Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East (41 page)

The problem
, appearing from now on in its full magnitude which must be the constant worry of all responsible departments of the army group commands,…is the daily widening of the
distance between the panzer groups and the [infantry] armies
.

While until now this distance had relatively little effect, the early renewal of the advance by the panzer groups, with an objective over 500 km away, will have the result that 100–200 km long stretches behind the panzer groups are more or less empty of German troops. That these extensive areas are traversed by the panzer troops almost entirely on the road, means that everywhere there are still strong enemy elements roaming and a constant danger exists to the supply and communications of the panzer groups.
¹⁶⁰

It was precisely this paradoxical method of waging war, whereby the front was extended without actually winning the traversed ground, which caught the attention of
Wilhelm Prüller, a non-commissioned officer in a motorised infantry regiment. His diary entry for 3 July summed up, in straightforward terms, the wider dilemma:

The whole war takes place, more or less, on the road. Without securing the land lying to the right and left of the road, we move along and reach the appointed goals. How many Russians must be cruising around the country still! How many enemy tanks are off the road, hidden in protected positions, waiting for the right opportunity to rush up behind the troops and raise hell. Funny the way this war is being
waged.
¹⁶¹

Another soldier,
Udo von Alvensleben, noted: ‘We are advancing without a firm front. The huge area, which the panzers have long since passed through, remains enemy occupied and must be laboriously cleared.’
¹⁶²
It was this rearward danger that
Kuntzen's LVII Panzer Corps was becoming increasingly concerned with, not just because of its limited ability to deal with the problem, but because of the threat an exposed rear posed to its supply. On 3 July the corps reported to Hoth's
Panzer Group 3: ‘In the rear area there are unknown numbers of Russians lurking in the woods, who cannot be captured by the corps with its present manpower, but who pose a serious threat to supply convoys.’
¹⁶³
Indeed the German army was attempting something unique in modern military history – advancing a major element of their supply apparatus
ahead
of the bulk of the army into what was essentially still hostile territory. Inevitably, losses would be heavy.
¹⁶⁴

Clearly, with the next stage of the advance beginning, the warning signs were evident that the panzer and motorised forces, already hard pressed by the preceding days, were about to face a much greater challenge in their race to the Dnepr. The supply columns of the panzer spearheads would be principally threatened; these were in any case struggling to keep pace with demands, especially over the dreadful network of roads.
¹⁶⁵
A report from Panzer Group 3 on 3 July informed Kluge's 4th Panzer Army that the roads and byways used in the advance were becoming even worse the further they travelled east with the result that numerous losses were being suffered in trucks.
¹⁶⁶
On the previous day (2 July) the Quartermaster-General's war diary for
Panzer Group 2 noted that panzer losses were beginning to mount due to the shortage in replacement parts of all kinds.
Furthermore, as a result of the constant advance and the absence of rear-area security troops, the securing of captured foodstuffs and oil was noted to be ‘impossible’ and the subsequent loss of these resources by the plundering of the local population was deemed ‘unavoidable’.
¹⁶⁷
In the town of
Pukhovichi half of the military supplies were pillaged in a single day by the local population. As a German report noted, this amounted to ‘an average per family of 200 kilos of sugar, 200 kilos of fats, almost 350 kilos of grits, and a quantity of fish, individual rations and vegetable oils…The population had not seen such opulence for a long time.’
¹⁶⁸

To
supplement their inadequate supply and sustain their momentum, the panzer groups themselves undertook widespread looting and pillaging among the civil population. The
methodical exploitation of the population had already been incorporated into the pre-war planning for the campaign, with a distinction supposedly to be made between ‘organised’ requisitioning under the orders of an officer and ‘wild’ plundering by the men. In practice, however, the latter was a frequent occurrence, resulting from the many shortages experienced by the army and the common perception, backed by the ideologically driven official declarations, that the Slavic peoples of the Soviet Union were simply ‘sub-humans’ (
Untermenschen
). The pillaging of the Soviet population began from the very beginning of the German invasion. One German general mockingly wrote: ‘Everywhere our people search for draft
horses and take them from the farmers. In the villages scenes of great commotion and despair. In this way the population is being “liberated”.’
¹⁶⁹
A report from the
XXXXVII Panzer Corps in early July pointed out that ‘the wild requisitions of cattle and poultry…from the impoverished inhabitants cause extraordinary bitterness among the villagers’.
¹⁷⁰
Similarly, a later report by the
255th Infantry Division noted that the practice of routine looting ‘embitters the population and practically drives it into the arms of the partisans’.
¹⁷¹
Ernst Kern
, who arrived on the eastern front in the late summer of 1941, reported: ‘Some of our veterans returned back from the village loaded with milk, eggs and fruit; they had “organized” (scrounged) these provisions.’
¹⁷²
The personal diary of a pastor in the
German army recorded what he saw in peasant homes after German soldiers had passed through them.

Now everything in these dwellings is lying topsy-turvy. All cupboards, drawers and chests have been pried open, their contents scattered all over the floor. The locks are knocked out of the doors, which is no doubt not the handiwork of the Russians. I know as a fact that many musical instruments were smashed by our soldiers just out of sheer mischief…the ‘blond beast’ creates the best impression at a distance of ten yards.
¹⁷³

Such ruthless actions and the callous disregard for the civilian population were bound to vilify the German army, underlining again the necessity of a rapid end to large-scale military operations in order to forestall, or at least weaken, the beginnings of a vigorous partisan war spreading throughout the occupied
territories.
¹⁷⁴

Reading
between the lines of the army's daily reports and communiqués, it appears that the confident expectation of a great triumph at Minsk is overshadowed by the undercurrent of intractable difficulties steadily mounting in a campaign far from won.
At the OKH and OKW, however, the great confidence of the pre-war period seemed entirely vindicated and the impending victory over the Soviet
Western Front reinforced a rash optimism oblivious to any looming obstacles. To Halder, it appeared that the main bulk of the Red Army facing Bock and Leeb had been destroyed before the Dnepr–Dvina line, as called for by the operational plan. According to his own calculations, backed by figures from the intelligence department Foreign Armies East, Halder concluded that just 15–20 Soviet infantry divisions and about six armoured divisions remained north of the Pripet marshes.
¹⁷⁵
With Soviet resistance apparently crumbling, Halder brashly wrote on 3 July:

On the whole one can already now say that the objective to destroy the mass of the Russian army in front of the
Dvina and
Dnepr [Rivers] has been accomplished. I do not doubt…that eastwards of the Dvina and Dnepr we would only have to contend with partial enemy forces, not strong enough to hinder realisation of the German operational plan. Thus it is probably not too much to say, when I claim
that the campaign against Russia was won within fourteen days. Naturally it is not yet over. The wide open spaces and the stubborn resistance, conducted with all means, will still claim our efforts for many more weeks to come.

Once we are across the Dvina and Dnepr, it will have less to do with the destruction of enemy forces than with taking from the enemy his centres of production and thereby preventing him from raising a new army from his enormous industrial potential and inexhaustible reserves of
manpower.
¹⁷⁶

Halder's buoyant outlook was also shared at the Wolf's Lair, where
Below later reported: ‘The month of July found most in an optimistic frame of mind at FHQ [Führer Headquarters]. Hitler saw himself confirmed in his judgement. Neither Brauchitsch and
Halder, nor
Keitel and
Jodl had a word to say to the contrary.’
¹⁷⁷
Although Joseph
Goebbels evinced an equally unshaken confidence in the final outcome of the campaign, he at least sounded a more realistic tone in reviewing the demands of the fighting and difficulties that were being encountered. On 2 July he observed: ‘In total the fighting is very hard and bitter…The Red regime has mobilised the people. Plus there is the proverbial stubbornness of the
Russians. Our soldiers have their hands full.’
¹⁷⁸
If Goebbels was closer to the mark than many of those in the High Command he was still a long way off from understanding the men at the front and the looming danger of fighting on into the endless
east. Siegfried Knappe
, a lieutenant in the 9th Army's
87th Infantry Division, recounted the following exchange with Major-General von Studnitz on the march to Minsk.

Figure 5.4 
Attempting to close the widening gap with the motorised divisions, the German infantry were ordered to undertake excruciating forced marches for the first month of the campaign.

‘How do you think the campaign has gone so far?’ he asked. ‘Great,’ I said enthusiastically. ‘Everything seems to be going according to plan.’ He did not respond for a moment, his thoughts seeming to be far away. ‘I was in Russia during the last war,’ he said finally. ‘I have experienced the Russian winter. It is savage, like nothing we have ever experienced. It will come, and it will come soon. We are just in this little part of Russia. We have a vast empty country ahead of us, and if we do not take Moscow before the weather turns bitter cold, I worry about what will happen.’

He was clearly not optimistic. I was amazed,…but I knew he was intelligent, experienced, and capable, and I began to tone down my own optimism after that.
¹⁷⁹

From
the Soviet point of view the next stage of operations had many advantages over the initial border battles. First, the disaster which befell
Pavlov's forces was in considerable part a result of their appalling strategic deployment deep into the
Belostok salient, half encircled by the Germans before the invasion got underway. Second, there could no longer be any question of strategic surprise which played an equally important role in deciding Pavlov's fate, especially with communications so badly disrupted. The encirclement of Pavlov's armies west of Minsk was not, however, the end of the Soviet Western Front as the German generals were inclined to believe. Soviet pre-war planning called for a first strategic echelon, deployed between 20 and 100 kilometres from the border, intended to counter-attack and stop the enemy advance in order to facilitate a general Soviet offensive carried out by a second strategic echelon located well back from the frontier between 100 and 400 kilometres away.
¹⁸⁰
With the first strategic echelon doomed to defeat, Pavlov was ordered back to Moscow and shortly thereafter tried and shot on Stalin's orders.
¹⁸¹
His replacement was the strong-willed Marshal
Semen Timoshenko, who, upon his arrival at Western Front headquarters, promptly undertook the
vital task of defending the Dnepr River line, using all means provided by the second strategic echelon as well as the mobilisation of the civilian population for constructing defensive
works.
¹⁸²