The German War (33 page)

No matter how much the war’s brutality disturbed him, Jarausch could not disown the German cause. On 14 November he wrote to Charlotte, telling her that they had found a fresh case of cannibalism. Of the 2,000 prisoners in the cement factory, 25 were dying each day. For the civilians, ‘above all the Jews’ who had nothing but their shirts to wear in the frost, ‘then it is really the most merciful thing, if they are led into the forest and done in there, according to the technical term’. He confessed that ‘you could be thrown into doubt about the sense of the whole thing, if you didn’t hear continually from the Russians what they suffered under Bolshevism’. It might, Jarausch admitted to his wife, be ‘more murder than war’, but, then, he just had to do his ‘bit of duty’.
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From Orel, Fritz Farnbacher and the 4th Panzer Division headed towards Tula, the key to Moscow’s southern defences, which the Wehrmacht had to overcome in order to encircle the capital. In the autumn weeks, the Soviets had fortified in depth the direct approach to Moscow along the western highway. Beyond the two existing Mozhaisk defensive lines, a triple ring of trenches had been dug in front of the city, with bunkers and strongpoints, each protected by minefields, making a frontal assault no longer viable. In any case, the Germans had no intention of launching a direct assault: here, too, the High Command planned for a final battle of encirclement. Operating from the northern and southern wings of Army Group Centre, the panzer groups would envelop Moscow, meeting at a junction east of the capital and hopefully trapping inside the remnants of the Red Army and the Soviet leadership.

With its population of 272,000, Tula, 150 kilometres south of Moscow, was an old armaments centre that lay in the middle of the Moscow lignite fields. Unless the Germans could take over the city’s railway junction and the airfield, Guderian could not risk sending his forces further east to surround Moscow: his 2nd Panzer Group may have just been upgraded to a Panzer Army but its lines were already extended and vulnerable. Entrusted with spearheading the assault on the Soviet capital from the south, Guderian struck a typically bravura note with his officers: ‘Tula? Short, hard battles – long trip – blond girl’.
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But the 2nd Panzer Army and its constituent parts, such as the 24th Panzer Corps and the 4th Panzer Division, were not the same units as had taken Orel without interrupting their line of march. Fritz Farnbacher saw his first snow on the night of 6–7 October. It turned to rain and the unsealed roads, baked hard by the summer, turned into a quagmire – ‘a liquid, bottomless swamp, black pastry mixed by thousands and thousands of boots, wheels, caterpillars’, as the Soviet journalist Vasily Grossman described it. Across Army Group Centre’s entire 500-kilometre front line, tanks and artillery pieces, trucks, half-tracks and horse-drawn carts were all sinking into the mire. By 15 October, the staff of Army Group Centre were registering that ‘the psychologically critical moment of the campaign has arrived’. In one week, the 6th Panzer Division had gone from 200 tanks to 60 operational vehicles. The 20th Panzer Division was down from 283 machines two weeks earlier to 43 semi-wrecks; and the 4th Panzer Division possessed a mere 38 tanks. It took a week to get the 4th Panzer Division under way, its commander warning that ‘the uninterrupted efforts and hard battles . . . have not passed over the officers and men without leaving a trace’ and that any attack would only ‘succeed with heavy and bloody losses’, if at all. It was more than the weather that slowed down the German advance. Since the beginning of October, the Luftwaffe had hardly been sighted, while the Red Air Force struck ever more effectively against the nearly stationary German targets. The closer the Germans came to Moscow, the stronger the Soviet defence became. Still, on 29 October the 4th Panzer Division advanced to within 4 kilometres of Tula, before getting stuck once more in the mud of the highway. The Wehrmacht’s confidential report for the next day recounted how units from the 4th Panzer Division and the Grossdeutschland regiment entered a wood south of Tula, where they fought on foot against Soviet tanks.
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In 1812, Napoleon’s Grande Armée had lost most of its men and horses not in its disastrous winter retreat, but earlier, during their victorious summer advance. So too in 1941, the Germans suffered the greatest number of casualties while advancing, losing 41,048 men in the last week of June, 172,214 in July, 196,592 in August and 141,144 in September. It was even worse in the German panzer divisions. By the end of July, the 35th Panzer Regiment, the armoured core of the 4th Panzer Division, retained only 49 of its original complement of 177 tanks. Guderian had to ask Hitler personally to send spare parts for his 2nd Panzer Group. The motorised infantrymen who fought on foot, scattered in the open between the tanks in any attack, were particularly exposed: by August their numbers were down by 50–70 per cent.
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The speed of the German advance became self-defeating. As the supply lines grew longer, the quartermaster-generals were confronted with impossible choices. The Germans did not possess enough rolling stock and locomotives to supply the eastern front. They had captured so few undamaged Soviet broad-gauge wagons and locomotives that they had to invest more heavily than they had expected in converting lines to standard-gauge rails, a slow business which grew in scale with the German advance. Moving goods from their depots along the railway also proved increasingly difficult, thanks to the loss of motor vehicles and horses. By mid-November, 425,000 of the 500,000 vehicles with which the German Army had begun the campaign had broken down and there were too few repair facilities to fix them. Horses, which provided most of the draught power, began to fall ill and die in their tens of thousands. The main highway from Smolensk to Moscow was a dual carriageway for most of its length, but the retreating Red Army had laid multiple landmines on long-running timers. Each day, craters 30 metres wide and 10 metres deep were torn in the road. The situation became so bad that much of the 5th Infantry Division was turned over to mending the road instead of being sent to France to recuperate.
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As the temperature dropped at the end of autumn, the Wehrmacht recovered some mobility over the frozen ground. But the cold brought new problems. When the snows came in mid-November, only half the men in the 4th Panzer Division had greatcoats, and only a third possessed woollen blankets. More men were now being invalided out with frostbite and other illnesses than with wounds, though both numbers were rising. In late July and early August, orders for winter equipment had been issued, but only for the fifty-eight divisions slated to stay and occupy the Soviet Union after the German victory. In the desperate juggling of transport priorities on the rails and roads, most of the winter clothing remained stockpiled at the railheads in Poland. Even postal deliveries, regarded as a vital to morale, were held back, as Army Group Centre concentrated on supplying the front line with munitions and petrol.
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According to the military censors for the 2nd Army, the ‘fighting spirit’ remained ‘unbroken’ and ‘confident’ through most of October, despite the difficult weather. ‘The contents of the letters in the past month was shaped by the great successes of the encirclement battles of Bryansk and Vyaz’ma and the advance on Moscow. Each man sees the end of the campaign against the Bolsheviks within touching distance and with it the longed for return to the Reich’, they reported. In fact, according to a smaller, in-depth survey of the letters of twenty-five correspondents, expectations of imminent victory were higher in October than they had been in June, July and August. In this month, even adversity appeared to confirm that victory was in the offing: one man complained about the poor food, but noted that supplies were always bad when ‘something major is under way’.
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In Army Group South things were much worse. As Helmut Paulus wrote to his parents the day after they reached Stalino in the Donetsk region, ‘Our feet have had it from the 2,000 kilometres which we have covered since July. You can’t stand for five minutes without getting pain in the feet and calf muscles. It’s not just like that for me but all comrades.’ Without any fat for his boots, he could not stop the leather from cracking and the stitching from coming apart. To cover the 500 kilometres from Dnepropetrovsk to Stalino, they had sometimes marched for twenty hours, struggling through the mud and darkness. On 17 October, the 17th Army and Kleist’s redesignated Panzer Army reached the river Mius, taking Taganrog, but the rains and mud halted them there. By early November the Paulus family in Pforzheim reported hopeful rumours that troops who had fought since the start of the campaign would be rotated away from the front and exchanged with those who had been in France. Helmut replied that soldiers’ conversations always revolved around ‘food, post, leave. Everyone is dreaming day and night of leave.’ He promised to eat only pretzels and Danish pastries, and on no account any Russian ‘black bread’, when he got leave. But he knew too that, as an unmarried man, his own chances of leave were nil.
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At the other end of the eastern front, Albert Joos and his comrades were entrenched near the coastline of the Gulf of Finland. A farmer’s son who had left school at 13, Joos had begun his diary when he was called up on 28 August 1939. He wanted to chronicle his war ‘as a brave person [ready] to give and do everything for the beloved homeland’. After the rigours of agricultural labour, he had coped well with basic training, welcoming the way that the Reich Labour Service and the army had liberated him from the closed and authoritarian world of the village fathers. Almost as soon as Joos had joined Army Group North in mid-October 1941, he had witnessed ‘two commissars’ being hanged for having blown up a transport train. They stood on the back of a car, the nooses were slung around their necks and the car pulled away. ‘What most shocked me’, Joos noted, ‘was the behaviour of the children, who not only played around the hanged men, but actually went up to them. So, that’s Russia.’
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After this introduction to the eastern front, Joos’s company was sent to take over shallow trenches from an exhausted East Prussian regiment, 20 kilometres west of Strelna. Here they were to shield the German heavy artillery so it could bombard the Soviet naval base at Kronstadt. For three days and nights, Joos and his comrades dug themselves into the hard ground, excavating 60 cubic metres of soil to construct a trench. ‘Like herrings’, they squeezed inside, fitted it with four bunk beds, built in their own stove, and even found a small glass door to block out the wind. The nearby woodland was full of snipers and Joos’s close friend was shot through the mouth and killed. Amid heavy artillery fire and repeated Soviet infantry attacks, the company kept moving, but each time it was harder to dig in and they had to break up the ‘stone-hard, frozen ground with hand-grenades’.
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Meanwhile, the road to Moscow remained shut. A frontal assault on Tula was driven back after bitter fighting. The 4th Panzer Division was left with only twenty-five tanks and insufficient transport vehicles. Without protective emplacements and with little or no shelter, the ranks of both officers and men were thinning fast through illness. ‘To save German blood’, the 2nd Panzer Army instructed its divisions to use Soviet prisoners to clear the minefields surrounding the city. Its dwindling stock of heavy weaponry meant that the division’s own casualty numbers rose sharply too. Geyr von Schweppenburg, the commander of the 24th Panzer Corps, had to tell Guderian ‘that the capacity of the troops and materiel is exhausted’. The official war diary of the 2nd Panzer Army went even further, reporting the first doubts amongst the troops: ‘The troops are exhausted, emaciated from the cold and effort. They want to know finally now what is supposed to happen.’
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On 1 November, Fritz Farnbacher had been shocked by the sight of a badly wounded Russian lying on the edge of the highway, writhing in wordless agony. ‘No one has any time for him; as an enemy, it is terrible to be wounded!’ the young lieutenant had concluded. On 20 November it was his closest friend, Peter Siegert, who was hit. Back in the summer, the two had become inseparable. Now, as he sat cradling his dying friend, he could think of nothing but their mothers: ‘Everything was empty, everything around me so pointless.’ At 2 p.m. Siegert died and Farnbacher felt that ‘a piece of [himself]’ was left behind too – just like in Uhland’s song, ‘Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden’.
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Having failed to capture Tula, the 4th Panzer Division occupied the lignite mining town of Stalinogorsk to the south-east. The divisional command treated the local civilians with hatred and contempt, dubbing them the ‘nastiest workers’ nest encountered in the Soviet Union’. For the first time, the division took over the functions of an occupying force. The troops no longer differentiated between Red Army units cut off from retreat, untrained local militiamen, civilians and partisans. They quickly came to rely on ‘police methods’ to secure intelligence, and adopted the tactics of the ‘dirty war’ of denunciations, interrogations and beatings. A foreman was found to be training the population in shooting and fieldcraft. Another man was discovered with explosives: he had been tasked with blowing up the mine; his wife and son were said to be accomplices. As in Kiev, the Germans did not distinguish between workers who wanted to collaborate in order to survive and dangerous ‘Reds’.
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Robert R. was ordered to torch the village of Mikhailovka in reprisal for the shooting of four German soldiers. ‘The whole village?’ he had asked his superior. ‘Why?’ came the sardonic reply. ‘Is it large? Then it’s worth the effort at least.’ As his unit’s personnel carrier reached the machine-tractor station outside the village, Robert had to set up a machine gun before the women and children obeyed the order to leave. They walked into the freezing gloom with no possessions. ‘I shouted without feeling and felt like weeping,’ Robert noted in his diary, but he avoided executing anyone. Dismissing his machine-gunner, he told the villagers in his broken Russian to report on any further partisan activity or risk even greater reprisals. Thanking him for sparing their lives, they watched the flames springing into the night sky as another German detachment set the village itself alight.
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