The Nazis- a Warning From History

by Laurence Rees

  As Wolfgang Horn and the rest of his unit discovered that winter, even getting frostbite would be to fail this ‘major test of character’: ‘We had to warn each other if a nose was getting white. “Rub your nose otherwise you will be punished!” You see, those who had something frozen were punished for abandoning the Fatherland to some degree – sabotaging the war effort by letting something freeze.’

  This same ruthless desire to enforce the harshest discipline on those who thought of retreat was evident on the Soviet side as well. As an NKVD officer, Vladimir Ogryzko fought alongside rearguard divisions behind the troops in the Battle of Moscow. Their job was simple. If Soviet troops ran past them in retreat, they killed them. ‘The station I was protecting had the right to kill anyone who approached it,’ says Ogryzko. ‘They’re given a chance, when you say, “Stop or I’ll shoot!” And if they don’t stop, then they’re shot . . . There are a certain number of rules in life, especially in the army and even more so in war. There can’t be demagogues. They are traitors, simply traitors. It should be considered as part of people’s education – a traitor should get his come-uppance.’ Ogryzko is still proud of his work: ‘It was a very good decision to take and it shouldn’t be judged. They used fear to crush fear. If it was right or wrong, so what? It was a time of war and there had to be certainty.’

  Just as Hitler’s personality helped shape the nature of the German defence outside Moscow, so Stalin’s helped shape the Red Army’s attack: ‘I have to say that the cruelty and determination and will of Stalin were communicated to the commanders of the front and also reached us, the junior commanders,’ says Fyodor Sverdlov, commander of an infantry company at the Battle of Moscow. ‘Stalin was cruel, but even now I continue to think this cruelty was justified. There couldn’t be any mercy, any pity.’

  During a frank interview, Sverdlov admitted that in pursuit of Stalin’s ‘cruel’ policy he personally shot one of his own men. ‘It happened once during a successful attack. There was one soldier, I don’t know what his name was, but because of his cowardice and because the combat was very severe he broke down, and he began to run, and I killed him without thinking twice. And that was a good lesson to all the rest.’

  Sverdlov also revealed another element that contributed to the brutality of the conflict – he, and the men he commanded, often fought under the influence of alcohol: ‘There’s a Russian saying that a drunken man can cross the sea. Whenever a man gets drowned in the Moskva River, he would always be a drunk. A drunk thinks that everything is easy, and this makes it clear why Russian soldiers were given vodka.’ Every one of his soldiers was issued with 100 grams of vodka a day from the Ministry of Defence – this was known as the ‘Minister’s 100’. But this wasn’t all they drank. ‘You know that Russians are fond of drinking,’ he says, ‘but it was a must during the war. Of course, it was seldom that we drank 100 grams only because as we bore heavy losses every day that amount of vodka was meant to cover a bigger number of people than there actually were. I usually drank 200 grams of vodka at breakfast, 100 grams of vodka at lunch, and if there was no combat in the evening, I would drink another 200 gram glass sharing dinner with a company of friends.’

  Fyodor Sverdlov doesn’t feel that being drunk hampered the fighting ability of the Soviet soldier – quite the contrary: ‘When a person gets drunk, he feels more determined, more courageous. He doesn’t think about being killed in a minute. He marches on, trying to kill the enemy. Being quite frank, I have to say that in the course of the whole war both Germans and Russians were always drunk at decisive moments because a human mind cannot otherwise bear the horrors of the modern war. I don’t know if the British and the Americans drank when they were landing in Normandy, but I bet they drank whisky.’

  By the end of January 1942 the crisis was over for the Germans. The front had stabilized. Hitler believed this accomplishment had been his alone – after all, had he not been the one who had issued the stand-fast order? And, his conceit knowing no bounds, he had by now replaced Brauchitsch as Commander-in-Chief of the German Army with the only man he felt certain had the strength of will to do the job properly – himself. But in reality Stalin and his generals were not yet in a position, in either their tactical thinking or the resources at their disposal, to impose a decisive defeat on the German Army. The eventual outcome of the war was far from certain and, in the meantime, the Nazis had a new empire to rule.

  The way the Germans administered their conquered territories in the East (particularly the biggest of them all, the Ukraine) was to play another decisive part in the escalation of the brutality of this war. Ironically, given what was to happen, at the start of Operation Barbarossa many German soldiers thought the indigenous population of the East could be their allies, not their enemies. ‘During the first few months of the war we were welcomed as liberators,’ says Peter von der Groeben, who was a senior officer with the 86th Infantry Division. ‘Sometimes they would bring you salt and bread [the traditional symbols of welcome and hospitality] because the peasants considered this their liberation from Bolshevism.’ For Rüdiger von Reichert, an artillery officer with the 4th Army, the experience was the same: ‘I experienced it again and again in these first months, that people would bring you something from their garden – we were very hungry for fresh vegetables. Not everybody was delighted, but many of them welcomed us warmly as their liberators.’

  Many of the German soldiers, even those like Carlheinz Behnke who fought in an SS Panzer division, thought that this might turn into a ‘conventional’ occupation: ‘We assumed that once the Ukraine had been occupied it would become an independent state and the soldiers would probably fight on our side against the rest of the Bolshevists. It might have been naive, but that was the general trend and mood amongst us young soldiers.’

  The reason for the warm welcome the German soldiers received as they marched into the Ukraine is not hard to find. The Ukrainians had suffered hugely under rule from Moscow. The famine of the early 1930s – created by Communist policies – had resulted in an estimated 7 million deaths. And just before they retreated in the face of the German advance, the NKVD had murdered thousands of Ukrainian political prisoners. ‘We dreamt about the new Ukrainian state,’ says Aleksey Bris, who lived in the west of the Ukraine. ‘Any war against the Soviet Union was perceived by us as a good war.’

  As an eighteen-year-old student with a gift for languages, Bris started to work for the local German administration as an interpreter. As he sees it, this was not collaboration: ‘I mean, every man is dreaming to have something better. Nobody would like to be a sweeper on the street.’ For him, and for many other Ukrainians, the Germans appeared at first as just another in a long line of conquerors. And ‘under all authorities, regardless of their character, their particular system was accepted as “normal”. For example, if the Chinese had come, we would also have thought of them as “normal” . . . I would have to work for them somehow because I need to eat, I need to live, I need to work, and that’s why we didn’t have this kind of definition as “collaboration” as you have it in the West.’ As Bris saw it, the Ukrainians had ‘no other choice’ but to work with the Germans.

  Aleksey Bris’s decision to assist the Germans was based on the judgement that the Nazis were ‘like any other conqueror’. But they weren’t. Hitler did not believe in a policy of cooperation with the indigenous population of the Eastern territories – in the way the British had ruled India or, indeed, the way the Romans had governed their empire. Whilst the conquered people in the West of the Nazi Empire, like the French or Dutch, could generally be treated less brutally because they were for the most part ‘civilized’, Hitler believed that since the people of the Soviet Union were ‘inferior’, they did not deserve the resources that nature had given them. ‘It’s inconceivable,’ he said, ‘that a higher people [i.e. the Germans] should painfully exist on a soil too narrow for it, whilst amorphous masses, which contribute nothing to civilization, occupy infinite tracts of a soil that is one o
f the richest in the world.’5 Hitler preached that the Germans should be guided by only one natural law in this occupation – the stronger person must do whatever he liked.

  Such a philosophy freed Hitler to dream of a form of conquest that would crush the inhabitants of the occupied Eastern territories for ever; he saw his mission to make them less civilized than even he thought they already were. Their level of education was to be, as he described it, ‘just enough to understand our highway signs so that they won’t get themselves run over by our vehicles’. For all his admiration for the British achievement in India, Hitler looked across the Atlantic to the violent colonization of the American West for a practical lesson in how to deal with the population of the German-occupied territories: ‘There’s only one duty: to Germanize this country by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins.’6

  These extracts, from Hitler’s private dinner-table monologues, carry the stamp of the authentic Führer. But he was not always so forthright, as Alfred Rosenberg, newly appointed Minister of the Eastern Territories, was to discover. Rosenberg met Hitler on 16 July 1941 at the Führer’s headquarters in East Prussia, the Wolf’s Lair, and voiced his view that the nationalist sentiments of the Ukrainians should be encouraged. Hitler did not object. At a later conference Hitler even hinted that the Ukraine might one day be considered independent within the German Empire. But these were simply words to keep the loyal but misguided Rosenberg happy. On 19 September Hitler revealed his true feelings to a more ideologically sympathetic Nazi. Notes survive of a meeting between Hitler and Erich Koch, the Nazi Gauleiter of East Prussia and recently appointed Reich Commissioner for the Ukraine. ‘Both the Führer and the Reichskommissar [Koch] reject an independent Ukraine . . . Besides, hardly anything will be left standing in Kiev [the capital]. The Führer’s inclination to destroy Russia’s large cities as a prerequisite for the permanence of our power in Russia will be further consolidated by the Reichskommissar’s smashing of Ukrainian industry, in order to drive the proletariat back to the land.’7

  What pleasure it must have given Hitler, in a meeting with a Nazi hardliner like Koch, to state that it was his ‘inclination to destroy Russia’s large cities’. Here he could be honest. With Rosenberg, technically Koch’s superior in the Nazi hierarchy, for long periods he was more opaque. Such behaviour seems curious at first, since it was Hitler himself who appointed Rosenberg. But Hitler’s behaviour is explicable, consistent as it is with the methods he generally used to control and manipulate the Nazi state.

  In the first place, Nazi hierarchies were not what they seemed. Koch had a very large degree of autonomy in how he decided to run the Ukraine and he was able to report directly to Hitler, should he wish it, through the automatic access guaranteed by his other position as Gauleiter of East Prussia, so Rosenberg could be bypassed whenever necessary. Second, Hitler was always loyal to those, like Rosenberg, who had stuck by him in the times of ‘struggle’ before the Nazis came to power – and here was a grand-sounding job as a reward for his loyalty. Third, the appointment of Rosenberg allowed Hitler to play off Koch against him if he wanted to. In-fighting amongst leading Nazis preserved the Führer’s role as the final arbiter within the system. Finally, Hitler disliked issuing written orders to the likes of Rosenberg and Koch, so the presence of this conflict between them allowed him ‘deniability’ if anything went catastrophically wrong. As Hitler acknowledged when he spoke to the commanding generals of the German Army Groups in the summer of 1942, he was prepared to say whatever he felt any situation demanded: ‘Were it not for the psychological effect, I would go as far as I could; I would say, “Let’s set up a fully independent Ukraine.” I would say it without blinking and then not do it anyway. That I could do as a politician, but (since I must say it publicly) I can’t tell every [German] soldier just as publicly: “It isn’t true; what I’ve just said is only tactics.”’8

  Inevitably, there was a series of disruptive rows between Rosenberg and Koch about how the Ukraine should be run. Whilst Rosenberg toyed with the idea of treating the Ukraine in a more conventional colonial way, Koch’s attitude is best expressed in his statement to the Nazis on Kiev city administration that ‘we are a master race that must remember, the lowliest German worker is racially and biologically a thousand times more valuable than the population here’.9 Whilst Rosenberg dreamt one day of a university in Kiev, Koch closed the schools saying, ‘Ukrainian children need no schools. What they have to learn will be taught them by their German masters.’10

  ‘You would not believe the kind of confusion there was,’ says Dr Wilhelm Ter-Nedden, who worked in Rosenberg’s ministry in Berlin. ‘The administration melted away.’ Even though Rosenberg was technically his superior, Koch treated him with open contempt. Ter-Nedden attended meetings between the two men and was shocked at what he saw: ‘On these occasions I witnessed Koch tearing Rosenberg off a strip, in such a manner that I would have thrown him out! And Rosenberg put up with it.’ At one lunch Koch ignored Rosenberg completely, only talking to the person next to him, until finally he leaned across the table and said loudly, ‘Is this as boring for you, Rosenberg, as it is for me?’ To Ter-Nedden this was all symptomatic of the same warped political system that had previously allowed Hermann Göring to control the economic destiny of Germany via the Four-Year Plan: ‘When Göring arrived we all had to line up to meet him – and Göring said, roughly, “Of course, I know nothing about economics, but I have an unbridled will!”’

  Koch’s own ‘unbridled will’ was creating a very different Ukraine from the one Aleksey Bris had anticipated: ‘Little by little, between Germans and Ukrainians there was a feeling of separation – an edge.’ To Bris this was summed up one day by a conversation he had with Ernst Erich Haerter, the German commissar of Horokhiv, his local town. Bris said that one day he would like to continue his studies and become a doctor. The German commissar replied, echoing Koch: ‘We don’t need you Ukrainians as doctors or engineers, we need you as people to tend the cows.’ As Bris now saw it, the Germans regarded themselves as ‘gods on the earth’.

  However, Nazi policy towards these occupied territories was never straightforward, and not just because of the inherent tension between functionaries like Rosenberg and Koch. Sometimes it was impossible for Nazi administrators accurately to second-guess just what the Führer’s policy would be on any particular issue, as the saga of the availability of contraceptives to the Ukrainians amply demonstrates.

  In July 1942 Hitler moved from East Prussia to new field headquarters near the town of Vinnitsa in the Ukraine, and stayed there until October of that year. This location allowed his faithful lieutenant, Martin Bormann, to observe the local population in the surrounding villages. He was outraged at what he saw; the Ukrainian children did not look like sub-humans at all. On the contrary, many were blond and blue-eyed. Seeking an explanation of this phenomenon in Nazi evolutionary theory, he concluded that these impressive children were the product of their grim living conditions – as a consequence of the poor housing and sanitation only the strongest children had survived. It was not in the interests of the Reich, as Bormann saw it, to allow the Ukrainians to breed further. Hitler agreed. Only a few months before, in February 1942, Hitler had fumed about the mistakes that previous German colonizers had made: ‘No sooner do we land in a colony than we install children’s crèches, hospitals for the natives. All this fills me with rage . . . The Russians don’t grow old. They scarcely get beyond 50 or 60. What a ridiculous idea to vaccinate them! . . . No vaccination for the Russians and no soap to get the dirt off them. But let them have all the vodka and tobacco they want.’11

  Now, after discussions with Bormann, and notwithstanding his desire to deny the Ukrainians other modern medical care, Hitler accepted that the local population should be encouraged to use contraceptives provided for them by the Nazis. But only weeks before Bormann’s eye-opening trip around the Ukrainian countryside a zealous Nazi official, acting no doubt on what he believed woul
d be Hitler’s wishes, had decided to ban contraceptives in the occupied territories, arguing that since they were evidence of sophisticated medical knowledge, the Führer would wish them to be denied to these ‘natives’. Hitler fumed: ‘If some idiot should actually try and carry out such a prohibition in the occupied East, he [Hitler] would personally shoot him to pieces. In the occupied Eastern territories a brisk trade in contraceptives shall not only be permitted but even encouraged, for one could have no interest in the excessive multiplication of the non-German population.’12

  The day after Hitler had uttered these words, Bormann relayed the Führer’s wish that there be a ‘brisk trade in contraceptives’ in the East to Rosenberg. (Bormann’s memorandum also emphasized that ‘German public health services shall under no circumstances be established in the occupied Eastern territories.’)13 The administrators in Rosenberg’s ministry were outraged, some complaining that the phrase ‘brisk trade in contraceptives’ should not be associated with the Führer. But at least Rosenberg’s ministry was not ordered to carry out these instructions. That fell to Koch, who was only too eager to add these racially inspired measures to his long and vindictive action plan against the Ukrainians.14