The Germans forced them along the dusty road for eight hours as they walked nearly 30 kilometres to the next village. The terror was constant: ‘Our mouths were dry and because of our tears we couldn’t see the road.’ But they were lucky. On this stretch of road there were no mines. At the end of this ordeal they owed their lives to another piece of good fortune. The Germans were about to kill them, but the locals protested vehemently to the army commander that these were not ‘bandits’ but innocent villagers and their lives were spared.
An insight into the mentality of those German soldiers who had to grapple with the partisan problem is given by Peter von der Groeben, the Operations Officer of Army Group Centre and its most senior staff officer after the Commander-in-Chief. He acknowledges that the partisans ‘were conducting a highly successful war against our reinforcement troops. On the railways, the roads, everywhere, blowing up the railway lines, destroying roads, attacking columns.’ In addition he ‘assumes’ that, since his soldiers were angry when they saw German columns attacked and mutilated, then ‘if they captured a partisan village, I am quite convinced that their behaviour wasn’t very gentle. I assume they more or less killed everybody they came across there.’
Confirmation of this behaviour comes from Carlheinz Behnke, a soldier with the 4th SS-Police Panzergrenadier Division. His section came upon some 20 or so German soldiers from his own unit who had been left behind wounded, and who had since been murdered and mutilated by Soviet forces ‘in the most bestial manner – their ears had been cut off, their eyes had been gouged out and their genitals had been cut off’. The commander of his detachment gave the order that any civilians still present in the area were to be shot as a reprisal, ‘without any consideration being given to the women or even the children’. Behnke thought this order ‘logical and correct’, and he himself participated in the subsequent killing of civilians. A sleigh was crossing the ice about 400 metres away from him and he, along with his fellow soldiers, fired at it and saw the three occupants topple over. ‘I don’t know whether they were children, women . . . obviously you look at these things differently nowadays . . . but it was a moment which is impossible to describe and nobody who didn’t witness it can understand it, I think.’
Behnke admits that his unit became incensed and vented their anger in indiscriminate murder. Only after 24 hours, their blood lust sated, did they regain some control. Their wild emotional state, which Behnke, in common with Peter von der Groeben, sees as some kind of justification for the subsequent committing of atrocities, is in fact the reverse – an example of how units of the German Army lost their discipline and permitted themselves to behave like crazed bandits.28
We traced a revealing report read and initialled by Peter von der Groeben in his capacity as Operations Officer (Ia) of Army Group Centre about the German anti-partisan Operation Otto. It lists around 2000 ‘partisans’ and their ‘helpers’ killed, but it details only 30 rifles and a handful of other weapons recovered from them. This extraordinary disparity, even today, does not surprise him. ‘Look, the partisans must have had the necessary weapons – otherwise they could not have done anything to us,’ he argues. And in response to the argument that this might be evidence that German troops were killing indiscriminately, he replies: ‘I can’t remember. As I said, the troops’ fury was immense. Well, I would imagine that they also killed some innocent people. But who could tell who was innocent?’ When pressed, he would only accept: ‘Well, if the counter-actions themselves did go over the top, I think they were regarded as unpleasant but necessary counter-measures which were, of course, also meant to be a deterrent.’29
Similar discrepancies between the number of ‘partisans’ killed and the number of weapons recovered occurred in the SS statistics for their own anti-partisan operations. When Himmler was asked why this was happening he replied: ‘You appear not to know that these bandits destroy their weapons to play the innocent and so avoid death.’ Not surprisingly, these harsh measures did not eradicate the partisan problem. The German Army High Command conceded in 1943 that they had not been able to rid the occupied territories of these ‘bandits’.
It is simplistic to state that the Nazis’ racism was the only cause of the cruelty of the partisan war. Other factors clearly contributed to the escalation of the brutality, not least the vast area that the Germans had to control, the despair felt by many German soldiers that the war as a whole was not going in a way that favoured them, and the ruthless way in which Stalin’s partisans could terrorize the locals and murder and mutilate captured German soldiers. But it is true to say that to stand a chance of eliminating the partisan threat, the Germans needed the cooperation of the indigenous population, and it was Nazi racist beliefs that made such assistance impossible.
It’s easy to argue that this failure was simply another of Hitler’s tactical mistakes. ‘If only he had been more flexible,’ the argument goes, ‘and treated the inhabitants of the occupied territories with the basic respect due to all human beings, then the partisan war would not have escalated as it did.’ But even to suggest this possibility is to misunderstand the nature of the whole war in the East. Hitler could never have moderated his policy towards the occupied territories. These racist beliefs were at the core of his being. They were almost how he defined himself. There were no circumstances in which Hitler would give up his vision of the new German Empire. Indeed, as the war progressed, far from doubting these central convictions, he became reconfirmed in his view that he was right. If the policy of treating the people of the East as ‘sub-humans’ was failing, then it was always the fault of other people around him – these ‘vain, cowardly wretches’ – who were not pursuing the policy of persecution with sufficient zeal.
Against the background of the growing partisan threat, Hitler set about trying, once more, to win the war on the battlefield. Now the Germans would advance south-east in a campaign that would be decided at a place then little known outside the Soviet Union – a city called Stalingrad.
7
THE TIDE TURNS
1942 WAS A year of transformation on the Eastern Front. At the start of it the Red Army was grappling with the Germans at the gates of Moscow. By the end of it the mighty German 6th Army was on its knees at Stalingrad.
It is easy, then, to characterize this as the year when the Soviets made the Germans pay for the arrogance of the original Barbarossa plan; to see this 12-month period as the time when a combination of the vast reserves of population from that the Red Army could draw, military aid from Britain and the USA, and the tanks and artillery from Soviet factories that had been dismantled in the face of the German advance and reconstructed far behind the front line, resulted in an inevitable change of fortune for Stalin and the Soviet Union. In short, it is easy to regard 1942 as the year when, day by inexorable day, the inevitability of a Soviet victory became obvious to the world.
But to judge that year in such a way would be a mistake. Instead, what the history of 1942 demonstrates is that, despite all the foreign help, all the manpower at their disposal, all the output of their factories, the Soviet Union could still have lost the war against the Germans. Both Stalin and the Red Army had to change the way they conducted the fight – and in the process, they had to learn from the enemy.
The Red Army performed badly in the first months of 1942 after the Battle of Moscow, and Stalin was the man most responsible. On 5 January he announced to the Stavka (the Soviet High Command) a plan almost as overambitious and contemptuous of the enemy as Hitler’s original Barbarossa plan had been. Instead of concentrating the resources of the Red Army on one point of attack, Stalin proposed that they should advance on all fronts. In the north they would push to relieve Leningrad, in front of Moscow they would attack Army Group Centre, and in the south they would confront the Germans in the Ukraine and the Crimea. In 1941 Stalin had demonstrated his military incompetence when it came to defence; now, at the start of 1942, he was showing his weakness as a commander in attack. Zhukov spotted the plan�
��s flaws and said so. Nikolai Voznesensky, the economist, pointed out the grave logistical problems that would result from such an overarching campaign, but was ridiculed as a man who ‘only ever mentioned problems’. Against such protests the Soviet offensive began.
Not surprisingly, the Red Army made little progress as it attempted simultaneously to take on the Germans on all fronts, but at least there were no disastrous defeats. However, all that was to change when Stalin ordered a new offensive in the south, around the Ukrainian city of Kharkov, to begin in May 1942. The General Staff view was that the Red Army should be much less ambitious and consolidate its position around Moscow. But Stalin wanted action. ‘Don’t let us sit down in defence,’ he stated baldly as he endorsed Marshal Timoshenko’s plan for a major campaign. (Timoshenko, the offensive’s main proponent and a comrade of Stalin’s from the civil war, had previously seen his army encircled in 1941 by the Germans at Smolensk.)
Boris Vitman was an officer in the Soviet 6th Army and took part in the ill-fated Kharkov offensive of May 1942. At headquarters he saw that ‘those who were planning the operation were certain that it would be completed successfully and the mood was very cheerful . . . the idea was that by 1943 the war would be finished.’ Vitman noticed that the offensive was ambitiously called ‘The campaign for the complete and final liberation of the Ukraine against the Nazi invaders’.
Stalin believed that the Germans’ major campaign that year would be mounted in front of Moscow, and the Kharkov plan was based on that assumption. By attacking in the south, the Red Army hoped to disrupt the German preparations further north and strike the enemy at their weakest point. Unfortunately for the Soviets, their assessment of the German intention was wrong. The Germans were indeed planning a major offensive – but not on the Moscow axis. Instead they intended to attack through the Ukraine towards the south-east of the Soviet Union. Thus the Red Army unwittingly attacked the Germans at the very place where they were preparing their own build-up. But even so, the Red Army still had superiority in numbers against the Germans for the forth-coming offensive – at least three Red Army soldiers to every two German ones, with the ratio even more favourable to the Soviets at the concentrated points of attack.
‘On 12 May 1942, early in the morning, large numbers of artillery were lined up – so long that you couldn’t see an end to them,’ says Boris Vitman, who took part in the initial advance. ‘The morning was misty, the sky was overcast, and this was good because it prevented German planes from seeing our divisions. All of a sudden you could hear a terrible noise. The earth was shaking. All the cannons opened fire simultaneously and this cannonade went on for more than an hour. Then when the cannonade stopped, the order came, “Go ahead!” and we advanced. Seeing such big power, such superiority, we were so inspired, we were going ahead thinking that victory was in our hands.’
Such optimism was misplaced. Anticipating an attack, the Germans had withdrawn and the mighty Soviet artillery barrage had been worthless. ‘When we reached the German line, we saw that the defences were empty,’ says Boris Vitman. ‘There was not a single German dead body. There were only destroyed mock cannons. It was all a simulation of the German defence line, which in fact had been abandoned long ago. And we went on and on without meeting any resistance. We kept marching and marching. We did not give much thought to the fact that there were no Germans around. We thought we were marching towards Berlin.’
But, as Vitman and his men were about to discover, they had been lured into a German trap. ‘On the outskirts of Kharkov all of a sudden our attack faced very strong resistance as the Germans had prepared a powerful defensive line. Our attack was choked.’ And then their predicament grew worse. ‘There was the rumour that, as we were advancing, the Germans struck on the flanks and crushed the two armies that were covering our advance, and that the Germans were almost about to encircle us.’
Nine days into the offensive, with the attack stalled, Vitman was ordered to report to the headquarters of the 6th Army about 6 kilometres from the front line, still within the threatened German encirclement: ‘I saw there a lot of panic. They were packing headquarters documents in a great hurry.’
Almost immediately he arrived at headquarters Vitman was told to return to his regiment. On the road back to the front line he passed a convoy of Soviet soldiers going in the other direction. The officer in command told Vitman that his regiment had been cut off by the Germans and that he should join this unit, which was trying to break out. But as they retreated, they were caught in the open and shelled and bombed by the Germans. ‘You could only hide in the old shell holes,’ says Vitman. ‘Actually I always preferred to lie not with my face down, but with my face up so I could see where the bombs were falling. . . . The earth was shaking. There was smoke going up, bits of bodies and uniforms flying into the air, and next to you there were bullets and splinters falling around. You don’t think about anything. What can you think about? When I saw several bombs flying directly on me, I said to the soldier who was lying near me, “Let’s run!” I managed to stand up and run away, but I was hit by the blast. Later, when I came back to see what had happened, all that was left of this other soldier was his bag and his gas mask.’
The Soviet troops became surrounded as the German flanks closed in on them. The panic intensified with each passing hour. Vitman watched as a commissar ripped the red star – the insignia that marked him as a political officer – from his sleeve and then, noticing there was a mark on his uniform showing where the star had been, began desperately rubbing mud over the fabric. When that failed he gave his tunic jacket away to a passing soldier and ran. Vitman saw another soldier throw down his rifle and say, ‘For many years I was like a prisoner in a collective farm, and now it doesn’t matter to me whether I live or not,’ and then run to surrender.
Joachim Stempel fought on the German side at Kharkov. He remembers ‘the astonished eyes of the Russians, who just couldn’t believe what was going on here. They couldn’t believe how much ground we had made up in the rearguard of their advance troops.’ He describes the nights of the battle as ‘unforgettable’: ‘The sight of thousands of Russians, who were trying to escape – a heaving mass of them – trying to reach freedom, shooting at us and being shot back at. Then, with a lot of shouting, trying to find gaps through which they could escape, and then being repulsed by the hail of bullets from our artillery and our guns . . . The most horrifying pictures and impressions were the ones immediately after the attempted break-outs; awful, horrible wounds and many, many dead. I saw people with entire lower jaws just torn away, people with head wounds who were barely conscious but still driven on . . . I had the impression that, at that point, it was every man for himself trying to find a way to get out of the cauldron.’
All around him Boris Vitman heard the moaning of the Soviet wounded, but no one was paying any attention to them. Nearby, in a dugout, the Red Army doctors and nurses lay completely drunk. ‘I pointed my gun at them,’ says Vitman, ‘and said, “Come out and do something!” But they had got drunk because they could see that they wouldn’t be able to help so many wounded.’
Vitman watched with horror as the Germans continued fighting. ‘I thought they were real butchers because they were still firing when there were so many dead. And I realized that they couldn’t take so many people prisoner, so they were trying to destroy as many of us as possible. German tanks began to approach, as well as armoured vehicles. At that moment our captain turned up. His head was bandaged and had blood on it. He shouted: “Attack!” About 20 people rose up, and I was one of them, even though my machine gun had no ammunition. We followed him, simply to die. Our group came under fire. People were falling down next to me and I kept thinking, well, when will my turn come? Then I saw an explosion, the earth went up, I lost consciousness for a moment, but quickly recovered and knew I was wounded in the leg.’ Vitman looked up and saw a German armoured car about 20 metres away from him. Two soldiers with machine guns got down from the vehicle and walked to
wards him. ‘Russ, komm, komm,’ they shouted. ‘I found it difficult to stand because of my wound,’ says Vitman. ‘One ran towards me, whilst the other aimed his machine gun at my head. When they saw I really couldn’t stand up they pulled me to my feet and threw me into the back of an open truck.’
Vitman was driven to a collection point for the wounded. The able-bodied were imprisoned nearby behind barbed wire and guarded by SS soldiers. He heard an announcement over a loudspeaker: ‘Jews and commissars come forward!’ The commissars were taken away, leaving about ten Jews behind. ‘The Jews were given spades and told to dig a trench. It began to rain. After a while I could only see the tops of their heads. An SS man was hitting them to make them dig faster. When the trench was deep enough, he picked up a Russian machine gun and fired, shooting several salvos into the trench. We could hear them moaning. Then some more SS men turned up and finished them off. They were killed only because they were Jews. This had a shocking effect on me because then I saw what Nazism was. We were told that the Jews and commissars cannot have control over us any more, that the Germans had come to liberate us and soon we’re going home. But I only knew I had to fight the Germans to the very end.’
Even though Boris Vitman had escaped immediate murder, since he was neither a commissar nor a Jew, he was still in great danger. A German doctor arrived and began a selection of the wounded – those still ‘useful’ to the Germans would be allowed to live for the moment, the rest left to die. Next to Vitman was a Soviet soldier who had been shot in the stomach. Knowing the importance of looking as though he had only a minor wound, he was trying to shove his intestines back inside his body. ‘He looked so much at a loss,’ says Vitman, ‘and his eyes were asking: what shall I do with all this?’
The Nazis- a Warning From History Page 23