’m that… uh…”

Confused by his own alias, the middle-aged man with a fake mustache and thick horn-rimmed glasses panicked when a young man in a Soviet uniform called his name in perfect German. He dropped his luggage and tried to run away.

But before he knew it, burly soldiers surrounded him and pointed their guns at him. Shaking with fear, he raised his hands high. Two agents with blue hats of the NKVD grabbed his arms.

“Come on, let’s go. You have… some kind of charges against you, but I don’t know much about them… Anyway, let’s go!”

“Ah… ah… please, spare me.”

“Oh, come on, do we look like those brutal bastards who kill people indiscriminately?”

Of course, they were brutal bastards who killed people indiscriminately, but von Braun couldn’t say a word and just shook his head frantically.

The NKVD agent made a joke in awkward German.

“Huhuhuhu, we won’t eat you, so follow us. We’re not that bad, you know?”

As the war neared its end, the Führer became obsessed with ‘super weapons’ to turn the tide and invested massive resources and manpower.

The brightest minds of the German Empire received huge budgets under this policy and built their own research achievements.

Of course, these innovative research results did not lead to a tremendous increase in power, and Germany eventually lost the war.

“Hahahaha! Come out, everyone! We’ll take you gently!”

“Eeeek!”

“Oops! If you try to sabotage the data here, hmm… there’s a special reservation for you in the gulag near the Arctic! If you want to spend your last years comfortably in a pen, come out quietly… or if you like ice a lot, you can sabotage! Do you have a lot of ice lovers in your family?”

The scientists and technicians who worked in the laboratories and factories had no time to escape as Berlin was reduced to ashes and the war ended.

And most of them were dragged away by the NKVD agents who stormed in in no time. There were various charges they could apply.

Germany was desperately short of labor in various fields, and they purged their own people by accusing them of being Jews, defeatists, and various other charges, and then mobilized the residents of the occupied territories or prisoners of war for slave labor.

Almost every research institute and factory was not free from this problem.

The Soviet Union arrested those who worked there on charges of ‘war crimes’ and ‘crimes against humanity’.

The US army had not yet entered the German liberation zone, and the disarmed German army could not resist.

The officers and generals were the first to be taken away, so there was no one to command.

“Wow… this is amazing! Not as much as Magnitogorsk, but…”

“No time to admire! Hurry, hurry, move!”

“Yes!!”

Also, the Allies, including the United States and the Soviet Union, agreed to limit Germany’s industrial capacity.

The Soviet Union, which had suffered ‘enormous human and material losses’ from being trampled by the German army, was ready to tear down the industrial facilities in the Ruhr region, which they considered a kind of spoils of war, to supplement their industrial capacity.

“We did it in Leningrad, we did it in Western Ukraine, and we’ll do it here too! Hahahaha!”

“Yeah. They probably didn’t think they’d get this when they invaded.”

The German workers and technicians looked at the Soviets who were dismantling the machines with a bitter smile.

The Luftwaffe fought to the death to protect Germany’s industrial zone from the American bombers. The facilities they saved were literally devoured by the Soviet Union.

The Soviets, who had dismantled various industrial facilities in their own territory during the war and literally moved entire cities to the Ural Mountains, happily dismantled the Ruhr region one by one as if they were used to this work.

“Take all the heavy industry equipment from Germany!”

The secretary-general ordered. This kind of industrial equipment plundering work continued throughout Germany, not just in the Ruhr.

The US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau also argued that Germany’s industrial capacity should be smashed after the war so that they could never dream of another world war.

Germany should be divided into four or five parts! Germany’s steel production should be limited to 3 million tons! 1,500 major factories should be destroyed! All kinds of radical statements came out.

The Soviet Union was the one who benefited from this.

If they left only 3 million tons of Germany’s steel industry, which produced 25 million tons a year, and took everything else? They could increase their own steel production, which was already scarce, by 20 million tons.

“This… they’re taking this…”

“Damn it! We should have fought to the end!”

Steel, chemical, mechanical, electrical, and many other factories were occupied by the Soviet army. The technicians cursed.

Until they were dragged away by the Soviets, begging for mercy.

The slave laborers who were in the basement of the factory dormitory immediately reported the atrocities they had committed to the liberators, and the technicians ended up being taken away one by one.

“They’re the ones! They’re the ones! They whipped us and made us work all night to maintain production, and the food was…”

“Yeah? Grab them!”

Especially, the chemical industry was not free at all. The heads of chemical companies, including I.G Farben, were arrested by the NKVD as soon as the Soviet army almost occupied the city.

“Karl Krauch? You are arrested for crimes against humanity and slave labor.”

“…I knew this day would come.”

Chemical engineering was a national strategic industry and was under the management and control of the state.

Nevertheless, the businessmen followed the state’s line that provided them with monopolistic profits.

Karl Krauch, the chairman of the board of I.G Farben, who worked as an adviser to Goering’s four-year plan, followed them with a resigned face.

Crimes against humanity, such as involvement in the production of poison gas, including Zyklon B, receiving slave labor from the Nazi regime, gaining huge economic benefits, participating in the war plan of the German Empire, and joining the Nazi SS, a criminal group! His charges were too many to read one by one.

“What is this nonsense! This is all the work of the Soviet Union!”

“Are they trying to destroy the industrial capacity of this country! Cowardly bastards. You guys are all shot… Ugh!”

Some made meaningless resistance, but soon they had to taste the fists of the NKVD agents. No matter how much the Soviet intention was to dismantle the German economy, they were not innocent of the crimes.

***

‘Most of them were not convicted in real history…’

Transporting materials to the Far East, transporting criminals from Germany and tearing down industrial facilities, the Kremlin seemed busier after the war than before.

I.G Farben, or rather, a kind of cartel group, was deeply involved in various war crimes. But to confront the Soviet Union, the United States and the rest of the allies released them and dismantled the cartel.

The economic dismantling of West Germany, which was composed of the occupation zones of the allies, was eventually nullified to raise West Germany as a vanguard against the Eastern bloc.

Rather, with the Marshall Plan, the United States pumped massive aid, revived its old enemy economically, and even allowed rearmament. In 1955, West Germany was allowed to rearm and joined NATO.

The Soviet Union established the Warsaw Pact as a means to counter this, but the Warsaw Pact was no match for NATO in terms of economic power or population size.

But this time it was different. France, which was supposed to be a core member of NATO, was holding its first general election of the Fourth Republic under the leadership of the Communist Party. The ‘West Germany’ occupied by the allies did not exist, and the Soviet Union took Germany entirely.

“Let’s tear Germany into three pieces, excluding Austria, as planned.”

“Yes, the U.S. Secretary of State Hull approved the German partition plan.”

“Additionally… we’ll give Alsace-Lorraine and Saarland to France, Sudetenland to Czechoslovakia, Oder-Neisse east and East Prussia to Poland…”

The Soviet Union and the United States agreed on one thing for sure.

They tear Germany apart. From the state to the industrial capacity and territory. Germany’s future could not escape what the U.S. and the Soviet Union agreed on.

“Limit the steel production to 3 million tons. The automobile industry scale to 10% of the pre-war level. This is all we take… and if the U.S. wants some, let them have it.”

“The U.S. is so interested in the atomic bomb that they will give us everything we ask for.”

“Really? Then let’s act like we can give them one more if they say they enriched nuclear material.”

Germany would now be an agricultural country. Before the war, Germany mainly exported heavy industrial products, but the U.S. and the Soviet Union had no intention of leaving them alone. Coal, coke, leather products and beer, wine and other beverages, and textiles?

They limited the secondary industry to light industry, produced light industrial products that the Soviet Union needed, exported them at a cheap price, and imported heavy industrial products produced by the Soviet Union at a high price. It was literally a subcontracting factory that was our German plan.

The chronic problem that always shook the Eastern bloc in real history was the lack of consumer goods and food. By incorporating France, the best agricultural country in Europe, into the socialist bloc, they solved the food problem, and made Germany, an industrial country, a light industrial production base by boosting the heavy industry.

In addition, by dividing China into two and making the People’s Republic of China an agricultural production base and a light industrial product production base, they could solve the Soviet’s chronic problem of heavy industry bias.

“Ah! But there was a problem with the U.S. here.”

“Hmm? What is it?”

Molotov handed out a report as if he had just remembered. The title was written in large letters on the report.

“<Kriegsmarine Reparation Ship Handling Agreement>? Huh…”

He picked up the report and read it hastily, and it seemed that what had not risen for a while might suddenly stand up.

The German navy had fortunately not lost their battleships until the end and blocked the U.S., but eventually they lost to us.

The battleships they preserved were handed over to the Soviet army without sinking like at Scapa Flow.

Of course, we deliberately did not attack them because we wanted to swallow them.

The U.S. coveted this fleet and drooled, claiming their share.

Renaming the battleship Bismarck to ‘Leningrad’ or Tirpitz to ‘Moscow’ and making everything Soviet was a tempting choice.

But… but… the romance of men was always the big ship and the big gun, but the era was the era of aircraft carriers. I knew that fact too well, so I had to make a decision.

“Battleships… you can give them all… but bring the submarines and aircraft carriers… and bring the technicians from Germany here.”

“Ah… yes, Comrade Secretary General.”

Molotov hesitated as he saw me looking gloomy, but soon bowed his head. Ah, battleships…

“Anyway, battleships are literally something to have or to throw away, so just give them to the U.S. as a gesture. German, French, Italian, just all of them!”

“Is… is that so?”

They were monsters that required thousands of people and ate up maintenance costs, but they were inevitably weak against aircraft carriers.

If there were nuclear weapons, missiles, and aircraft carriers, why would they need battleships!

It was just because they were cool.

“But be sure to bring the carriers and submarines. Got it?”

“Yes! Comrade Secretary General!”

With the minimum deterrence, they developed carriers and maintained naval and air force bases across Eurasia to create a spatial barrier between the U.S. and us. It would be much better to go quietly than to provoke a competition with the U.S. if we increased our armaments.

In Europe, places like Brest in France, Hamburg in Germany, Norway.

In Asia, places like Jeju Island or Hokkaido, Tonkin Bay in Vietnam, where they set up submarine bases and developed SSBNs, they could have at least some deterrence.

We should not be complacent with the power we have now and get along well with the U.S.

There is still a lot to eat.