The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  But for all the heady optimism of those early days, and despite the collapse of Soviet defenses in most key areas, there were signs even then that the Germans were up against more than they expected. German units quickly discovered that roads and other infrastructure, which may have looked good on their maps, were often virtually nonexistent. And from the very first day, some Soviet soldiers fought back fiercely, refusing to surrender no matter how doomed they were.

  For example, the Germans expected to brush by the fortress at Brest, right across the border, but found themselves bogged down in several days of intense fighting. Soviet troops, along with their wives and children, held out under a steady barrage of German artillery and machine gun fire longer than seemed humanly possible. A few diehards kept fighting from the fort’s tunnels and ramparts for up to a month. “Russians, surrender,” the Germans appealed to them on loudspeakers. “German command guarantees your lives. Moscow has already capitulated.” Ironically, Polish troops had resisted the German invaders at the same fortress in September 1939, when Brest still belonged to Poland. (One of its defenders who survived was this writer’s father.) Later the Germans had handed over Brest to the Red Army, since the city was assigned to the Soviet Union in Hitler and Stalin’s division of the spoils.

  Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, the commander of Army Group Center, who observed the fighting in and around the fortress and then the battles nearby, recorded in his war diary on June 23, only a day into the invasion: “The Russians are defending themselves stubbornly. Women have often been seen in combat. According to statements made by prisoners, political commissars are spurring maximum resistance by reporting that we kill all prisoners! Here and there Russian officers have shot themselves to avoid being captured.”

  As he and the rest of the Soviet diplomats prepared to leave Berlin following the outbreak of hostilities, Valentin Berezhkov met with SS Senior Lieutenant Heineman, who was in charge of the guards around the embassy. Heineman proved to be far less of a committed Nazi than he first appeared, and he quickly informed Berezhkov that top German officials were extremely worried by the determined resistance they were encountering in some areas during the initial fighting, which was leading to heavy German casualties. “Some people in the Imperial Chancellery even wonder whether Germany should have started the war against the Soviet Union in the first place,” he told Berezhkov.

  The SS man, it turned out, was eager to be recruited for money, so he may have been overstating his case. For the most part, the initial successes of the German invaders buoyed the spirits of the Nazi leadership, convincing them that Hitler had been right to make his bold move against his eastern neighbor. But even Goebbels, while claiming in his diary on June 24 that “military developments in the East are excellent beyond all our expectations,” tempered his optimism with grudging respect for his adversaries. In denouncing the “wild atrocity propaganda” of Moscow in response to the invasion, he noted on June 25 that “their propaganda is better than London’s. Here we find ourselves facing a more practiced opponent.” It was a theme he returned to again two days later. “The Bolsheviks are not Englishmen,” he wrote. “They know a thing or two about subversive propaganda.”

  More significantly, his reports about German victories quickly were peppered with admissions that their opponents were often putting up serious resistance. On Friday, June 27, he noted: “The Russians are suffering huge losses in tanks and aircraft. But they are fighting well and have learned a great deal even since Sunday [the day of the invasion].” The next day he added, “The enemy is defending desperately and is also very well led. The situation presents no threat, but we have our hands full.”

  As the Kremlin began gearing up its defense of the Soviet capital, organizing the opolchenie or home guard units that quickly attracted 120,000 recruits following Stalin’s speech, a note of hesitancy began to creep into the thinking of the German leadership about the targeting of Moscow. On July 4, Goebbels reported once again that the situation on the central front was “excellent” and that “the enemy is beginning to wilt.” But he cautioned, “I ban any special emphasis on Moscow from German propaganda. We must beware of fixing the public gaze on this one fascinating goal.”

  Why the hesitancy when German troops were driving east at such speed? General Alfred Jodl, Hitler’s chief of staff, provided at least a partial explanation. “The Führer has an instinctive aversion to treading the same path as Napoleon,” he said. “Moscow gives him a sinister feeling. He fears that there might be a life and death struggle with Bolshevism.”

  But it was precisely that life or death struggle that Hitler triggered when he launched Operation Barbarossa. And there was no doubt that the Germans needed to conquer Moscow in order to have a chance of dealing a mortal blow to the Soviet state. And yet that summer, just when that goal appeared within reach, Hitler hesitated. Moscow’s fate—and ultimately the fate of both totalitarian regimes—hung in the balance, and suddenly the normally bold Führer, much to the dismay of his generals, didn’t seem to know what he wanted to do. His lingering optimism from the first stages of the invasion convinced him that he had enough time to pursue other targets of his eastern campaign first, especially victory in the Ukraine, while his underlying nervousness about Moscow convinced him this was also the safer course.

  This would prove to be a major miscalculation, offering Stalin his first glimmer of hope. It was almost as if each despot was determined to match the other mistake for mistake.

  3

  The Price of Terror

  When Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, Ilya Vinitsky was a student at the Moscow Aviation Institute (MAI) and had just started a job as a summer trainee at a factory on the Volga. Raised in a Jewish family in Kiev, he had trained as a sniper while he was still in high school there. So he was ready—eager—to volunteer for military service when the war broke out. He rushed back to Moscow the very next day. The regional Party committee office assigned him to the First Special Communist Battalion of Moscow, a 307-man unit composed of a few other MAI students along with more experienced engineers and factory foremen, some of whom had gained combat experience in the Spanish Civil War.

  At the first briefing of the new battalion that same evening, three Party officials in civilian clothes arrived and, after telling the military instructor to step outside, informed the volunteers that they were entrusted with a special mission. Many Soviet troops were fleeing the German attackers; the battalion’s job was to stop them, the officials explained. They admitted that in the Baltic region many soldiers had dropped their guns, stripped down to their underwear, and swum across a river to escape; many others were simply waiting to surrender. The task of the new battalion, they continued, was to reimpose discipline and put an end to such behavior. “The Central Committee authorizes you to take whatever measures prove necessary—even executions,” they declared.

  Recalling those words as an octogenarian, Vinitsky found himself fighting back tears. Few memories are as painful to veterans of the Great Patriotic War, the official designation of World War II in Russia, as those of Soviet troops killing their own men. To this day, many veterans have suppressed everything to do with that particular memory—or at least have avoided talking about it. But the practice was started in the earliest period of the war and became frighteningly commonplace. Right from the beginning, Stalin acted on his core conviction, which was evident throughout every period of his reign, that he needed to wage a two-front war: one against the foreign invader and the other against those he and his armies of willing executioners deemed traitors or enemies within.

  The terror of the 1930s morphed quickly into a new wartime terror campaign. And most of those who went to war in 1941 recognized—or soon came to recognize—that it wasn’t only the Germans who threatened their lives; it was also their own comrades, superior officers, and NKVD enforcers. Even the most loyal soldier couldn’t be sure that he wouldn’t run afoul, sometimes unwittingly, of someone from his side on or off the bat
tlefield.

  As a young man who had just donned a uniform, Vinitsky wasn’t put off by the instructions his unit received—quite the contrary. “We were proud we were assigned this special mission,” he recalled. That mission also meant that they were all equipped with rifles and grenades at a time when many other units were given only minimal supplies. And since they were volunteers who hadn’t gone through the mobilization office, their paperwork was different from that of most other recruits. Because of an oversight, they were allowed to keep their internal passports—the identification document all civilians were required to carry with them at all times—instead of turning them in for military ID cards, as almost everyone else was required to do. This bureaucratic slip-up would soon almost cost Vinitsky his life.

  But first, along with his unit, he had to make it to the front. One of their military lecturers had told them about the soil of East Prussia, explaining why it would be difficult to dig trenches there—as if it was really possible that they’d soon find themselves that far west, pushing the Germans back into their own territory. Instead, they boarded a train heading west that made it only as far as Velikiye Luki, a town 280 miles from Moscow. “That was it. There was no Soviet power any further,” Vinitsky recalled.

  The town and everything in it had been abandoned by Soviet troops, although no Germans were there yet either. Even the railway switches were locked. With the help of a local engineer, they managed to unlock them and pull out in the evening, only to find themselves under attack from German planes the next morning. Vinitsky and the others jumped off the train, but about thirty were killed or wounded before they could make it to the cover of nearby woods. “For the first time, I saw what ‘a little blood’ meant,” he said, referring to the popular prewar boast of the Soviet authorities that they would defeat any enemy on his territory, spilling only “a little blood” of their own. The dead and dying were sprawled out everywhere. A bomb fragment had split open the head of one of his friends, killing him instantly, but his eyes were still open and seemed to be looking at Vinitsky and the other survivors “as if in reproach.” Nothing of the train was left but a useless wreck.

  Ordered to return to their main job of finding retreating units to force them back into battle, the survivors dispersed in the woods, usually in pairs. Vinitsky soon found himself alone, since his partner disappeared during the night. After walking several hours, he came upon a group of sixty to seventy Soviet soldiers sitting around a fire. Everything about them indicated that they had given up. Two senior officers, who were identifiable by the insignia they had torn off their uniforms, were clearly preparing to surrender to the Germans. Sitting listlessly by, their men were ready to follow their lead. Some had already burned their personal documents.

  Facing them alone, Vinitsky asked who was in charge of their unit. No one answered. “Line up!” he ordered them, and, remarkably, the men obeyed. He told them he had full authorization from the Central Committee to take charge, and that he was also authorized to shoot any cowards. He then instructed them to follow him, and, once again, they obeyed. “They were happy to see anyone assuming any kind of responsibility,” he said. “The men were encouraged since they believed I had confidence in what I was doing.”

  That was hardly surprising, since many of the soldiers had seen only incompetent officers. Vinitsky told the two officers of his plan to lead the men back to his unit so that they could be reconstituted as a fighting force. But when they looked at a map together to figure out what route to follow, he realized that the unit’s political officer didn’t even know how to read it. The reason was that the senior officers in that particular unit had all been purged less than a year before, and Party loyalists, who had no knowledge beyond Party slogans, had risen to take their place.

  Although he could easily have done so, Vinitsky didn’t shoot the officers or anyone else. He acknowledged that he had been tempted for a moment, particularly when he saw that the officers had torn off their insignia. But when he marched the men he had found back to the main unit, he heard that things had gone differently elsewhere. Some of his comrades freely admitted that they had executed soldiers to assert their authority. The special unit had rounded up about fifteen hundred soldiers in all, but Vinitsky didn’t know how many they had killed in the process.

  Vinitsky’s battalion didn’t hesitate to do whatever it took to survive, no matter who paid the price. They seized horses, grain, and any other food supplies they could find in the villages that weren’t yet occupied by the Germans. Vinitsky claimed his men issued receipts for whatever they took, but the peasants knew they were worthless. “You are leaving us to the Germans and stealing from us—you bloody ‘defenders,’” they’d shout at the soldiers.

  At one point, Vinitsky’s unit spotted a German automobile and ambushed it. Inside were a German general, a Russian nurse, and a driver. “We killed them all,” Vinitsky noted. “We had to kill the nurse as well. There was no way for us to capture them. It wasn’t practical. We could hardly find food for ourselves.” He added, “The nurse was a defector. You would not believe how many traitors there were.” Many of the men had already witnessed the destruction wrought by the Germans, sometimes on their hometowns, families, and neighbors. As a result, Vinitsky concluded, “We were furious and unmerciful.”

  Ironically, those charged with hunting down the “traitors,” troops preparing to surrender, were just as likely to fall victim to others charged with the same mission. That, too, was commonplace in Stalin’s system. The hunters could—and very often would—suddenly become the hunted.

  When the summer was almost over, Vinitsky received orders to make his way back east to Rzhev, a fiercely contested town northwest of Moscow. He was supposed to help maintain the Soviet planes that were based there. On his way, he found himself with a day to kill while waiting for a train connection in a small town. “My legs were aching, I was hungry, I had no money with me, and I couldn’t buy any food,” he recalled. So he decided to go to a nearby lake, take off his boots, and soak his feet in the water, enjoying the rare peaceful view on a warm summer day. He was wearing a dirty uniform and carrying a German machine gun and binoculars that he had seized in battle. But worst of all, he was still carrying his internal passport, which normally would have indicated that he wasn’t really a Soviet soldier, since soldiers were supposed to carry only military ID cards or dog tags. “I was like a gift for the counterintelligence service,” he noted sardonically. “At that time, hunting for spies was in full swing.”

  Sure enough, he suddenly heard the order, “Get up! Hands up! Freeze!” A three-man patrol had crept up on him, and the three men had their guns pointed at Vinitsky. “Your papers!” they demanded. When Vinitsky pulled out his internal passport and his student ID card, they pushed him to the ground and tied his hands behind his back. Though he had a piece of paper assigning him to his battalion, they were convinced this was a German forgery. As far as they were concerned, they had nabbed a German spy.

  The patrol marched Vinitsky back to the NKVD office in the town, where three other men began interrogating him and quickly dismissed his story as an obvious fraud. One of the men began working him over, punching him in the face. He paused for a moment as Vinitsky spat out some of his front teeth, and the captive managed to have the presence of mind to throw out another defense: he was Jewish. His tormenter then made him undress to prove he was circumcised. But that only convinced the trio that he was “a very well-camouflaged spy.” The beating continued until the NKVD officer was tired. He then proposed they shoot Vinitsky on the spot.

  But one of the other men, the local Party secretary, had continued to examine his documents and he concluded they weren’t forged. Which could mean only one thing: he was an even more important spy than they had thought; and so he should be dispatched to the local NKVD headquarters in the bigger town of Kalinin, where they could “make this bastard tell the truth.” Three armed men escorted him on the train ride to Kalinin, and, once there, he was thrown
on the cement floor of a windowless cell in the NKVD headquarters, still tied up and with his mouth still bleeding.

  Vinitsky didn’t know it yet, but he was lucky to be there. His new interrogator, a young NKVD agent wearing civilian clothes, wrote down everything he said, including his protestations that it wasn’t his fault that he was never issued a military ID card. Much to Vinitsky’s surprise, the interrogator heeded his plea to call the director of MAI, who could testify to the veracity of his story that he was a student who had volunteered for military service. The interrogator asked him detailed questions about MAI, where the aviation institute was located in Moscow, and where its main lecture halls were situated inside the building. When Vinitsky answered everything accurately, he ordered a guard to untie him, allowed him to wash up, and offered him tea and dry bread. Vinitsky could only drink the tea since, after his beatings, he couldn’t chew.

  The interrogator freed Vinitsky, who would go on to do maintenance work on airplanes, though not in Rzhev. That town’s plane facilities had already been destroyed in the fighting. Later, Vinitsky would learn about the fate of the rest of his unit. Of the 307 men, thirty-two survived. He was among those very few lucky ones, and, not all that unusually, his closest brush with death came when he was taken prisoner by his own side.