Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (16 page)

The main cause for the horrifying numbers of casualties was the German military leadership’s cynical decision to abandon POWs to the fate of
starvation, making little to no effort to provide them with adequate nourishment. German military leaders never ceased reminding common soldiers that they were fighting “an enemy race and culture of inferior nature,” which one was to encounter with a “healthy feeling of hatred.” In this battle, German soldiers were not supposed to show “any bleeding-heart sentiments or mercy.”
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From the onset of the Third Reich’s
war with the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, it was clear that the perennial calls for German soldiers to show steely hardness would have consequences. The Wehrmacht immediately began fighting with unusual
brutality. There were numerous reports of “the bodies of countless [Soviet] soldiers lining the roads, without weapons and with their hands raised, showing unmistakable signs of having been shot in the back of the head.”
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One significant factor in the extreme violence was that German predictions about the terrible
tactics employed by the Red Army were quickly confirmed. From the first day of the war onward, Soviet forces fought in ways violating international law and foreign to Western European custom.

German anecdotes about Soviet brutality stoked the violence already being perpetrated with the power of imagination. A
Lieutenant Leichtfuss reported seeing six German soldiers nailed to a table through their tongues, ten hung up from meat hooks in a slaughterhouse, and twelve to fifteen who were thrown down a well in a small
village and then stoned to death. This leads his conversation partner to ask: “Were those soldiers dead who were hanging on the meat hooks?”

Reports about Russians mistreating German POWs, mutilating German
wounded, and liquidating German soldiers who tried to
surrender continued throughout the war and were too frequent and too well documented to be complete fiction. Today, it is estimated that 90 to 95 percent of German POWs captured in 1941 soon died. Most of them were executed directly at the front.
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The horror stories about German wounded and prisoners being mutilated only encouraged the
German Eastern Army’s willingness to commit acts of unscrupulous violence.

In early July 1941, General
Gotthard Heinrici wrote to his family: “Sometimes there’s no mercy at all anymore. The Russian has behaved bestially toward our wounded. And now our people are clubbing and shooting to death anything in a brown uniform. Both sides are driving each other on so that there are enough corpses to fill whole mausoleums.”
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Similar statements can be found through Wehrmacht files. The daily war report of the
61st Infantry Division, for instance, recorded that on October 7, 1941, the bodies of three Wehrmacht soldiers were discovered, whereupon the division commander ordered ninety-three Russian prisoners shot the following day. Many such atrocities were never registered because soldiers lower down in the chain of command, like
Lieutenant Schmidt, “took care of things” themselves.

The frontline
murder of countless Red Army soldiers was primarily an act of
revenge and
retribution. The character of the fighting in Russia was completely different from that in
Poland,
France, or Yugoslavia. The Red Army put up unexpectedly stiff resistance, and many Soviet soldiers preferred to fight to the death rather than surrender.
Embittered hand-to-hand combat led to heavy losses on all sides and further ratcheted up the violence. Consider the following exchange:

Faller’s stories show once again that
female members of the
Red Army were particularly at risk since women in battle were not part of
German soldiers’
frame of reference. Denigrated as “rifle sluts,” they were denied the status of true combatants and thus regarded as on the same level as partisans. For that reason, they were more likely than male members of the Red Army to become the victims of excessive brutality.
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Along with the determination of individual soldiers to fight to the death, what most angered Germans were the
tactics used by the Red Army.
Soviet soldiers would often pretend to be wounded or
play dead in order to attack from behind—something Germans regarded as a massive violation of the
customs of
warfare. The
Hague Conventions did not explicitly prohibit
deceptions of this kind, but they represented a break with the unwritten rules of open warfare. Before the invasion, manuals written by the German
military leadership predicted that the Red Army would use such tricks, and German troops punished them with extreme brutality. For example, as early as late June 1941, a regiment of the
299th Infantry Division reported: “Prisoners were not taken because troops were so bitter about the dishonest fighting style of the enemy.”

Other tactics that were part of conventional warfare were unfamiliar to Germans and thus interpreted as evidence of the Red Army’s
refusal to fight fairly. They included opening fire from behind, letting the enemy advance before unleashing a barrage at short range, and letting vanguard troops pass by so as to attack them from the rear. A
German soldier named
Hölscher, for instance, passed on a
description of the
Eastern Front he had heard from a friend:

In German soldiers’ eyes, there was nothing criminal about their behavior toward the Red Army, even though it, too, clearly violated
international law. Soviet misbehavior was justification enough for German troops to execute prisoners, and almost no one, it seems, saw any alternatives.

Thus, within the first weeks of Nazi Germany’s campaign against the Soviet Union, new
customs of war that flouted international law were established. The exercise of violence was not static, but rather constantly in flux—depending on structural, personal, and situational conditions. In the fall of 1941, for example, the extreme violence of the summer receded. But no sooner had the Eastern Army been compelled to beat a chaotic retreat in the winter of 1941–42, than they once again began regularly executing
POWs who could not be transported.
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Phases of escalation and de-escalation would continue until the end of the war.

The surveillance protocols contain scattered instances in which soldiers describe refusing to commit
war crimes against prisoners. An SS Second Lieutenant (Untersturmbahnführer) named
Schreiber recounted one such story, including a description of his shock at a prisoner’s
murder:

Significantly, the interlocutor here—
Navy Lieutenant Bunge—expects a different end to Schreiber’s story, one in which the SS man does indeed end up “putting down” the Russian POW. Killings of that sort were common in soldiers’ conversations, and it was far more unaccustomed when they did
not
occur.
Sergeant Grüchtel had a similar tale to tell:

We have no way of knowing whether stories of this kind are true or not, but they occur very rarely in the protocols. This fact should not be mistaken for evidence that
humane treatment of POWs or occupied populations happened any more or less frequently in real life than it did in soldiers’ conversations. It merely documents that
behavior which today would be considered humane played a very minor communicative role among the POWs. Stories relating what we consider inhumane acts, often told in the first person, were much more frequent than ones describing what would be deemed “good” behavior under contemporary norms.

This might be an indication that describing one’s own “good” behavior wasn’t bound to increase one’s popularity. In situations where killing is regarded as both an everyday practice and a social duty, charitable behavior toward Jews, Russian POWs, and other groups deemed
inferior would have represented a violation of the norm. Even after World War II, it took years until stories of that nature elicited greater approval than the sorts of deeds the soldiers usually recounted in the surveillance protocols. Only later did Germans begin to give their recollections other nuances. So the relative infrequency of stories in which German soldiers show pity or
empathy with prisoners, or simply treat them
decently, might be due to the fact that such behavior was
considered antisocial at the time and thus conversationally off-limits. Or perhaps the
frame of reference in which others and their behavior were categorized simply did not admit of a category like empathy. In any case, the fact that stories in which soldiers boast of their own inhumanity rarely elicited any criticism suggests that such stories, and not the humane ones, reflected the normal everyday reality of World War II.

Most Red Army
POWs did survive for a few days after being captured. But their martyrdom began as soon as they began making their way to prisoner of war camps:

Soviet POWs resorting to
cannibalism is a recurring topic in the protocols. A
First Lieutenant Klein, for instance, recounts: “When one of them died the Russians often ate him while he was still warm. That’s a fact.”
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Lieutenant General
Georg Neuffer and Colonel
Hans Reimann recalled a POW
transport in 1941: