Gradually Stalin and Beria had to think more of replenishing the ranks of the army, given the staggering losses they suffered during the early months of the German invasion, and the pace of executions slowed. In a few cases, top military officers who looked as though they were doomed received sudden reprieves. This was the case with General Kirill Meretskov, who found himself arrested and tortured in the early days of the war, when Stalin was looking for scapegoats. Beaten mercilessly with rubber rods, Meretskov subsequently was allowed back into the inner circle, although this included a former colleague who had been his chief torturer. Unlike others in that kind of situation, he didn’t hide his unease. “We used to meet on informal terms, but I’m afraid of you now,” he told his tormenter. For his part, Stalin made a rare concession. Since Meretskov had been crippled by his brutal treatment, the Soviet leader allowed him to sit down while reporting to him.
Nothing was too surreal in Stalin’s universe of terror. After General Rokossovsky was released from prison in 1940, Stalin noticed that the freed man had no fingernails and asked if he had been tortured. When Rokossovsky confirmed that he had been tortured, Stalin declared, “There’re too many yes-men in this country.” At other times, he’d ask about a particular individual and express surprise and disappointment that he had been executed, as if he had had nothing to do with such decisions.
Stalin’s cohorts and defenders insist that his terror tactics both before and after the German invasion were justified. In particular, Molotov, who was the quintessential loyalist until his death in 1986, defended the military purges of 1937 to 1938: “Of course there were excesses, but all that was permissible, to my mind, for the sake of the main objective—keeping state power!…Our mistakes, including the crude mistakes, were justified.” When it came to the first top military victims of the purges, such as General Tukhachevsky, he was equally unapologetic. “If trouble started, which side would he have been on? He was rather a dangerous man,” he declared. “I doubted he would have been fully on our side when things got tough, because he was a right-winger. The right-wing danger was the main danger at the time. And many right-wingers didn’t realize they were right-wingers, and were right-wingers in spite of themselves.”
His arguments reflected a logic that only a true Stalinist could comprehend. You could trust no one; anyone could be an enemy of the people, even if he didn’t know it yet. That was the logic of Stalin before the war, and it would continue to be his logic during the war, as the German advance continued. According to this reasoning, only terror and more terror—whether in the form of “blocking units” shooting at their own retreating troops or frenzied executions of prisoners who couldn’t be evacuated—could ensure victory.
Sergo Beria, the son of Stalin’s secret police chief, offered a very different perspective on the prewar terror, particularly the military purges of 1937 and 1938. “My father explained to me that if this policy of extermination of the elite had continued for another two years, the Germans would not have needed to invade us because the state would have collapsed by itself,” he wrote. To be sure, this was part of a son’s defense of the indefensible, a monstrous father, by a claim that his father was trying to mitigate the policies that he, in fact, was carrying out with brutal efficiency. But it’s still a revealing commentary on the policy of wholesale slaughter of his own people that Stalin and his cronies pursued. That policy wreaked havoc on the Soviet armed forces and antagonized many of Stalin’s subjects, particularly in the newly occupied regions between 1939 and 1941. It also left a climate of fear that paralyzed many of the military officers who survived, which hardly encouraged effective leadership when the moment of crisis came.
But luckily for Stalin, Hitler was intent on imposing his own rule of terror everywhere his forces advanced, which produced a more equal contest than initially appeared to be the case. It was also, not surprisingly, a contest that reflected the ruthlessness that flowed from the top of both regimes. As Robert Service wrote, “Warfare reverted to the colossal brutality last seen in the religious wars in the seventeenth century and Stalin was in his element.” So was Hitler, but his forces were trying to navigate the terrain of a country they didn’t know and were facing a people they didn’t understand. To reach Moscow, they’d need to remedy those deficiencies fast and make all the right moves with little delay. The Führer had his window of opportunity, but it wouldn’t remain open very long.
4
Hitler and His Generals
During those crucial summer months when German forces drove deeper and deeper into Soviet territory, Hitler and his generals often failed to see eye to eye on both tactics and strategy. This was hardly the first instance of such tensions. The generals had been hesitant in each previous case when Hitler had gambled and won—annexing Austria, dismembering Czechoslovakia, invading Poland and then conquering France and most of the rest of Continental Europe. And, of course, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, some generals were dubious about his prediction that the Soviet Union would quickly collapse. Once the invasion took place, however, Hitler suddenly proved to be the hesitant one when it came to deciding when and how to attack Moscow, frustrating his generals in the field, who were convinced that only a swift, direct assault on the Soviet capital would provide the knockout blow that was so badly needed to ensure victory and the destruction of the Soviet Union.
At the same time, Hitler planted the seeds of resistance to the German invaders by pursuing his policy of terror against the inhabitants of the territories conquered by his armies. Many of his generals would later claim they had opposed those policies, too. But if they did, they rarely did so openly. And it’s unlikely that any of those misgivings were based on moral inhibitions. By serving Hitler as long as they already had, they, in effect, had shelved their consciences.
Nonetheless, their subsequent protestations that they recognized that the brutality of German rule was quickly turning local populations against them has a more convincing ring—at least in some cases. In purely practical terms, they could see that Hitler’s determination to rule by full-scale terror could backfire, making the subjugated peoples fear Hitler’s reign of terror even more than Stalin’s reign of terror. Most important, it would give Stalin the ammunition he needed to mobilize his people against an unmistakably evil foe, making the job of Soviet propagandists remarkably easy. Leading the pack was Ilya Ehrenburg, the poet who returned to Moscow from his long exile in Paris in 1940. “Let us kill!” he urged his countrymen. “If you haven’t killed a German in the course of a day, your day has been wasted.”
As many German soldiers reported, their initial reception in some parts of the western Soviet Union reflected a very different mind-set. Hans von Herwarth, the former German diplomat in Moscow who had returned as part of the invasion force, watched with astonishment the reaction of villagers as they looked up at a one-sided aerial battle between German and Soviet fighters. “All the Soviet planes were shot down,” he noted. “As each crashed to the ground in flames, the villagers clapped their hands, shouting that soon Stalin, too, would fall.” He reported that peasants eagerly asked if the Germans would now dissolve the collective farms, and some brought lists of communist officials “against whom they wanted us to take action.”
But such early acceptance quickly gave way to suspicion and then to fear and hatred. Captain Karl Haupt, whose 350th Infantry Regiment was initially greeted by villagers with bread, salt, and flowers in the western Ukraine, reported that by mid-July local attitudes had become “hostile through and through.” He lamented that “there is no place for trust, chumminess, or letting one’s guard down.” And he would follow up those observations with orders to his men to employ “the harshest, most ruthless measures” against the inhabitants of villages that only a couple of weeks earlier had looked so welcoming.
Many of the German invaders professed to be shocked by the first atrocities from the Soviet side that they witnessed, claiming that their own actions were mostly of a retaliatory nature. G
eneral Erich von Manstein, who was commander of the Fifty-sixth Panzer Corps at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa and who would soon attain the rank of field marshal, claimed that on the very first day of the fighting his men came across a German patrol that had been cut off by Soviet forces. “All its members were dead and gruesomely mutilated,” he wrote in his memoirs. Upon seeing this, he recalled, he and his officers vowed “that we would never let an adversary like this capture us alive.”
On another occasion, Manstein reported that his unit had recaptured a German field hospital where three of their officers and thirty men had been left behind during a battle. All thirty-three had been killed, he wrote, and “their mutilations were indescribable.” He also complained that there were several cases of Soviet soldiers throwing up their hands as if in surrender and then opening fire, and other incidents in which Soviet soldiers pretended to be dead “and then fired on our troops when their backs were turned.”
Whatever the accuracy of Manstein’s reporting about such incidents, they hardly explain or justify the policies that the Germans would ruthlessly employ from the very beginning of their campaign. To be sure, the German occupiers initially promised to improve the lives of the peoples they were “liberating.” On the first day of the invasion, for instance, German radio broadcasts promised that “one of the first measures of the German administration will be the restoration of religious freedom…. We will allow you to organize religious parishes. Everyone will be free to pray to God in his own manner.” But Hitler, whose contempt for churches was almost as visceral as Stalin’s, quickly made clear that he had no intention of delivering on such promises. He forbade German army units to do anything to help churches and missionaries to enter the newly occupied Soviet territories. “If one did it at all, one should permit all the Christian denominations to enter Russia in order that they club each other to death with their crucifixes,” he declared.
Hitler’s vision of what awaited the conquered east didn’t allow for anything but death and subjugation by terror. He spelled out the essential elements of his approach before Operation Barbarossa began, leaving no doubt about the nature of the occupation he envisaged no matter how Soviet troops and civilians behaved. On March 30, 1941, he convened his generals and—as recorded in summary form by Franz Halder, his chief of staff—delivered a blunt message about the nature of the battle:
“Clash of two ideologies. Crushing denunciation of Bolshevism, identified with a social criminality. Communism is an enormous danger for our future. We must forget the concept of comradeship between soldiers. A communist is no comrade before or after the battle. This is a war of extermination. If we do not grasp this, we shall beat the enemy, but thirty years later we shall again have to fight the Communist foe. We do not wage war to preserve the enemy…. Extermination of the Bolshevik commissars and of the Communist intelligentsia.”
That approach quickly translated into a blueprint for the policies of terror that swept aside all the traditional rules of warfare. The premise was simple: the Russians and other peoples of the Soviet Union were an inferior, primitive race, who weren’t worthy of normal human considerations. As Erich Koch, Hitler’s brutal governor of the Ukraine, would put it: “The attitude of the Germans…must be governed by the fact that we deal with a people which is inferior in every respect.” The object of the occupation wasn’t “to bring blessings on the Ukraine but to secure for Germany the necessary living space and a source of food.”
None of this was empty rhetoric. Hitler’s pronouncement on forgetting the concept of comradeship between soldiers led to the infamous Commissar Decree—the order to execute all political officers in Red Army units, even if they attempted to surrender. “Political commissars in the [Red] Army are not recognized to be prisoners of war and are to be liquidated, at the latest in the prisoner of war transit camps,” read the order drawn up on May 12, more than a month before the German forces launched their attack. General Jodl added a note that leaves no doubt about the cynical nature of subsequent protestations that such policies were prompted by Soviet behavior. “We must reckon with retaliation against German fliers; therefore it will be best to picture the whole action as retaliation.”
The Commissar Decree had the predictable effect of convincing Red Army commissars that they had to fight back at any cost, since they soon realized that defeat amounted to an instant death sentence. When the Germans began encountering Soviet troops who fought back ferociously despite overwhelming odds, the official explanations never made that connection—in fact, the pretence was maintained that no such connection existed. “The main reason why the Russian never surrenders is that, dim-witted half-Asiatic that he is, he fully believes the notion, drummed into him by the commissars, that he will be shot if captured,” a directive issued to the German Fourth Army declared.
In order to prepare its forces for the mission ahead, the Wehrmacht distributed propaganda leaflets to them that combined denunciation of the commissars with anti-Semitic themes. Referring to the commissars, one such tract declared: “We would insult the animals if we described these mostly Jewish men as beasts. They are the embodiment of Satanic and insane hatred against the whole of noble humanity.”
While the Germans showered the Soviet-controlled areas with propaganda leaflets claiming they were coming to liberate the country and urging Red Army troops to surrender—by the end of 1941 the Luftwaffe had dropped more than 400 million of them—those efforts were undercut by the policies based on Nazi doctrine that were directed at all those who came under their rule in the east. A May 2, 1941, report produced by German economic planners charged with setting the goals for the eastern campaign predicted that by September of that year “the entire German Armed Forces can be fed at the expense of Russia.” Far from shying away from the implications of that statement, it went on to point out, “Thereby tens of millions of men will undoubtedly starve to death if we take away all we need from the country.”
As Untermenschen, or subhumans, the Slavs deserved no consideration, including the staggering numbers of Red Army soldiers who were captured in the early months of the fighting. When German newspapers began publishing photos of the POWs, it was to ridicule their “Asiatic, Mongol physiognomies” and their “degenerate qualities.” Little wonder, then, that the German invaders cared little for the POWs’ survival and in many cases simply murdered surrendering soldiers. As Field Marshal von Manstein would admit about the early days of the fighting almost in passing, “At this stage we had hardly the time or the men to spare for rounding up prisoners.” He pointedly left unsaid what happened to those who weren’t rounded up, but their fate isn’t hard to imagine. And as word spread of such treatment, the commissars in the Soviet units certainly found it easier to convince their men that captivity would mean death and it made more sense to keep fighting.
Civilians couldn’t expect much better treatment. Already on May 6, more than a month before the Germans attacked, the German military command authorized the shooting of all those local inhabitants “who by their behavior constitute a direct threat to our troops” and “collective measures of force” against any location “from which insidious and malicious attacks of any kind whatsoever have taken place.” German troops, the orders concluded, “must defend themselves without pity against any threat from the hostile civilian population.” And even if German troops committed “punishable acts,” they wouldn’t be prosecuted if they were motivated by “bitterness against atrocities or subversive work of carriers of the Jewish-Bolshevik system.”
In late July 1941, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, the commander of the army, issued a secret order on Hitler’s behalf that bluntly reinforced the message about the nature of the German occupation. “Because of the vast size of the areas occupied in the East, the forces that will be available for establishing security will only be large enough if all resistance is punished not by legal prosecution of the guilty, but by the spreading of such terror by the occupying forces as will remove all desire
to resist among the population.” As soon as the Germans began encountering partisan activity, the military authorities made good on their pledge to invoke “collective measures,” instructing their troops to execute between fifty and a hundred Soviet citizens for every German killed.
Such policies gave German troops carte blanche to murder and destroy at will. And, in that context, any acts of mercy were deemed contrary to official directives. “Feeding inhabitants and prisoners of war who do not work for the German armed forces, from army messes, is as much an act of misplaced humaneness as giving away bread or cigarettes,” warned Field Marshal Walther von Reichenau in October 1941. The practical implementation of such policies had immediate consequences for the huge POW population. Hans von Herwarth recalled seeing columns of Soviet POWs “marching arm-in-arm but reeling like drunkards.” The next morning a fellow soldier pointed out the corpses of many of the POWs strewn nearby. Suddenly, the truth dawned on him. “They had apparently not been fed for days, and their ‘drunkenness’ was the result of sheer fatigue,” he wrote. A popular German saying summed up the underlying assumption that made this kind of treatment the norm rather than the exception. “The Russian must perish that we may live.”
If that left everyone a potential victim, the Germans made special preparations to start the killing of Soviet Jews. In a war where the enemy was defined as “Judeo-Bolshevism,” all killings of Jews could be explained as the elimination of the enemy. By the autumn, when partisan activity became more widespread behind German lines, German commanders were calling all resisters Jews, whatever their origin. As they put it, “Where there’s a Jew there’s a partisan, and where there’s a partisan there’s a Jew.”
The Greatest Battle Page 11