The Third Reich at War (33 page)

One army officer reported on 31 August 1941 from another part of the front:

The population not only in Orscha, but also in Mogilev and other localities, has repeatedly made complaints concerning the taking of their belongings by individual German soldiers, who themselves could have no possible use for such items. I was told, amongst others, by a woman in Orscha, who was in tears of despair, that a German soldier had taken the coat of her three-year-old child whom she was carrying in her arms. She said that her entire dwelling had been burnt; and she would never have thought that German soldiers could be so pitiless as to take the clothes of small children.
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Orders from Army Headquarters threatening punishment for such acts remained a dead letter. In Witebsk troops removed all but eight of the town collective’s 200 cattle, paying for only twelve of them. Huge quantities of supplies were stolen, including a million sheets of plyboard from a local timber yard, and 15 tons of salt from a storehouse. When the weather turned cold, troops began stealing wooden furniture from people’s houses to use as fuel. In the south, Hungarian troops were said to be ‘taking everything that was not nailed down’. The local people referred to them as ‘Austrian Huns’. Scores of thousands of troops were forcibly billeted on townspeople, eating them out of house and home. In desperation, many women turned to prostitution. In some areas the incidence of venereal disease among German troops soon reached a rate of 10 per cent. The establishment of 200 official army brothels for the troops in the east did little to alleviate this situation. Rapes were far from uncommon, though rape was not used as a deliberate policy by the army; yet of the 1.5 million members of the armed forces condemned by court-martial for offences of all kinds, only 5,349 were put on trial for sexual offences, mostly as a result of complaints by the female victims. The courts dealt with this kind of offence leniently, and arrests for looting and theft even fell after 22 June 1941. Clearly the army was turning a blind eye to misbehaviour by the troops in the east, so long as it did not affect morale.
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Theft and rape went alongside wilful acts of destruction. German army units amused themselves in the various palaces that dotted the countryside around St Petersburg by machine-gunning mirrors and ripping silks and brocades from the walls. They took away the bronze statues that adorned the famous fountains of the Peterhof Palace to be melted down, and destroyed the machinery operating the fountains. The houses in which famous Russian cultural figures had lived were deliberately targeted: manuscripts at Tolstoy’s Yasnaya Polyana were burned in the stoves, while the composer Tchaikovsky’s house was trashed and army motorcycles driven over the musical manuscripts that littered the floor.
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From the outset, the military adopted a reprisal policy that was brutal in the extreme. As in Serbia, German army units raided Ukrainian, Belarussian and Russian villages, burning the houses and shooting the inhabitants, in retribution for even the smallest supposed act of sabotage. They had little compunction in destroying what seemed to them to be scarcely habitable dwellings anyway. ‘If one had not seen with one’s own eyes these primitive circumstances among the Russians,’ wrote the soldier Hans-Albert Giese to his mother on 12 July 1941, ‘one could not believe that such a thing still existed . . . Our own cowstalls at home are sometimes like gold in comparison to the best room in the homes in which the Russians choose to live. They are perhaps a worse rabble than the Gypsies.’ A few days later he referred to Russian villagers as ‘bush negroes’.
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Senior army officers were equally contemptuous of the civilian population of Russia, which Manstein, entirely typically, described as a land far from Western civilization. Rundstedt was constantly complaining of the dirt in the quarters he took up in the southern sector of the front. The inhabitants of the Soviet Union seemed bestial, Asiatic, dull and fatalistic, or cunning and without honour, to officers and men of all ranks alike.
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On entering the Soviet Union, Gotthard Heinrici felt he had entered another universe: ‘I believe that one could only do it justice if we did not, as we have here, enter it gradually, on foot, but instead travelled to it as in a sea-voyage to a strange part of the globe and then, as one left our own shores, cut off all internal ties with the things we are used to at home.’
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This was a kind of negative tourism: ‘There will be hardly anyone in this miserable land,’ wrote one soldier from the conquered area, ‘who does not think gladly and often of his Germany and his loved ones at home. Things here are really even worse than in Poland. Nothing but dirt and tremendous poverty rule the roost here, and one simply cannot understand how people can live under such circumstances.’
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It did not matter, therefore, how harshly these miserable, half-human people were treated. Hundreds of civilians were taken as hostages; they were customarily shot when the next act of partisan resistance occurred. ‘We are now experiencing war in its entire tragedy,’ reported Alois Scheuer, a corporal, born in 1909, who belonged to the older generation among the troops, ‘it is humankind’s greatest misfortune, it makes people rough and brutal.’ Only the thought of his wife and children, and his Catholic faith, prevented him from ‘becoming almost without feeling in spirit and soul’.
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German military violence against civilians soon dissipated the support the invaders had initially won from the local population. Partisan resistance prompted further reprisals, leading more to join the partisans, and so the escalating cycle of violence continued. ‘The war is being cruelly fought on both sides,’ confessed Albert Neuhaus in August 1941.
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A few months later, he reported a commonplace incident of a kind that must have happened many times before. ‘In a neighbouring village that we passed through this afternoon, our soldiers had hanged a woman from a tree because she had been stirring up people against the German troops. So we are making short shrift of these people.’
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A keen photographer, Neuhaus thought nothing of taking a snap of an alleged partisan hanging from a tree and sending it back home to his wife.
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Everywhere German troops burned villages to the ground and shot civilians by the thousand.
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The speed of the German advance meant that many Red Army units found themselves cut off; they then continued fighting behind the front, joining with local people to create partisan bands to harry the enemy in the rear. This enraged the German troops, who, just as they had in Poland in 1939, considered this somehow unfair. ‘Lost soldiers,’ reported General Gotthard Heinrici on 23 June 1941, just one day into the invasion, ‘are sitting everywhere in the great forests, in innumerable farmsteads, and often enough shooting from behind. The Russians in general are fighting the war in an insidious manner. Our people have cleared them out several times, without pardon. ’
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‘Our people,’ he wrote on 6 July 1941, ‘beat and shot dead everything that was running around in a brown uniform.’
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On 7 November 1941, Heinrici was forced to tell his interpreter, Lieutenant Beutelsbacher, who had been carrying out executions of real or imagined Soviet guerrilla fighters, ‘he is not to hang partisans up 100 m in front of my window. Not a pretty sight in the morning.’
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Faced with such horrors, Soviet soldiers and civilians began to listen to Stalin’s new, patriotic message and fight back. Encouraged by Stalin, more and more young men took to the woods to form partisan bands, raiding German installations and intensifying the vicious circle of violence and repression. By the end of the year, the overwhelming mass of civilians in the occupied areas had come round to supporting the Soviet regime, encouraged by Stalin’s emphasis on patriotic defence against a ruthless foreign invader.
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Escalating partisan resistance went along with a dramatic recovery of the fighting effectiveness of the Red Army. The cumbersome structure of the Red Army was simplified, creating flexible units that would be able to respond more rapidly to German tactical advances. Soviet commanders were ordered to concentrate their artillery in anti-tank defences where it seemed likely the German panzers would attack. Soviet rethinking continued into 1942 and 1943, but already before the end of 1941 the groundwork had been laid for a more effective response to the continuing German invasion. The State Defence Committee reorganized the mobilization system to make better use of the 14 million reservists created by a universal conscription law in 1938. More than 5 million reservists were quickly mobilized within a few weeks of the German invasion, and more followed. So hasty was this mobilization that most of the new divisions and brigades had nothing more than rifles to fight with. Part of the reason for this was that war production facilities were undergoing a relocation of huge proportions, as factories in the industrial regions of the Ukraine were dismantled and transported to safety east of the Ural mountains. A special relocation council was set up on 24 June and the operation was under way by early July. German reconnaissance aircraft reported what to them were inexplicable massings of railway wagons in the region - no fewer than 8,000 freight cars were employed on the removal of metallurgical facilities from one town in the Donbas to the recently created industrial centre of Magnitogorsk in the Urals, for example. Altogether, 1,360 arms and munitions factories were transferred eastwards between July and November 1941, using one and a half million railway wagons. The man in charge of the complex task of removal, Andrej Kosygin, won a justified reputation as a tirelessly efficient administrator that was to bring him to high office in the Soviet Union after the war. What could not be taken, such as coalmines, power stations, railway locomotive repair shops, and even a hydro-electric dam on the Dnieper river, was sabotaged or destroyed. This scorched-earth policy deprived the invading Germans of resources on which they had been counting. But together with the evacuation, it also meant that the Red Army had to fight the war in the winter of 1941-2 largely with existing equipment, until the new or relocated production centres came on stream.
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Stalin also ordered a series of massive ethnic cleansing operations to remove what he and the Soviet leadership thought of as potential by subversive elements from the theatre of war. More than 390,000 ethnic Germans in the Ukraine were forcibly deported eastwards from September 1941. Altogether there were nearly one and a half million ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union. 15,000 Soviet secret policemen descended upon the Volga to begin the expulsion of the ethnic Germans living there, removing 50,000 of them already by the middle of August 1941. Similar actions took place in the lower Volga, where a large community of German descent was living. In mid-September 1941, expulsions began from the major cities. By the end of 1942, more than 1,200,000 ethnic Germans had been deported to Siberia and other remote areas. Perhaps as many as 175,000 died as a result of police brutality, starvation and disease. Many of them spoke no German, and were German only by virtue of remote ancestry. It made no difference. Other ethnic groups were targeted too - Poles, as we have seen, were deported in large numbers from 1939, and, later in the war, up to half a million Chechens and other minorities in the Caucasus were removed for having allegedly collaborated with the Germans as well. In addition, as the German forces advanced, the Soviet secret police systematically murdered all the political prisoners in the jails that stood in their path. One hit squad arrived at a prison at Luck that had been damaged in a bombing raid, lined up the political prisoners, and machine-gunned up to 4,000 of them. In the western Ukraine and western Belarus alone, some 100,000 prisoners were shot, bayoneted, or killed by hand-grenades being thrown into their cells.
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Whatever their impact on the war effort, such actions stored up a bitter legacy of hatred which was to lead within a very short time to horrific acts of revenge.

II

The Soviet will to resist, expressed in these various ways, operating from top to bottom of the hierarchy, quickly became apparent to the German military leaders, who soon realized that the war was not going to end in a matter of weeks after all. Army Group Centre had managed to encircle huge numbers of Soviet troops, but in the north and south the Red Army had only been driven back, and the German advance was slowing down. Far from melting away, the Red Army was beginning to find ways to bring fresh reserves to the front, and it was starting to mount successful counter-attacks on a local basis. Well before the end of July, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock was forced to deal with repeated counter-attacks by the Soviet forces. The Russians were becoming ‘impudent’, he noted. ‘Victory has not yet been won!’ ‘The Russians are unbelievably tough!!’
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‘Day by day,’ one ordinary soldier wrote in a propaganda tract, the troops had to endure ‘the piercing screams of the Bolshevik hordes, who seem to rise from the earth in dense masses’.
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Particularly around Smolensk, on the way from Minsk to Moscow, to the east of the river Dnieper, the Soviet commanders Zhukov and Timoshenko had begun a series of heavy counter-attacks on 10 July 1941 in an attempt to disrupt the advance of General Heinz Guderian’s panzer group towards the city. Poorly equipped, badly co-ordinated and inadequately supplied, the Soviet resistance failed, but it slowed down the German advance and inflicted heavy losses of men and equipment on Guderian’s forces, whose supply lines were now seriously over-extended. Ordinary soldiers shared the view that the Russians were unexpectedly tough.
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The German armies were subjected to constant harassment and repeated attacks. ‘The Russians are very strong & fight with desperation,’ wrote General Gotthard Heinrici to his wife on 20 July 1941. ‘They appear suddenly all over the place, shooting, fall upon columns, individual cars, messengers etc. . . . Our losses are considerable.’
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