by J. Lee Ready
But Stalin still needed more partisans, so he informed his guerillas of a new recruiting method. They were to sneak into small villages at night to avoid the police and militia and they were to conscript all able-bodied men and all childless able-bodied women of every ethnicity. Any who refused to come along were shot dead as was their entire family. These recruits were then given a modicum of training and sent into their first battle without weapons to prove themselves. Anyone deserting from the partisans, and who was unfortunate enough to be caught by them, was not just killed, but tortured hideously. Not surprisingly this caused an increase in militia recruitment [BNS, UNS, Eesti Kaitseliit, Siauliai and Aiszargi], so that every village could be protected from these partisan press gangs. In addition there were some partisans who operated independently of Soviet control, and indeed some bands fought the Communists as avidly as they fought the Nazis.
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The three army security divisions of Army Group North together with Police Regiment North only had to control the land up to thirty miles behind the lines, but by August 1941 this translated into more than 15,000 square miles of mountains, forests and swamps, and they also had to protect the long roads and rail lines by which the army group was resupplied. Put another way, it meant three German soldiers/policemen for every square mile. Obviously this was pathetically few. As no further reinforcement was forthcoming from Germany, Army Group North was forced to create two indigenous units: the Einwohnerkampfverbaende of part-time Russian militiamen; and the full-time Sicherungabteilungen of fourteen battalions of Russians, Karelians, Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians.
Army Group Center was in a similar situation, so it too created a militia, the Ordnungsdienst from Byelorussian and Russian volunteers. In addition this army group commissioned Leutnant Henning von Tresckow to visit the prisoner of war camps and raise six battalions of Ukrainian and Byelorussian engineers. He was very successful.
Generaloberst Rudolf Schmidt, commander of the Second Panzer Army, went even further than his contemporaries, establishing an autonomous republic around Lokot, in which 1.7 million Russians could rule themselves and protect themselves with their own militia. The tide of the entire war might have been different had Hitler listened to Schmidt.
Compare this to Himmler’s treatment of Bandera’s legions. Himmler did not trust these Ukrainians, so he connived to have them regrouped as the 201st Schuma Battalion of the German police. This was a bad move. The men had volunteered to liberate the Ukraine not to join the German police. They mutinied, and the German police arrested several ringleaders and sent them off to a concentration camp. Bandera’s remaining soldiers now fled into the countryside, ready to wage war on Communists and Nazis alike.
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By the beginning of August in Kovno SS Einsatzkommando Jaeger [of SS Einsatzgruppe A] and its Lithuanian hiwis had shot 6,000 Jews, and now Jaeger placed the remaining 30,000 Jews of Kovno into a ghetto in the city. Here he permitted the Jews to set up a Judenrat [Jewish Council] and a Juden Ordnungsdienst [Jewish Police] to run the ghetto’s daily affairs. The perimeter would be guarded by Lithuanian police.
By the end of August 1941 in the Vilnius area a 500-man detachment of SS Einsatzgruppe A plus several hundred Lithuanian hiwis had killed 20,000 Jews, leaving about 40,000 Jews in that city. About this time Gruppenfuehrer Pruetzman, HSSPF for the North, gained some control over SS Einsatzgruppe A and he ordered the cessation of ‘aktion’, declaring that the remaining Jews were to be housed in two small neighborhoods of Vilnius. The perimeters of these ghettoes were to be guarded by Lithuanian police. Pruetzman’s orders were in direct contravention of Himmler’s wishes.
One week into the life of the Vilnius ghettoes the local KdS issued work permits to all Jews who appeared healthy enough to work and he assigned them jobs. If the work site was outside the ghettoes the Jews were marched to and from the site by Lithuanian police or Lithuanian Werkschutz [factory guards]. A few days later the SD and Gestapo entered the ghettoes and rounded up 10,000 Jews found to be without work permits. They were handed over to SS Einsatzgruppe A personnel, who marched them to Ponary for ‘special treatment’ at an ‘aktion’.
The majority of Lithuanian Christians did not seem to be concerned at the treatment of their Jewish neighbors, but a few did protest and a small number actually aided the Jews in some manner. Sofija Binkiene risked her life to help Jews escape. Mother Superior Anna Borkowska hid Jews in her convent until someone informed on her. She was arrested and sent to a concentration camp. Her Jews were executed and the convent was closed. Stefan Raczynski owned a farm near one of the execution sites at Ponary and when some Jews managed to escape from one of the death columns and approached him, he hid them. He later married one of them.
The sheer horror of the shootings was taking its toll upon the German killers. In fact most of the Germans in the einsatzkommando did not want to participate in the shootings and left as much as possible to the hiwis. True the actual shooters were Germans, but these tiny few often got drunk on cheap vodka before every ‘aktion’, which accounted for their wild shooting. Some members of the einsatzkommando worked up enough nerve to ask for a reassignment, though this would put them on the Gestapo’s ‘bad boy list’. Others just went quietly mad. A few committed suicide. Some shooters would kill men, but not women. Others would kill men and women but not children. There were occasions when the shooting of children was left to the hiwis.
Even Gruppenfuehrer Erich von dem Bach Zelewski, HSSPF for Central Russia, started to express doubts about the morality of the exterminations. Possibly this was brought on by the fact that he had befriended Jews and had Jews in his extended family? Eventually he had a complete breakdown and had to take medical leave at an SS hospital for his cramps, fits and hallucinations.
Ordinary German soldiers sometimes witnessed these atrocities and it left them sick to the stomach. They complained to their officers, who in turn demanded that the einsatzkommando ‘soldiers’ be apprehended for murder. Roman Catholic priests serving in the German forces as chaplains not only protested through military channels, but informed the Vatican. The Pope therefore knew what was happening quite early on. Even died in the wool Nazis were disgusted. The Reichskommissar for the central region, Wilhelm Kube, was shocked when he learned of the massacres. He complained through his boss, Rosenberg, all the way to Hitler about the murderous behavior of SS Einsatzgruppe B. The response to everyone was to be told to mind his own business. In fact Himmler made sure his SD took an interest in those who complained, including Kube. Army Unteroffizier Anton Schmid could not stand idly by and see such horror and he began helping Jews escape from the Vilnius ghettoes. He was caught by the army’s military police and was executed.
In August 1941 Himmler visited SS Einsatzgruppe B near Minsk, where Nebe bragged that his men had killed 37,000 undesirables so far, including 900 Jews in Dubno on one day, and he arranged another ‘aktion’ in Himmler’s honor. Probably this was the first time Himmler had actually witnessed an execution of any type. He was visibly shaken. [Karl Wolff, who accompanied him, says he vomited.] Once he regained his composure, Himmler, who could care less about the victims, did begin to have some sympathy for the killers, especially those who showed signs of cracking up, and he decided to go forward with plans, already tentative, to execute Jews in a more mechanical and efficient manner in order to protect the sanity of his men.
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Chapter Thirteen
A NEW KIND OF WAR
While the SS einsatzgruppe were busy killing for the crusade, the Waffen SS soldiers were dying for the crusade. In post war years Waffen SS veterans testified that during this period the butchery of Jews by other members of the SS was rarely spoken about. First of all the Waffen SS did not consider the SS einsatzgruppe, SD or Gestapo to be soldiers like themselves, and secondly the resistance by the Soviet Red Army was stiffening, so that the discussions among the soldiers in their ‘quiet’ moments invariably hovered around the next day�
��s fight and the chances of surviving it, and of course reminiscences of home. This is attested to in post war testimony even by Mischlings who served in the Waffen SS, e.g. members of the SS Polizei Division who had been ordered to ‘volunteer’. These Mischlings had no reason to lie or whitewash the Nazis. This is understandable. After all, as a rule American GIs never discussed the brutal racism of prison chain gang bosses in the south of the USA, and British ‘Tommies’ didn’t give the plight of their colonial subjects a second thought. Most Soviet soldiers abhorred the NKVD, but they fought to defend their homes.
Those German soldiers who hated the Nazis felt they had no choice but to defeat the Communists first, and only then turn on the Nazis.
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Army Group North launched a new offensive on 8 August from the Luga bridgehead and from the west shore of Lake Ilmen, but at the latter the Soviets counterattacked. Among the Germans trying to hold them back were the SS Totenkopf and SS Polizei Motorized Divisions. They succeeded, allowing other Germans to break through and come within thirty miles of Leningrad by the end of August. Polizei Oberst Schulze of the SS Polizei Division was mortally wounded earning a medal for heroism.
To help in the assault on Leningrad reinforcements soon arrived, including the Flanders Legion and the Norwegian Legion. The latter had already lost some of its volunteers who had had second thoughts and had resigned, mostly owing to political differences with the Nazis. As volunteer legionnaires these men were allowed to resign, at least in 1941.
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Red Army resistance was fanatical by now and quite, quite insane. This was not surprising as the army was controlled by the same insane lunatic who controlled the Soviet Union, namely Josef Stalin, who had murdered most of his experienced generals, suspecting they were plotting against him. Red Army divisions were now commanded by men in their thirties, who knew the price of defeat was not just death for themselves but death for their spouses, kids, parents and siblings too. When shoddily dressed fresh recruits arrived, who could barely salute let alone handle a rifle, they were often sent into action without weapons. If they survived they could pick up a rifle from a veteran who had not. As far as the Communist commissars in the Red Army were concerned, the life of a soldier was cheaper than the cost of a rifle. They cared naught for the pain of a mother bearing a son, raising that son through illnesses and boyhood injuries for twenty years only to see him thrown unarmed against a German machine gun. The Germans were mentally disturbed by the Communist disregard for human life.
The German method of clearing a minefield was to put artillery fire on the enemy to keep his head down while trained German pioneers crawled forward and lifted sufficient mines to clear a path. Then the German infantry and perhaps armor would attack along the path. The Soviet method was to bring up penal battalions made up of political prisoners and ordinary criminals and send them unarmed in a wave with arms linked across the minefield. If they all died before the minefield was cleared, another penal battalion was brought up. Eventually the minefield was cleared and the actual combat troops could then attack.
The German method of attack was to try one tactic, and if it failed try another, and so on. The Soviet method was for Communist commissars to send in wave after wave of infantry. Any who fell back under withering German fire were machine gunned by units of NKVD. The Soviets never changed their tactics. As a result the Soviets might lose 200 men in one area on one day, but their German opponents would only lose 20 or 30 and that to Soviet artillery and mortar fire and long-range automatic fire. Rarely did an individual Red Army infantryman actually inflict a casualty on a German. In other words most German casualties were inflicted by shrapnel, mines and machine gun bullets. Only a handful were hit by a rifle bullet and almost none were stabbed by bayonets.
The Germans came to learn that Soviet courage was unbelievable, that Red Army artillery was good and plentiful, that their Katyusha rocket launchers were scary as hell and devastating, that their sub-machine guns were fine weapons and that some of their tanks were better than that of the Germans, but that it all counted for nothing because Soviet generalship was not even as sophisticated as the tactics of a German Obergefreiter [corporal].
In all the campaigns fought by the Nazis to date - Spain, Poland, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, Greece and North Africa the average German soldier had behaved impeccably, accepting prisoners, giving medical treatment to captured enemy and incarcerating them in reasonably decent housing. This was true for the Waffen SS as much as for the army. In the North African desert German troops had been known to free enemy prisoners if they had insufficient water for them.
But this all changed when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. This different behavior has been dismissed as simply a result of racial hatred of all Slavs, but this is blatantly untrue. If the common German soldiers felt this way they would never have accepted hiwis and osttruppen.
One has to look elsewhere for this change in attitude. First of all the ordinary Germans did not hate the political philosophy of their previous enemies, such as Norwegian democracy, but they did hate Communism with a passion, primarily because of the atheistic belief promulgated by the Communists, i.e. the denial of God. The Germans had grown this hatred, because their government leaders and their church leaders had both propagandized the German people for two decades against the evils of Communism. When the German soldiers heard for themselves how the Communists had treated conquered peoples, exterminating their intellectuals and closing their religious institutions, and when they saw at first hand the corpse-filled NKVD prisons, they became even more incensed at Stalin’s hordes.
There was yet another reason: anger. Spain and North Africa excepted, the other campaigns had been quick, a few weeks at most, but Russia was so immense and the killing went on so long that the Germans developed a hatred towards the Red Army, because it kept up the struggle without let up.
To be sure another reason for the change in attitude was that the ordinary German soldiers started to become angry with Hitler and the Nazi party that had dumped them in Russia and seemingly wanted them all to fight to the death, like a huge army of gladiators. They expressed their anger in the only way they could, by killing the enemy ruthlessly.
Yet another reason was their frustration with partisans. It appeared to them to be cowardly: sentries stabbed in the night, gates booby-trapped, roads in the rear suddenly mined, men picked off by snipers. This built up a tremendous seething anger.
And perhaps another reason was that if the Soviets did not care a fig for the lives of their own troops, why should a German go out of his way to care for them?
The result of this change was the brutalization of the German soldier. Sometimes individual Germans gunned down surrendering Red Army soldiers. More common was the execution of Red Army prisoners too badly wounded to walk. Captured partisans were often hanged or shot.
Yet despite this brutalization most surrendering Soviets were taken prisoner. In fact they were taken in such huge numbers that it caught the German rear echelon unprepared and they could not cope. The result was inadequate housing for them, a lack of food and sparse medical provisions. In places thousands of Soviet prisoners were guarded in open fields, with no fences nor water nor food distribution lines, which meant that the Soviet prisoners started dying like flies in the hot sun. A few German soldiers tossed them chunks of stale bread.
The Communist commissars and the NKVD alike were all bullies and therefore cowards, and when their units were overrun they surrendered rather than fight to the death, the way they had exhorted others to do. The Germans were under Hitler’s orders to kill all Communist commissars and NKVD, but in fact most Germans refused to shoot prisoners, even commissars. Maybe the Waffen SS were more inclined to shoot them, but even they refrained from killing known Communists on occasion. The evidence for this is that thousands of commissars, Communist party functionaries and NKVD members arrived alive at prisoner of war camps.
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In August though Army Group Center was still under Hitler’s halt order, its motorized formations including SS Das Reich advanced anyway, a little bit at a time.
By 3 August Army Group South had surrounded three Soviet armies [of the South West Front], and had begun to take prisoner 103,000 men! There was still plenty of action though, and in one incident Sturmbannfuehrer Teddi Wisch was wounded, but this did not prevent him from continuing to lead his battalion of the SS LAH. Von Kleist’s 1st Panzer Group, including SS LAH and SS Wiking, now swerved south of Kiev and aimed for Karkov. One of the replacements catching up with the SS LAH was none other than Jochen Peiper, who had fought with the unit in France and since then had been serving again as Himmler’s senior adjutant. Peiper was glad to be back with his unit. He had had enough of cocktail parties, dress balls, paper work and concentration camp inspections. Whether he informed his men about the ongoing extermination of Jews is unknown, but probably not.
On 7 August the SS Wiking attacked in the Korsun area, but soon had to fend off countless counter-attacks by hordes of Red Army soldiers. An SS Wiking task force also fought in the Dnepropetrovsk area, taking a small bridgehead on the Dnepr River. Meanwhile the troops of the SS LAH had taken Zaselye, but then they too found themselves under fierce counter-attack for days.
On 18 August the SS LAH battled into the industrial city of Cherson against Soviet die-hards including naval infantry. It took them three days of house-to-house hand-to-hand combat to occupy the city.
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On 8 August in Army Group North’s sector Keppler’s SS Totenkopf Motorized Division was finally allowed to participate in a major offensive. They crossed the Mshaga and Luga Rivers from Estonia into Russia. The combat was gruesome as waves of Soviet infantry kept coming, especially in night attacks, but they could not prevent the SS Totenkopf from making a flanking move, which by mid-August had helped to destroy the Soviet Thirty-fourth Army.