Stalin raged against Andrei Zhdanov, the Communist Party boss in Leningrad, and Voroshilov, the local defence supremo, when he heard of one town after another falling to the Germans as they encircled the city from the south. He insinuated that traitors must be at work. ‘Doesn’t it seem to you that someone is deliberately opening the road to the Germans?’ he signalled to Molotov, who was on a fact-finding visit to the city. ‘The uselessness of the Leningrad command is so absolutely incomprehensible.’ But instead of Voroshilov or Zhdanov ‘being put in front of a tribunal’, a small wave of terror swept the city as the NKVD rounded up the usual suspects, often because they had a foreign-sounding family name.
On 7 September, the German 20th Motorized Division advanced north from Mga to take the Sinyavino Heights. And the next day, reinforced with part of the 12th Panzer Division, it reached the town of Shlisselburg, with its Tsarist fortress at the south-western point of Lake Ladoga where the Neva flowed into it. Leningrad was now entirely cut off by land. The only route left was across the huge lake. Voroshilov and Zhdanov took a whole day before they summoned up the courage to tell Stalin that the Germans had seized Shlisselburg. The siege of Leningrad, the longest and most pitiless in modern history, had begun.
As well as half a million troops, the civilian population of Leningrad stood at more than two and a half million people, including 400,000 children. Führer headquarters decided that it did not want to occupy the city. Instead the Germans would bombard it and seal it off to let the population starve and die of disease. Once reduced, the city itself would be demolished and the area handed over to Finland.
Stalin had already decided that he needed a change of command in Leningrad. He ordered Zhukov to take over, trusting in his ruthlessness. Zhukov flew from Moscow as soon as he had received his orders. On arrival, he drove straight to the military council in the Smolny Institute where he claimed to have encountered defeatism and drunkenness. He soon went even further than Stalin in his readiness to threaten the families of soldiers who surrendered. He ordered commanders of the Leningrad front: ‘Make it clear to all troops that all the families of those who surrender to the enemy will be shot, and they themselves will be shot upon return from prison.’
Clearly Zhukov did not realize that his order, if carried out to the letter, would have meant the execution of Stalin himself. The Soviet dictator’s own son, Lieutenant Yakov Djugashvili, had been captured in an encirclement. Stalin declared in private that it would be better if he had never been born. Nazi propaganda services soon made use of their trophy prisoner. ‘A German aircraft appeared,’ a soldier called Vasily Churkin wrote in his diary. ‘It was a sunny day and we saw a large heap of leaflets fall out of the aircraft. On them was a photograph of Stalin’s son supported on two sides by smiling German officers. But it was cooked up by Goebbels and had no success.’ Stalin’s pitilessness towards his son only eased in 1945 when it appeared that Yakov had thrown himself at the barbed wire in his camp, forcing the guards to shoot him.
Stalin had no feelings for civilians. On hearing that the Germans had forced ‘old men and women, mothers and children’ forward as human shields or as emissaries to demand surrender, he sent orders that they were to be shot down. ‘My answer is–No sentimentality. Instead smash the enemy and his accomplices, sick or healthy, in the teeth. War is inexorable, and those who show weakness and permit wavering are the first to suffer defeat.’ A Gefreiter with the 269th Infantry Division wrote on 21 September: ‘Crowds of civilians are escaping from the siege, and one has to shut one’s eyes to avoid seeing the misery. Even at the front, where at the moment there are some sharp exchanges of fire, there are many children and women. As soon as a shell screams ominously near, they run for cover. It seems so comical and we laugh at it; but it is in fact sad.’
As the last wounded and defeated stragglers limped back into the city, the authorities tried to exert an iron rule, enforced by NKVD troops ready to shoot any deserter or ‘defeatist’ on the spot. Stalinist paranoia surged, with orders to the NKVD to arrest twenty-nine categories of potential enemy. Spy-mania in the city became feverish, spurred on by fantastical rumours, largely because the Soviet authorities revealed so little information. But while a minority of Leningraders secretly hoped that the Stalinist regime might fall, there is no evidence of organized German or Finnish intelligence agents at work.
Zhukov gave orders for the guns of the Baltic Fleet at Kronstadt to be deployed, either as floating batteries or to be dismounted and taken up to the Pulkovo Heights outside Leningrad to shoot back at enemy artillery positions. Their fire was directed by General of Artillery Nikolai Voronov from the cupola of St Isaac’s Cathedral. Its great gilded dome, visible from Finland, was soon camouflaged with grey paint.
On 8 September, the day that the Germans took Shlisselburg, Luftwaffe bombers targeted the food depots in the south of the city. ‘Columns of thick smoke are rising high,’ Churkin wrote in his diary, appalled by the implications. ‘It’s the Badaevskiye food depots burning. Fire is devouring the six-months’ food supplies for the whole population of Leningrad.’ The failure to disperse the stores had been a major error. Rations would have to be dramatically reduced. In addition, little had been done to bring in firewood for the winter. But the greatest mistake was the failure to evacuate more civilians. Apart from refugees, fewer than half a million Leningraders had been sent east before the Moscow line had been cut by the German advance.
In the second half of September, the Germans launched furious attacks with heavy air raids. Soviet pilots in their obsolete aircraft were again reduced to ramming German bombers. But the defenders, largely thanks to their artillery support, managed to beat off the ground attacks. Marine infantry from the Red Banner Baltic Fleet played a key role. They wore their midnight-blue sailor hats at a rakish angle, with a forelock emerging at the front as a proud trademark.
On 24 September, Generalfeldmarschall von Leeb acknowledged that he lacked the strength to break through. This coincided with further pressure from other German commanders to relaunch the advance on Moscow. Hoth’s panzer group was ordered back to Army Group Centre. With both sides on the defensive as winter approached, bringing stronger frosts at night, the fighting had turned to trench warfare. At the end of the month, the bitterly contested front lapsed into sporadic artillery duels.
Soviet casualties in the north had been dreadful, with 214,078 ‘irrecoverable losses’. This represented between a third and a half of all troops deployed. But they would be small in comparison to the mass deaths from starvation to come. Even if Leningrad surrendered, Hitler had no intention of occupying the city and even less of feeding its inhabitants. He wanted both of them completely erased from the earth.
13
Rassenkrieg
JUNE–SEPTEMBER 1941
German soldiers, who had been horrified by the misery of Polish villages in 1939, expressed even greater disgust on Soviet territory. From the massacres of prisoners by the NKVD to the primitive conditions of collective farms, the ‘Soviet paradise’ as Goebbels referred to it with cutting sarcasm entrenched their prejudices. The Nazi propaganda minister, with his diabolic genius, had perceived that contempt and hatred alone were not enough. The combination of hatred and fear provided the most effective way to inspire a mentality of annihilation. All his epithets, ‘asiatic’, ‘treacherous’, ‘Jewish Bolshevik’, ‘bestial’, ‘sub-human’, combined toward this end. Most soldiers were convinced by Hitler’s claim that the Jews had started the war.
The atavistic and fearful fascination which many, if not most, Germans felt towards the eastern Slavs had of course been heightened by reports of unbelievable cruelties in the Russian Revolution and civil war. Nazi propaganda sought to exploit a notion of culture clash between German order on the one hand and Bolshevik chaos, squalor and atheism on the other. Yet, despite superficial similarities in the Nazi and Soviet regimes, the ideological and cultural divide between the two countries was profound, from the significant to the trivial
.
During the heat of the summer, German motorcyclists often drove around wearing little more than shorts and goggles. In Belorussia and Ukraine, old women were shocked by their flaunted torsos. They were even more shocked when German soldiers walked around naked in their izbas, or peasant houses, and harassed young women. Although there appear to have been comparatively few cases of outright rape by German soldiers quartered in villages close to the front, many more occurred well behind the lines, especially against young Jewish women.
The worst crime was carried out with official approval. Young Ukrainian, Belorussian and Russian women were rounded up and forced into army brothels. This slavery subjected them to continual rape by off-duty soldiers. If they resisted, they were brutally punished and even shot. Despite the fact that sexual relations with Untermenschen (sub-humans) was an offence under Nazi law, the military authorities regarded this system as a pragmatic solution both for reasons of discipline and for the physical health of their soldiers. The young women could at least be inspected for infectious diseases on a regular basis by Wehrmacht doctors.
Yet German soldiers could also feel pity for Soviet women who had been left behind in the retreat and had to cope without men, animals or machines. ‘One even sees a couple of women pulling a home-made plough, while another guides it,’ wrote a signals corporal in a letter home. ‘A whole crowd of women are repairing the road under the eyes of an Organisation Todt man. It’s obligatory to use the knout to instil obedience! There’s scarcely a family in which the man is still alive. In 90% of cases the answer to the question is always: “Husband dead in war!” It is frightful. The Russian loss of men is completely terrible.’
Many Soviet, especially Ukrainian, citizens had not expected the horrors of a German occupation. In Ukraine, numerous villagers at first welcomed German troops with the traditional gift of bread and salt. After Stalin’s enforced collectivization of farms and the terrible famine of 1932–3, which had killed an estimated 3.3 million people, hatred for the Communists was widespread. Older, more religious Ukrainians had been encouraged by the black crosses on the German armoured vehicles, thinking that they represented a crusade against Godless bolshevism.
Officers from the Abwehr sensed that, with the vast areas to be conquered, the Wehrmacht’s best strategy would be to recruit a Ukrainian army of a million men. Their suggestion was rejected by Hitler, who did not want weapons given to Slav Untermenschen, but his wishes were soon quietly ignored, both by the army and by the SS, both of whom began to recruit. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, on the other hand, whose members had been helping the Germans just before the invasion, were suppressed. Berlin wanted to crush their hopes for an independent Ukraine.
After all the Soviet propaganda claims about its industrial triumphs, Ukrainians and others were bewildered by the quality and variety of German equipment. Vasily Grossman described villagers crowding round a captured Austrian motorcyclist. ‘Everyone admires his long, soft, steel-coloured leather coat. Everyone is touching it, shaking their heads. This means: how on earth can we fight people who wear such a coat? Their aircraft must be as good as their leather coats.’
In letters home, German soldiers complained that there was little worth looting in the Soviet Union, except for food. Ignoring the early gifts, they seized geese and chickens and livestock. They smashed hives to get the honey and paid no heed to the pleas of their victims that they would have nothing left to survive the winter. The Landser thought wistfully of the campaign in France, with its rich pickings. And unlike the French, Red Army soldiers fought on, refusing to acknowledge that they had been defeated.
Any German soldier who showed compassion for the suffering of Soviet prisoners was jeered at by his comrades. The vast majority regarded the hundreds of thousands of prisoners as little more than human vermin. Their pitiful condition, filthy as a result of the treatment they received, served only to reinforce the prejudices influenced by the propaganda of the previous eight years. Victims were thus dehumanized in a form of self-fulfilling prophecy. A soldier guarding a column of Soviet prisoners wrote home that they were eating ‘grass like cattle’. And when they passed a field of potatoes, ‘they fell on the ground, digging with their fingers and eating them raw’. Despite the fact that the key element in the plan for Barbarossa had been battles of encirclement, German military authorities had deliberately done little to prepare for the mass of prisoners. The more that died from neglect the fewer there would be to feed.
A French prisoner of war described the arrival of a group of Soviet prisoners at a Wehrmacht camp in the Generalgouvernement: ‘The Russians arrived in rows, five by five, holding each other by the arms, as none of them could walk by themselves–“walking skeletons” was really the only fitting description. The colour of their faces was not even yellow, it was green. Almost all squinted as if they had not strength enough to focus their sight. They fell by rows, five men at a time. The Germans rushed on them and beat them with rifle butts and whips.’
German officers subsequently tried to attribute the treatment of the three million prisoners of war they captured by October to the lack of troops to guard them and the shortage of transport to feed them. Yet thousands of Red Army prisoners died on forced marches simply because the Wehrmacht did not want their vehicles or trains to be ‘infected’ by the ‘foul-smelling’ mass. No camps had been prepared, so they were herded in their scores of thousands into barbed-wire encirclements under open skies. Little food or water was provided. This formed part of the Nazis’ Hunger Plan designed to kill thirty million Soviet citizens to cure the problem of ‘over-population’ in the occupied territories. Any wounded were left to the care of Red Army doctors but deprived of medical supplies. When German guards threw totally insufficient quantities of bread over the wire, they amused themselves watching men fight over it. In 1941 alone, more than two million Soviet prisoners died from starvation, disease and exposure.
Soviet troops responded in kind, shooting and bayoneting prisoners out of anger, which came from the shock of the invasion and the ruthlessnes of German warfare. In any case, the impossibility of feeding and guarding captives in the chaos of retreat meant that few were likely to be spared. Senior commanders were exasperated at the loss of ‘tongues’ to be interrogated for intelligence purposes.
The combination of fear and hatred also played a large part in the cruelty of the war against partisans. Traditional German military doctrine had long fostered a sense of outrage against guerrilla warfare in any form, well before the OKW’s instructions to shoot commissars and partisans. Even before Stalin called for insurrection behind German lines in his speech on 3 July 1941, Soviet resistance had begun spontaneously with bypassed groups of Red Army soldiers. Bands began to form in forests and marshes, swelled by civilians fleeing persecution and the destruction of their villages.
Using the fieldcraft and camouflage which came naturally to those who had lived their lives in the countryside and forests, Soviet partisans soon became a far greater threat than the planners of Barbarossa had ever imagined. By the beginning of September 1941, sixty-three partisan detachments with a total of nearly 5,000 men and women were operating behind German lines in Ukraine alone. The NKVD was also planning to insert another eighty groups, while a further 434 detachments were being trained as stay-behind groups. Altogether over 20,000 partisans were already in place or being prepared. A number included specially trained assassins who could pass themselves off as German officers. Railway lines, rolling stock and locomotives, troop trains, supply trucks, motorcycle couriers, bridges, fuel, ammunition and food depots, landlines, telegraph and airfields, all were targeted. Using parachuted radios, partisan detachments led by officers mainly from NKVD frontier forces transmitted intelligence back to Moscow and received instructions.
Not surprisingly, the partisan campaign made the idea of colonizing Hitler’s ‘Garden of Eden’ rather less appealing to potential Germans and Volksdeutsch settlers who had been promised farms there. The
whole Lebensraum plan in the east required ‘cleansed’ areas and a completely subservient peasantry. Predictably, Nazi reprisals became increasingly savage. Villages near partisan attacks were burned to the ground. Hostages were executed. Conspicuous punishments included the public hanging of young women and girls accused of aiding the partisans. But the harsher the reaction, the greater the determination to resist. In many cases, Soviet partisan leaders deliberately provoked German reprisals to increase hatred for the invader. It was indeed a ‘time of iron’. The life of an individual seemed to have lost all value on both sides, especially in German eyes if the individual was Jewish.
There were essentially two parts to the Holocaust–what Vasily Grossman later called ‘the Shoah by bullets and the Shoah by gas’–and the process which eventually led to the industrialized murder of the death camps was uneven, to say the least. Until September 1939, the Nazis had hoped to force German, Austrian and Czech Jews to emigrate through maltreatment, humiliation and the expropriation of their property. Once war began, that became increasingly difficult. And the conquest of Poland brought a further 1.7 million Jews under their jurisdiction.
In May 1940, during the invasion of France, Himmler had written a paper for Hitler entitled ‘Some Thoughts on the Treatment of Alien Populations in the East’. He suggested screening the Polish population so that the ‘racially valuable’ could be Germanized, while the rest were turned into slave labour. As for the Jews, he wrote: ‘I hope completely to erase the concept of Jews through the possibility of a great emigration to a colony in Africa or elsewhere.’ At that stage, Himmler considered genocide–‘the Bolshevik method of physical extermination’–to be ‘un-German and impossible’.
The Second World War Page 29