The story of the contraceptives is instructive not just because it shows how obsessive Hitler and Bormann could be about such a matter of detail, but also because it demonstrates the power of Hitler’s underlying racist belief. From his perspective, part of the reason for Operation Barbarossa was, indeed, to stop the Slavs ‘breeding like vermin’.
For Aleksey Bris the tension inside him caused by the way the Germans were treating the Ukrainians – beatings and hangings in his local town were commonplace – finally burst out in dramatic fashion on 12 September 1942. It was a bright autumn day, and Bris was standing idly in a street near the centre of Horokhiv, watching as townspeople queued to buy the belongings of Jews whom the Germans had killed – pots and pans and other kitchenware. But it wasn’t this fact that prompted Bris to action. (When pressed on why he seemed so relaxed about both the Germans and the Ukrainian townspeople profiting from the murder of the local Jews, he replied: ‘I don’t think they thought much about what they were buying – they just thought about the chance of buying anything.’) One of the locals tried to jump the queue and was beaten with a cane by one of the German soldiers supervising the sale. Something snapped inside Bris as he saw this fellow Ukrainian being whipped, and he grabbed the German policeman by the collar. ‘How could you allow him to hit this person?’ Bris shouted to members of the German administration who stood nearby.
The Germans stared in shock. Who was this ‘inferior’ who had dared lay his hand upon a member of the master race? Then a member of the German administration recovered himself and screamed ‘Raus!’ (‘Get out!’) at Bris, who stayed still – he didn’t know what to do. The German shouted again and then hit Bris with his own cane. And that was the moment Bris’s life changed. He fought back. ‘I had this kind of chivalrous knight idea . . . I felt on the edge of mental collapse . . . at that moment I wasn’t afraid of the Germans. When you are hit like that, the emotions come first and you don’t think about the consequences.’ Bris darted forward, grabbed the cane from the German and pushed him over. Then he kicked him on the head. Another member of the German administration standing nearby made a grab for his pistol. As he fumbled to undo the straps on his holster, Bris started to run.
Meleti Semenyuk was among the townspeople who witnessed Bris’s actions that day: ‘I felt that he was a hero, especially because I knew that he used to work for the Germans.’ As he watched the German policeman beat the queue-jumper, Semenyuk too was ready to react against them. ‘I hated all of them. But Bris was the first man to act.’
The Germans mounted a massive search for Bris. They went straight to the house where he lived with his relatives and beat them severely before taking them to a concentration camp. They posted leaflets around the town offering a reward of 10,000 Reichsmarks for his capture. But Bris had escaped to the forest. Having once worked for the Germans, he was now determined to fight against them.
Bris’s own personal history mirrors the experience of thousands of other disillusioned Ukrainians, though few began their resistance to the Germans in such a dramatic way. And since this link between the cruelty of the German civilian administration and the creation of a resistance movement seems clear, the result has been that men like Koch – as the physical embodiment of Hitler’s sentiments – have become convenient scapegoats. Artillery officer Rüdiger von Reichert noticed that the ‘friendly attitude’ of the local population changed only ‘when the effects of the civilian administration, which followed after the military administration, were felt. Naturally word got round very rapidly that in general they would behave as members of a master race and treat everyone like slaves and exploit them.’ Former Panzer officer Walter Schaefer-Kehnert agrees: ‘We came for them as a kind of liberator,’ he says, ‘liberating them from the Bolshevistic community system. My personal opinion is that the Nazis were too stupid to exploit that. You see, we could really have come as liberators but their [the Nazis’] idea that they were second-class human beings was ridiculous . . . The Russians and the Ukrainians, they were people like we were ourselves, with a great feeling for human dignity.’
Many other German soldiers expressed a similar view, claiming that the maltreatment of the civilian population in the occupied territories was the responsibility of Nazi administrators such as Koch. As a result, they exonerated the German Army from blame. But that’s not what actually happened – for not all of the Ukraine was in the hands of Koch. Whilst the majority of it was in his Reichskomissariat, Galicia and Volhynia in the west were incorporated into the General Government under his fellow Nazi administrator Hans Frank, and the territory nearest the front line, including the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkov, came under the jurisdiction of the German military authorities. And that city’s population suffered more under the German military administration than Bris’s home town of Horokhiv did under Koch’s rule.
The military rulers of Kharkov were responsible, in the winter of 1942–3, for a famine in which thousands died (the precise number who died in the German occupation of Kharkov will probably never be known – one estimate is about 100,000). Whilst the Army requisitioned huge quantities of food for themselves, the vast majority of the population received nothing to eat at all from the Germans. The soldiers watched as the weakest members of the population – most often women, children and the elderly – simply starved to death.
‘They didn’t pay much attention to people dying,’ says Inna Gavrilchenko, talking of the attitude of the German military administrators. ‘They took it easy. I don’t think they were shocked.’ Inna, a teenaged girl during the occupation, witnessed how the townspeople tried to survive: ‘First they killed dogs and ate them. But the dogs didn’t last long. So they ate rats, pigeons, crows.’ When the animals ran out, the most desperate started to eat human flesh. ‘There were some people who excavated fresh graves to get the bodies. And they boiled them and cooked them in all possible ways. They made meat jelly out of bones and ate some cakes with human flesh.’
The German military administration didn’t just give the non-working inhabitants nothing to eat, they also sealed Kharkov as a security measure, preventing the townspeople from being able to barter for food with the local farmers. As a result, Inna’s beloved father died of starvation in front of her. Almost delirious with hunger herself, she sat talking to his body for eight days in their flat before a neighbour came and helped prepare the body for burial: ‘For a very long time I had a fear that they buried him alive. Sometimes [sitting with her father when he was dead] I heard sighs. Maybe it was just gases in his body as a result of decay . . . I don’t know.’
Inna believed she too was going to die of starvation. But she was lucky. A neighbour who worked in a German canteen used to take the water in which she had washed the Germans’ dirty dishes, boil it up and make her drink it – there were occasional remnants of food floating in it. Inna also worked for a short time as an errand-girl in a German meat factory in the town. Sometimes the Germans who worked there would give her a scrap of bone or a bottle of blood: ‘With blood,’ she says, ‘you can make an omelette . . . just like you make scrambled eggs, but without the eggs.’
When a blood omelette wasn’t possible, she ate what she could find in the nearby woods within the city limits: ‘Have you ever tried the bark of a birch tree? . . . It is sweetish. And you can try the leaves and young twigs of jasmine. There are a lot of edible things that you hate to think of today.’
Heartbreaking as Inna Gavrilchenko’s story is, there are even worse examples of the suffering the German Army brought to Kharkov – and many of them relate to the maltreatment of children. Anatoly Reva was only six years old when the Germans arrived. His torment began when some prisoners of war were temporarily held behind his family house. Anatoly’s father, seeing their suffering, threw food over the fence to them. The Germans shouted at him to stop, but he didn’t hear, so they shot him dead. As a result of the shock, the little boy’s mother lost her sight and was taken for treatment to a hospital that Anatoly could not
find. So in March 1942, without any relations to care for him, he found himself alone.
He began to beg in the streets. But since as a child he was what the Germans called an unnützer Esser (useless eater), his prospects were bleak. Then his fortune seemed to change. One day he was befriended by a woman who took him to an orphanage in Kharkov. He slept that night on a bed of hay and the next morning awoke and waited for some breakfast – but the orphanage had no food that day or the next. The children were fed on scraps just twice a week. So, to survive, they had to run into the forest and scavenge. ‘I was so hungry that I was eating nuts,’ says Reva, ‘and these nuts were poisonous, but I had to eat them because my stomach required some kind of food. Other children ate grass or leaves.’
Children in the orphanage regularly died of hunger, most often at night. But starvation was not the only cause of death in that institution. From time to time German soldiers came, looking for anyone who was circumcised, anyone who was Jewish. Once, Anatoly watched as a Jewish boy was discovered and taken away to be shot.
The selection of these Jewish children would almost certainly have been done by the SS or other security forces. But for the most part the town was home to ‘ordinary’ soldiers of the German Army. Once, Anatoly approached a group of these men and, his desperation overcoming his fear, begged for some food. One of them said, ‘Hold on a minute’ and reappeared moments later with a ‘bag full of excrement’. ‘They didn’t have any kind of human feelings,’ says Anatoly. ‘They didn’t feel sorry for children.’
It was administrators from the German Army, not Nazis like Koch, who presided over this nightmare world and orchestrated the famine. But the guilt and responsibility of the German Army for the savage way in which civilians were treated during the war in the East does not stop there. Academic researchers, studying the detailed records of individual Wehrmacht units in the East, have shown in recent years that, especially in the rear areas, the committing of atrocities against the civilian population was widespread. And the evidence against the Wehrmacht is not contained just in documents – it comes from the testimony of surviving German soldiers themselves.
Walter Schaefer-Kehnert’s Panzer group participated in the burning down of Soviet villages as part of the German scorched earth policy in the wake of their repositioning after the Battle of Moscow: ‘You see, the soldiers disliked it utterly. They said better to have a real battle than to burn the houses of the civilian population, so we were very reluctant to do so.’ When asked what happened to the people whose houses he burnt, he said: ‘Well, they had to look somewhere else, going to the next village or wherever they could.’ But surely the next village might have been burnt as well? ‘Sure,’ he replied, ‘but you were busy enough looking after yourself. . . .’
Wolfgang Horn of the 10th Panzer Division personally ordered the burning down of a Russian village in a reprisal action. Crucial to his ability to deny women and children shelter was his overall belief about the sort of people he was fighting. ‘One divided Europe into three areas,’ he says, ‘Europe A, B and C. So Russia was Europe C – the lowest standard of all. England or Germany or France were Europe A and Poland maybe Europe B.’ He didn’t think the Russians were ‘as civilized as we are . . . They were not accustomed to normal behaviour, like coming in on time and doing one’s work efficiently, as we were in Germany.’ All this meant that to burn down a Russian village was of no great consequence to him. ‘Burning down a civilized house’ would have been very different. As he saw it, a Russian house was primitive and not of much value.
Adolf Buchner served in an SS unit on the Eastern Front, near Leningrad, and he too witnessed the consequences of Hitler’s desire to fight a war of annihilation. Under the guise of suspecting particular villages of sheltering ‘partisans’, Buchner’s unit would set fire to wooden houses with flame-throwers and then shoot anyone who emerged. ‘These were defenceless people and perhaps they could have been gathered together and brought to a camp and given a chance to survive, but this was sheer brutality, totally stubborn. Anything that moved – bang! There were children among them too. There were no scruples, everybody was a target.’ Adolf Buchner denies shooting women and children himself, but he does admit shooting at the men who emerged from the burning houses. ‘What can you do? . . . It feels like being hypnotized, you cannot really describe it.’ The brutality of the German soldiers even extended to shooting stray children. ‘The child has to be fed, so they’d sooner simply get rid of it. Put it in a ditch and the matter was over and done with.’ Once, when a school was being stormed, Buchner said to his comrades, ‘Don’t you feel sorry for the children?’ ‘Why?’ came the reply. ‘A child might also be holding a weapon.’
Still troubling Adolf Buchner today is the knowledge that some of his German comrades enjoyed the killing: ‘Was there any need, for example, to shoot the children in front of the women and then shoot the women after that? That happened too. That is sadism. There were officers like that, they liked sadistic things, they liked it when the mothers were screaming or children were screaming – they were really hot for that. In my view these people are not human . . . to see a child crying “Mummy” or “Daddy” . . . a human being capable of thought who is capable of doing such things, I cannot get it into my head that such things exist, but they do.’
Adolf Buchner is clear about the extent of German participation in the atrocities in the east. ‘Virtually all units were involved . . . It did not matter whether it was Wehrmacht or SS, both of them.’
The last of these witnesses who bear testimony to atrocities committed by the German Army is Albert Schneider, who was a mechanic in the 201st Assault Gun Battalion. He told us how, as his unit passed through a Russian village, a comrade of his stole a pig from one of the peasants. The owner of the pig objected and started to wail in protest. So his comrade drew his pistol and shot him. ‘I was unable to say anything about it,’ says Schneider. ‘Perhaps I was too much of a coward. I’m not all that brave.’
Not only did Schneider witness the aftermath of atrocities committed by individual Wehrmacht soldiers (on top of a heap of corpses in one village he saw the body of a woman with a German bayonet thrust into her vagina), but his unit, under instructions from its commander, systematically perpetrated a war crime. Staying overnight in a remote Russian village, his unit garaged some of their vehicles in a barn. During the night one of the engines blew up. Next morning, the officer commanding his unit ordered all the men from the village – some as young as 12 – to be gathered together. Then they were told to run away from the German soldiers, and as they scattered they were shot in the back. This all took place ‘without any investigation at all as to what had actually happened’, says Schneider. ‘Why, it might have been that the engines overheated because they were Maybach engines which tend to overheat very quickly.’ The officer who ordered this terrible reprisal should not be thought of today as unique. At the time he would have felt his actions were justified by the special powers, for use only in the East, given to him by the German Army (see here). (General Halder had asked for a provision to be inserted in the infamous Barbarossa Directive of May 1941 that allowed a commanding officer to order the burning of villages and the killing of some of the inhabitants if he believed they were supporting Soviet partisans.)15
Having witnessed theft and mass murder, Albert Schneider also admits that rape was commonplace. Many Wehrmacht soldiers still say today that sexual molestation of the local women was out of the question – not least because these women were, the German soldiers were repeatedly told, members of an ‘inferior’ race and such an action would have been judged a ‘race crime’ and severely punished. But that was not Schneider’s experience. He saw one of his comrades take a Russian woman into a barn and heard the woman scream as she was raped. After it was over his comrade boasted, ‘Well, I showed that one!’
‘But that was not an isolated incident,’ says Schneider. ‘There were several cases in this village in particular when women were actua
lly raped . . . it was well known throughout the ranks that things like this were going on. And nobody said a word about it. . . . I once asked a sergeant why nothing was being done about it. And he said: “Because half the army would have to face trial!” In my opinion that says it all.’
The mass of the civilian population of the occupied areas could therefore be violated and oppressed by any combination of German agencies – the Army, the SS, the Einsatzgruppen (see Chapter Eight) and the civilian administration under fanatical racists like Koch. All of them are responsible both for the escalation of the suffering of the civilian population and for helping to create greater resistance to the German occupation.
On the Soviet side, Stalin had called for a partisan movement to rise and fight against the Germans as early in the war as 3 July 1941. In a speech made that day he announced: ‘Conditions must be made unbearable for the enemy and his collaborators – they must be pursued and annihilated wherever they are.’
Hitler’s response to Stalin’s call is instructive. ‘This partisan war in turn has its advantages,’ Hitler said. ‘It gives us a chance to eliminate anyone who turns against us.’16 This meant, of course, that the suffering of the occupied population could only increase. Since neither Hitler nor Stalin was held in check by moral considerations, neither were the forces they controlled – such as the Soviet partisans or the German forces who tried to track them down. In most guerrilla wars, such as that in Vietnam, one side (in that case the Americans) is trying to preserve the status quo. In this partisan war neither side wanted to keep the status quo – the Germans wanted to reorder the occupied areas to create their new, racially inspired empire, and the Soviet partisans wanted not just to disrupt the Germans but to impose their will on the local population as well. Part of the role of these partisans was to root out ‘collaborators’ and remind the indigenous population that Stalinist terror could still operate even in German-occupied territory.
The Nazis- a Warning From History Page 21