The Nazis- a Warning From History

by Laurence Rees

  Sudoplatov also writes that Beria told him the motive for this approach to Stamenov was to give ‘the Soviet government room to manoeuvre and gain time to muster strength’.28 After the fall of Communism he reiterated that ‘the aim of this disinformation was to play for time’. This justification too should be treated with scepticism. For even if this peace approach had been deadly serious, Beria would still have briefed Sudoplatov in this way – it would be the only possible means of denial if news of any negotiations leaked out. ‘Of course,’ Beria would say, ‘this was all part of a massive disinformation campaign . . .’ This also meant that, should the negotiations subsequently be discovered (as they indeed were, and used against Beria at his trial in 1953), there was a chance they might be explained away.

  The Russian historian Dimitri Volkogonov, drawing on previously secret sources for his biography of Stalin, unearthed evidence that also contradicts the idea that the Soviet leadership was, by these actions, merely trying to ‘gain time to muster strength’. He writes that ‘Molotov described the offer of territory in exchange for an end to the fighting as “a possible second Brest-Litovsk Treaty”, and said that if Lenin could have the courage to make such a step, we had the same intention now’.29

  The final significant feature of Sudoplatov’s hitherto secret report is the date of the contact with the Bulgarian Ambassador – late July 1941. This means that the following anecdotal story told by a Russian historian who knew Marshal Zhukov becomes of particular importance. In the 1960s Zhukov was out of favour and Professor Viktor Anfilov befriended him. Zhukov told him how he was called to Stalin’s dacha in early October 1941, at the lowest point of Soviet fortunes: ‘When I was asked in I said, “Good afternoon, Comrade Stalin.” Stalin obviously failed to hear me – he was sitting with his back to me. He continued talking to Beria, who was in his room. And I overheard the following: “. . . get in touch through your agents with the German intelligence service, find out what Germany is going to want from us if we offer to sign a separate peace treaty”.’

  Until recently there was dispute about when this approach to the Bulgarian Ambassador had taken place – July or October. Sudoplatov is clear – it was in late July. Yet Zhukov overheard the conversation between Stalin and Beria in October. Therefore what the confirmation of the date of the original approach to the Bulgarian Ambassador in July now leads to is the new and intriguing possibility that, with Stalin’s authorization, Beria was ordered to pursue peace feelers in both July and October (and maybe in between as well). And if Zhukov honestly and accurately reported what he heard Stalin saying to Beria, this doesn’t sound like ‘disinformation’ but desperation. It’s not surprising, therefore, that after the war the Soviet leadership wanted to pretend that these thoughts were never in their minds – or at least to shove the blame solely on to the shoulders of Beria and Sudoplatov. Just as German generals wanted to rewrite the past once the result of the war was known, so did Stalin and the rest of the Soviet leadership.

  During the first months of the invasion, the Germans, of course, weren’t about to let Stalin make even a humiliating peace – not least because, as a result of their victories, they were accumulating Soviet prisoners by the million. ‘I witnessed the huge, incredibly enormous numbers of prisoners of war,’ says Rüdiger von Reichert, ‘which naturally left a deep impression, and helped to get rid of any scepticism one had had when the war started.’ The sight of these Soviet prisoners also confirmed to Reichert the accuracy of the Nazi stereotype of the ‘sub-human’ Slav: ‘You saw people who you felt were inferior to you in terms of their level of civilization, their spiritual and mental capabilities – I’m ashamed to say this now, for today we see things entirely differently.’

  The fate of these Soviet prisoners of war is one that has not received, in the West, the attention it deserves. Knowledge of the 6 million who died in the Holocaust is, rightly, widespread. But how many in the West know the terrifying statistic that out of a total of 5.7 million Soviet soldiers taken prisoner between June 1941 and February 1945 a staggering 3.3 million died – the majority as a result of disease and starvation?30 The treatment these POWs received was very different from that experienced by captured British or US servicemen. For the Soviet prisoners there was often no food, no shelter, no camp to speak of at all – just an open field enclosed with barbed wire. The experience of Georgy Semenyak, captured by the Germans near Minsk in July 1941, was typical. Once taken prisoner, he and 80,000 of his comrades were herded into a vast open space, guarded by German soldiers with machine guns. For the first week they were given neither food nor water – they could drink only from a muddy stream at the edge of the camp. At the start of the second week the Germans threw a few boxes of food – mostly salted herring – into the crowd of prisoners and then watched as the Soviet prisoners fought for the contents.

  That autumn Semenyak was transferred to an even worse camp in Poland. About 100,000 Soviet prisoners were held in an open space without shelter from the elements. To amuse themselves the German guards would often fire directly into the camp. Lice were everywhere, and as a result there was an epidemic of typhus. A combination of disease, hunger and desperation led to cannibalism amongst the prisoners. During the night bodies were cut open. The buttocks, the liver, the lungs – all were removed, to be fried and then eaten. After beating the odds and surviving all this horror (and without, he says, resorting to cannibalism himself), Semenyak sums up his treatment at the hands of the Germans simply: ‘They just never considered us humans.’

  After the war some German officers claimed that such huge numbers of prisoners had never been anticipated, so the German Army had lacked the necessary means to deal with them. But at the very least, this is disingenuous. Whilst no direct evidence has surfaced that in the planning stages of the war the death of so many prisoners was specifically ordered, there is more than sufficient circumstantial evidence to conclude that such suffering was an obvious consequence of the way the war was conceived.

  During the planning stage of Barbarossa it became clear that the vast distances to the front line and the inadequate Soviet transport system would prevent German troops being adequately supplied from the Reich. By 1941–2 the ‘entire German Army’ would therefore, as a document of 2 May 1941 from the Wehrmacht’s central economic agency states, have to ‘be fed at the expense of Russia’.31 The consequence of this was obvious, as the document records: ‘Thereby tens of millions of men will undoubtedly starve to death if we take away all we need from the country.’

  Another document from the same agency, dated 23 May that year, goes even further in its prediction of the consequences of the German invasion on the Soviet people’s food supply. Entitled ‘Political-Economic Guidelines for the Economic Organization East’, it states that the goal was to use Russian resources not just for feeding the German Army but also for supplying Nazi-controlled Europe.32 As a consequence, 30 million Soviet people in the northern part of the region to be occupied were expected to die of starvation.

  The Wehrmacht leadership must have foreseen that large numbers of Soviet prisoners would be taken – even if they did not anticipate as many as 3 million in the first seven months. But adequate preparations were not taken even for a lower number of captives – hardly surprising given the tone of documents like those quoted above. If, in planning the war, it was possible to assert that perhaps 30 million people would die of starvation as a result of German policy, then why, in parallel, would anyone have been trying actively to save the defeated enemy’s soldiers?

  That summer, whilst the Soviet prisoners of war died in the German camps, Hitler became concerned about the state of his army’s advance. Despite the initial power of the German attack, the Soviet system showed no signs of imminent collapse. And although enormous numbers of prisoners had been taken, the Soviets had been able to call up military reserves – something the Germans had underestimated. In places the Red Army was putting up fierce resistance. Above all there were problems caused by the shee
r scale of the German operation. By the middle of July some Panzer units were over 600 kilometres inside Soviet territory and the view voiced before the campaign that such units could, if necessary, ‘live off the land’ was proving to be a ridiculous fiction. The Soviets had burnt or otherwise destroyed anything that could be of value to the Germans, and supplies from the rear were hampered not only by the distances involved but also by the poor Russian infrastructure (almost all the roads were unmetalled, and what railway track existed was a broader gauge than the German system). In addition, the forward Panzer spearheads had suffered terrible losses. This was only to be expected in Blitzkrieg, where these units bore the brunt of any enemy resistance – Walter Schaefer-Kehnert’s spearhead Panzer unit, for example, lost 50 per cent of its personnel within the first eight weeks of the war. But Blitzkrieg operations were not designed to last for month after month.

  In July and August 1941 there was conflict at the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s Field Headquarters in East Prussia, between the Führer and his generals. The argument was over how to deal with a new strategic problem. The German front was effectively cut in half by the Pripet Marshes, a remote area all but impenetrable to armoured forces. Whilst Army Group Centre, operating north of the marshes, had made spectacular gains, Army Group South, fighting south of this region, had run into tougher resistance. Hitler’s generals still favoured Army Group Centre pushing forward at once to Moscow. Hitler disagreed; not only had he asserted since December 1940 that it was more important to destroy the industrial base of the Soviet Union than to capture its capital, but he was concerned about possible flank attacks on Army Group Centre.

  The atmosphere was not helped when Hitler, suffering from dysentery in the early days of August, vacillated about what the German Army should do next. One day Moscow was going to be the priority, then a few days later he insisted that there were other tasks to fulfil first. On 19 August it appeared to Josef Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister, that Hitler might even be doubting the ability of the German Army to crush the Red Army as planned: ‘The Führer is very annoyed at himself for letting himself be fooled about the potential of the Bolsheviks by reports from the Soviet Union. His underestimation of the enemy’s armoured divisions and Air Force, in particular, has meant an extraordinary amount of trouble for our military operations. He has suffered greatly as a result. It is a serious crisis.’33 On 21 August Hitler made his decision clear: more important than the capture of Moscow was the encirclement of Leningrad in the north and the destruction of Soviet forces in the south, which would eliminate the threat of a flank attack on Army Group Centre.

  Subsequently, this decision has been seen by some as another example of the ignorant corporal crippling the chance of victory created by his generals. But compelling military studies demonstrate that it was Hitler who had the more sound military sense.34 An advance on Moscow in August by Army Group Centre would have been fraught with risk – not least from flanking attack, since considerable Soviet forces were still concentrated south of the Pripet Marshes in the Ukraine. The Germans might have reached Moscow but then been cut off inside the city, as they were later at Stalingrad.

  Hitler’s decision to order Guderian’s Panzer Group south to Kiev in the Ukraine brought about an astonishing victory – one that restored the Führer’s optimism. The Germans took more than 600,000 prisoners at Kiev in the greatest encirclement battle fought in modern times. Whole Soviet armies were caught, some trapped on the eastern bank of the River Dnieper as Kiev fell on 18 September.

  Stalin was responsible for this disaster. Dominating the Stavka, the command body that controlled all Soviet forces, and believing in his own genius despite his almost total ignorance of military strategy, he ordered the Red Army to attempt the impossible and hold Kiev. One of the very few who dared stand up to him was Zhukov. He suggested to Stalin that the Red Army should withdraw in the face of the German advance on Kiev, only to be told by Stalin that he was talking ‘rubbish’. Zhukov asked to be relieved at once of his post as Chief of the General Staff – a proposal that Stalin instantly accepted.

  Nikolay Ponomariev, Stalin’s personal telegraphist, witnessed the Soviet leader’s response to the frantic calls from the Red Army commanders in Kiev. ‘They were saying that they were not strong enough to maintain control over Kiev,’ he says. ‘They asked to be allowed to move the troops away, but Stalin insisted on the opposite – “Hold out as long as you can.”’ Stalin’s intransigence cost the Soviet Army dear – the paucity of his strategic thinking is no better illustrated than by this catastrophe. Stalin’s idea of defence at this time was as simple as Hitler’s was later to become – hold your ground and fight to the last.

  German soldiers were elated. ‘We succeeded, didn’t we!’ says Hubert Menzel, who fought as a German tank officer at Kiev. ‘We did wage encirclement battles across distances which we’d been simply incapable of imagining before.’ Hitler too was euphoric. This was, he believed, the turning point of the war. With the threat from the flanks now clear, Hitler accepted that the German Army should push on towards Moscow, with the Soviet capital the target of the German Operation Typhoon.

  On the Soviet side, in the wake of the dramatic loss of Kiev, there was bewilderment and fear. ‘We simply kept wondering why our Army was surrendering one town after another,’ says Viktor Strazdovski, who was eighteen years old in 1941. ‘It was a real tragedy. It’s difficult to express by words how we lived through that.’ That autumn Strazdovski joined the Red Army and was shocked to see the equipment he was expected to use to defend his country. ‘The 60-millimetre guns that we were given were trophies left from World War I – they didn’t have modern sighting devices. And we only had one rifle between five soldiers.’

  Strazdovski, badly equipped and poorly trained, was about to take part in the Battle of Vyazma – around the town that was the last great obstacle in the way of the German advance on Moscow. At the beginning of October 1941 the 3rd and 4th Panzer Groups linked to form the Vyazma pocket. Five Soviet armies were trapped. ‘We were face to face with the Germans,’ says Strazdovski, ‘and we had to use these primitive weapons in real combat. We didn’t feel confident enough . . . When I was sent to the place where the Germans broke our defence line, you can imagine how we felt – we felt we were doomed. There were four of us, with two rifles between us, and we didn’t know in which direction we would run into the Germans. The woods around us were ablaze. On the one hand we couldn’t disobey our order, but on the other hand we felt doomed.’

  Soviet soldiers tried frantically to break through and escape the German encirclement. ‘I saw one of these attacks coming early in the morning,’ says Walter Schaefer-Kehnert, an officer in the 11th Panzer Division. ‘We were sitting on top of the hills, there was a fog going down to the river valley, and when the fog came up it was like a herd of vehicles and men coming up by the thousand and it made your blood freeze . . . and then the Russians came into the ground where there was a swampy area, and then all the vehicles at once sunk in the mud, and then the people came on to us like a herd of sheep.’ Schaefer-Kehnert shouted to his men, ‘Let them come, let them get nearer, let them come on!’ until they were close enough for the German 2-centimetre anti-aircraft flak cannon and machine guns to mow them down.

  The next day Schaefer-Kehnert looked out over the battlefield at the thousands of Soviet dead and dying lying in front of him: ‘And there were some Russian girls – I will never forget them – in trousers and dressed like soldiers, and they got in a cart, with a horse, and had a barrel of water and then went around giving water to the dying Russian soldiers lying on that field . . . They were lying there by the thousand like the battlefield of old history.’

  Wolfgang Horn was in another Panzer division at Vyazma facing a different section of the encircled Soviet armies. As he looked across at the Red Army through special field glasses, he saw an ‘incredible’ sight. Only the front row of Soviet soldiers rushing towards the Germans had rifles – the row behind was unarmed. �
�As the first row was mowed down,’ says Horn, ‘they [the second row] bent down and took the guns of those who were dead – they were destined to attack without weapons . . . something that was totally unfamiliar to us.’

  That night, as more Soviet troops tried to find a way past the Germans, Horn’s unit spotted several trucks full of Red Army soldiers coming towards them. The Soviet soldiers opened fire. But standing close together in the trucks they made a ‘beautiful target’ for Horn and his comrades, who lobbed hand grenades at them. Horn himself sustained a minor wound, which so angered him that he fought back even more fiercely at the enemy soldiers trapped around their trucks. ‘Then the Russians were so cowardly,’ says Horn, ‘that some of the crew of these trucks cowered behind the vehicle.’ As the Soviet soldiers lay huddled together, their hands and arms covering their heads, Horn shouted, ‘Hands up!’ in Russian at them, and then, when they didn’t immediately respond, he and his comrades opened fire and killed them all. ‘When they don’t surrender,’ he says, ‘we shoot them. It was natural for us to do . . . They are cowards – they didn’t deserve any better, anyhow.’

  Even if Horn had accepted the surrender of these Soviet soldiers that night, they still might not have been saved because the lieutenant commanding his unit decided to order the murder of many of the Soviet prisoners taken. Horn felt this behaviour not just ‘unchivalrous’ but ‘stupid’ because ‘Russians hiding in the forest might have seen the prisoners being shot and so they might fight better the next time’.