The German War (29 page)

Participating in this crusade profoundly changed Albring’s sensibilities. A new phase in his war began in late August when he watched as a German unit executed partisans near a small watermill. They were led up, one by one, shot in the back of the neck and kicked into a ditch. While a Russian shovelled calcium chloride over one body, the next was already being led forward. Albring got close enough to see the exit wound in the head. ‘It is a hard but just end,’ he explained to Eugen, with a shadow of self-justificatory doubt: ‘if you know what led up to it and however much one may dispute the method, which,’ he added with a cultivated shrug, ‘bears the
signa temporis’,
the ‘sign of the times’. Albring was just as fascinated as the Germans who had watched similar executions in Poland in 1939. ‘You have to see everything, in order to know everything and to reckon with everything,’ he wrote. He did not question the justice or racial politics of the actions, nor did he wonder who these people were. What fascinated him was something else, the mystery – and power – involved in snuffing out life: ‘What is that which we hang on to and which is snuffed out and gone in a fraction of a second?’
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In the vanguard of Army Group Centre, Fritz Farnbacher witnessed another kind of war. On 20 July, the alarm came through at 2 a.m. and he took charge of an artillery battery, providing covering fire for the infantrymen ahead of him. As day broke, it became clear that it had been a false alarm. ‘You could get annoyed about something like this,’ he noted in his diary; ‘but I do understand the riflemen well.’ Regularly targeted by ‘pinpoint accurate’ mortar fire, ‘the men are gradually becoming more jumpy’. A lieutenant on the staff of the 103rd Tank Artillery Regiment, the 26-year-old Farnbacher had simply done what he had been trained to do. Both the artillery and infantrymen were part of the elite 4th Panzer Division, and had just captured the small Belorussian town of Cherikov. As the sun rose on a glorious summer’s day, the young pietist remembered it was Sunday and sang the 36th Psalm to himself: ‘Your loving kindness, O Lord, extends to the heavens, / Your faithfulness reaches to the skies.’
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Intermittent fighting began again and Farnbacher’s battery lost its telephone line to headquarters. Jumping into a despatch rider’s sidecar, Farnbacher reported to Major Hoffmann at the regimental command post. They were interrupted by the arrival of a group of Red Army deserters, all clutching leaflets dropped by the Luftwaffe promising them good treatment. One was said to be a commissar and a Jew. ‘It’s decided to shoot the Jew. According to higher orders, commissars are to be shot,’ Farnbacher jotted down.
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With his reputation for bravery and wearing his Knight’s Cross, Major Hoffmann cut quite a figure. He decided to interrogate the man to discover where all the other commissars in Cherikov had hidden, and had a messenger fetch his ‘Jew-comforter’ – a stout stick, decorated with various runes and Soviet stars. Forced to stand by with the rest of the staff, Farnbacher fixed his eyes on the the red star nailed to the stick, watching as it became covered in blood while the major beat the prisoner over the head. Eventually, Hoffmann had the Jew led away to where five German soldiers had been freshly buried. At each grave, the major beat the prisoner again with his stick, before finally sending him off to be shot. For Farnbacher, it was a ‘most unpleasant’ way to end his Sunday.
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Farnbacher’s distaste at the example set by a highly decorated superior officer was moral and religious. But he was not absolutely opposed to it. On 2 July, after they had held the bridge over the Berezina, Farnbacher and his best friend in the regiment went to see where their battle dead lay. An infantry staff sergeant told them how the wounded had been butchered by the Soviets in a ‘bestial manner’, stabbed with bayonets and their skulls smashed in. ‘One really may not show false leniency there,’ Farnbacher concluded. He did not add in his diary that his regiment executed a hundred ‘irregulars’ in retaliation. Six weeks later, Farnbacher was astonished by the bitter Soviet defence of a village, the enemy refusing to come out of their bunkers, trenches and foxholes even after the fighting had ended. Some who did raise their hands in surrender threw hand grenades between the feet of their captors. ‘You can well comprehend if the squaddies simply bump off the next Russians they catch,’ Farnbacher reasoned. While some of the men shot the Russians who would not surrender, others set every house in the village ablaze.
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As one unit after another adapted to this kind of war, German soldiers chronicled in letters and diaries the new norms they learned on the eastern front: for mutilated German dead, no prisoners were taken; for snipers, reprisals of a hundred to one; gallows erected in every village. As Hans Albring tried to describe to his friend Eugen Altrogge what he witnessed, he helplessly sought some points of artistic and religious reference:

Just to be alive still seems like a gift of God and I don’t just want to give thanks with words if we survive this man- and life-eating ogre Russia with all our limbs and senses intact. The sight of bestially mutilated corpses which wear the same uniform as you cuts into your whole mental map of where you are. But also the staring faces of the hanged. The pits full of the shot – pictures darker than the darkest of Goya – oh, Eugen, you can never forget it, even if you want to. And in such proximity it takes away our sense of being carefree and . . . gives us something instead of the harried creature, of the pitiful, impoverished man. Our path here is strewn with some kind of self-portraits, whether they have lost their lives or are still living, you find yourself in them. It is just like those who sit by the path in the Gospels, plagued by this and that, until the Saviour comes. I have not yet found a poem that encompasses what is happening here – much must remain forever unsaid, saved up for the hour when it is handed down to people without mediation.

Nothing had prepared him for this. By January 1942, Albring would write about the Jews as ‘these people who are doomed to die’. He was close enough to the Army’s Security Divisions, German police and SS
Einsatzgruppen
to have had other opportunities to witness the mass executions being conducted in the rear of Army Group Centre’s advance, but he mentioned just one further incident to Eugen. On 21 March 1942, by now serving in the front line, he would note that ‘[t]he corpses which used to be thrown without order on to a heap have been sorted out as well as possible and lime has already been scattered over the half a thousand Jews who were shot’. As if anticipating Eugen’s shock at this cursory reference, he added hastily, ‘This isn’t the place to go into detail about what happened here.’ Hans Albring would not write about these mass executions again. His path to self-censorship took over nine months of campaigning.
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But there was no typical learning curve. Wilhelm Moldenhauer, a radio operator with Army Group South, was also not predisposed to think well of the Jews. The owner of a successful general store in a village outside Hanover, Moldenhauer seemed to be just another comfortable member of the provincial middle class who had joined the storm troopers in 1937 and went on subscribing to his local paper on the eastern front. His political views showed in his choice of anti-Semitic phrases. Like Helmut Paulus, his campaign had begun in Romania, where he had watched with satisfaction the embarkation of Romanian Jews at the port of Constanta. On entering Ukraine, he typically attributed the poverty and oppression he encountered to Jewish and Bolshevik rule: ‘here’, he wrote home, ‘the functionaries and Jews did a lot of work with their propaganda’. Yet, as his radio truck criss-crossed places where Jews were massacred in the late summer and autumn of 1941, Moldenhauer soon stopped referring in his letters to what he saw. He had a more personal reason for silence than Hans Albring: Wilhelm was descended from converted Jews on his mother’s side of the family. Whereas he had eagerly photographed the ‘camerashy’ Jews he encountered in Poland and Romania, now he turned his Leica to charting his travelogue across the empty steppes.
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In contrast to these men, there were many ‘execution tourists’ in the Wehrmacht, snapping away at the public hangings of Jews and partisans. The reserve policeman Hermann Gieschen, a shopkeeper in Bremen in his civilian life, realised that his battalion would face a difficult task, imagining that it would be ‘a bit like in Poland’. He managed to buy a cine-projector in Riga, hoping that the film of his battalion’s tour of duty in Latvia and Russia would ‘later become a document and be of great interest for our children’. On 7 August 1941, he wrote to his wife, Hanna, about the actions of his unit: the previous night, ‘150 Jews from this place were shot, men, women and children, all bumped off. The Jews are being completely exterminated.’ He quickly added, ‘Please don’t think about it, that’s how it has to be. And don’t tell R. about it, leave it for later!’ Not yet telling their son about such ‘actions’ became a characteristic refrain in the letters that followed.
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As his unit followed the advance of Army Group North on Leningrad, Gieschen left the bustling towns of Latvia for the forests of northern Russia, ‘not a maintained forest, but primeval forests, [full of] undergrowth, thickets, disordered, untended and terrifying’. Remembering a family acquaintance in Hamburg with communist leanings, he wrote, ‘Tell Z., he should come and look at Russia. Anyone who still has a grain of communism in his soul will be cured of it here, utterly.’ They marched ten Russian prisoners ahead of them to take the brunt of any mines along the forest trails, but the middle-aged reserve policemen found the going exhausting. It was easier to search villages for partisans – even though Gieschen quickly learned that it was rare to catch them there. In fact, they could only locate the partisans by using informers.

To make them talk, they tied their prisoners to poles and left them standing without food or water all night just outside the company cookhouse. One prisoner, whose eye had been shot out in the firefight with the German patrol, succumbed to the torture and led the police company to the village harbouring partisans. But the German captain was too incompetent to surround it fully and Hermann watched as a dozen partisans legged it to the relative safety of the forest. After entering the village, the German policemen began to nail up posters announcing that they had come not as conquerors but as liberators: ‘He who plunders will be shot’ seemed to reassure the villagers and one woman began to cook a large pot of eggs for the whole company, while others brought out flasks of milk and pickled cucumbers. Despite the reassuring placards, the captain went through the houses, helping himself to a box gramophone – ‘I’ve been looking for one of them for ages’ – and making off with a bolt of cloth. Hermann Gieschen worried that this crass contrast with the promise on the posters cast their leadership in a poor light, but he was still proud of their mission and assumed that they would go on being welcomed as liberators because ‘the people were so intimidated and exploited by the Communists and Jews and commissars that they are happy to be rid of the scoundrels and really do see us as their liberators’.
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Soon after crossing into Russia, Gieschen had reported that a ‘gun-woman’ had been handed over to them, ‘a person of twenty, dark and forbidding, in uniform and high boots . . . Dreadful that women give way to such things.’ He was fairly confident, he wrote home, that his comrades would shoot her: one of them, a former hairdresser, had become ‘an expert in killing’. They kept a photo of the woman. As a communist perversion of natural female domesticity, women in the Red Army seemed to epitomise the cruel, untamed woman of the Steppes and fascinated Germans. As early as July, the newsreel panned rows of Russian prisoners to pick out a Russian woman huddled on the ground, ‘a Bolshevik gun-woman in uniform’, as the voice-over emphasised. It was she, rather than any of the other prisoners, even those whose ‘Asiatic’ features had been singled out, whom German cinema audiences discussed animatedly afterwards. The common verdict was that ‘such types should not be allowed to live’.
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Hermann Gieschen was not a cruel or sadistic man. In fact, he was rather squeamish and managed to avoid witnessing an execution for the first four months of his campaign, even though he passed on to Hanna details he learned from his comrades. Aware of his own shortcomings, he wrote admiringly to his wife about one of the men who played the ‘revolver-toting hero’ by shooting three civilians in front of the whole company. When he finally watched an execution, he was struck by how the victims stood, tall and unbending like trees. ‘It was all very quick,’ he wrote. ‘We watched the show and then went back to work, as if nothing had happened,’ he wrote, adding a customary justification: ‘Partisans are enemies and blackguards and must vanish.’ Four weeks later, he had acclimatised enough to photograph the execution of eight partisans.
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Men like Gieschen who wrote with approval about the murder of the Jews, quoting Nazi slogans in their family letters, appear to have constituted a small minority. Studies of German soldiers’ letters have found that mention of Jews was either absent or peripheral, with Jewish ghettos, forced labour and confiscation of property mentioned only in passing. In his letters home, Helmut Paulus did not mention such events at all. The only reference to Jews in over 1,000 surviving letters sent by Helmut to his cultivated medical family in Pforzheim came during the first week of the campaign, when he noted that his regiment had set up headquarters in a Jewish cemetery on 28 June 1941. His subsequent silence seems too complete to be casual.
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Such silence did not prevent knowledge of what was going on in the east seeping back to Germany. Instead, it marked out the moral limits of what husbands should tell wives; or if, like Hermann Gieschen, they did tell them, then what wives were meant to keep from the children. Such familial censorship worked differently from the relatively light-touch military censorship, which sampled divisional mailbags, occasionally blacking out passages of letters and sending in monthly reports on military morale, all of which helped commanders to issue moral guidelines on what their men should tell those on the home front. Still, news leaked back via men on leave, gossip, and film sent home for processing. Soldiers, officers, even police officials travelling across Germany, often talked rather frankly to strangers they met on trains. That summer, a description of mass shootings even found its way into a volume of soldiers’ letters published by the Propaganda Ministry.
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