by Giles Milton
Peter’s job – and that of the other boys in his class – was to shoot down any enemy planes that happened to pass over Pforzheim. He was given a uniform and some basic training in how the guns were to be fired. Russian ones that had been captured at the front, they required three or four people to fire them. His task was to get the gun to the correct elevation.
The boys were woefully under-trained and their weapons were far from accurate. They had to be able to see the plane in order to shoot at it. Peter never had the opportunity to put his training into action. Indeed, he rarely saw any planes passing overhead.
His other friends were less fortunate. One was sent to Peenemunde on the Baltic coast, where Hitler’s secret rocket programme was being developed. This was a regular target for the Royal Air Force, whose bombing raids were often heavy and sustained. His friend’s group shot down many planes. One day he was given leave to go home because the family house had burned down in a raid. While he was away, his group received a direct hit and they were all killed.
Peter hated his time in the heimatflak. He still had to go to school each morning; then, after lunch, he changed into his military uniform and reported for duty. Worst of all, he was no longer allowed to live at home. He and his comrades shared cramped accommodation in barracks on the edge of town.
The food was not bad because it was being brought to Germany from the occupied countries. They had plentiful supplies of cheese and butter, which had been stolen from Denmark.
Personal hygiene, however, was non-existent. They were allowed home once a week and Peter was always desperate for a bath, but the family tub was kept permanently full of cold water, in case of fire.
Chapter Eight
Dirty War
‘We are not to publicise our objectives to the world.’
Wolfram and his fellow conscripts were to travel to the Crimea by train, a circuitous journey that would take them through the heart of German-occupied Ukraine. In different times and different circumstances, such a voyage would have been a fabulous adventure into the unknown for a group of wide-eyed young lads. As their destination was a war zone, the outcome was one of deep uncertainty.
They were to pass through many towns that had been brutally subjugated by the army and the SS, among them Brest-Litovsk, Kiev and Mariupol, before arriving at Dzhankoy on the Crimean peninsula. The 1,700-mile journey would take four weeks. For Wolfram, it seemed like four years.
Although the men were not aware of it at the time, they were unwitting pioneers in one of Hitler’s more disquieting projects: to empty the Crimean peninsula of Slavs and transform it into a summer playground for the Germanic race.
‘For us Germans,’ he said in one speech, ‘it will be our Riviera.’ He planned to build a spectacular autobahn that would stretch from Berlin to Sevastopol, entertaining visions of smiling German families climbing into their Volkswagen cars and driving southwards to the sun. He intended to call this new colony Gothenland. ‘In the Eastern territories,’ he said proudly, ‘I shall replace Slav geographical titles by German names.’
For Wolfram and his comrades, their own voyage southwards fell dismally short of Hitler’s rose-tinted vision. They were loaded on to overcrowded transport trains, forty men to a wagon. Each carriage was divided into narrow, boxed-off compartments, with boards, above and below, that created just enough space for ten men to sleep. It was like going to bed in a coffin.
The atmosphere in the enclosed carriage was fuggy and claustrophobic and it stank of stale sweat and unwashed clothes. There were no windows – just a narrow slit through which the inquisitive or bored could peer out on to the fleckled smudge of passing fields and forest.
The worst aspect of the journey was going to the toilet. The men had to suspend themselves over the gap between rattling carriages and, with the aid of a friend to anchor them, do their business on to the tracks below. As there was no toilet paper, they used the straw that covered the floor or, once they reached the Ukraine, the local banknotes, which were completely worthless.
Each of the conscripts had his own manner of dealing with the pangs of homesickness. Some told stories of happy childhoods. Others spoke with feigned bravado about the dangers that lay ahead. Wolfram spent his daytime hours in a trance, peering out through the letter-box slit that was his only link with the outside world.
‘Brown cows in the fields, lots of houses, green meadows, a few hills, some windmills and derelict villages which from a distance looked quite nice to paint.’ Such were his impressions in a letter he wrote to his parents.
There was a darker side to this idyllic picture – one that Wolfram was not able to include in the letter for fear of censorship. Alongside his memories of tumbledown villages and tidy potagers came the first hazy awareness of the more sinister reality that was overtaking these conquered lands.
He got his first shock as the train drew to a halt at the bleak frontier town of Brest-Litovsk, just a few miles inside Belorussia. A large number of Jewish women, all wearing yellow stars, were cleaning dirt from between the tracks. They were in a pitiful condition – their sallow faces and famished frames a visible testimony to long months of hunger and harsh treatment.
Wolfram, upset by what he saw, tried to speak with a group of girls, but no sooner had they begun to answer his questions than the bark of a German sentry echoed across the tracks. Verboten! Verboten! They were forbidden from communicating further.
Wolfram’s eye was drawn to another group of Jews engaged in a desperate brawl over empty food tins that had been thrown out of the train windows by the German soldiers. They were wiping the insides of the tins with their fingers in the hope of finding some nourishment.
Wolfram and his comrades made their way from the station into town, where they became witness to a picture of human misery. Brest-Litovsk had been all but destroyed when the German army had attacked the Soviet garrison in the previous summer, subjecting defenders and civilians alike to a lethal combination of mortars and flame-throwers. The liquid fire was particularly devastating. The few survivors from the citadel emerged with stories of a heat so intense that it melted bricks and liquefied steel girders.
The siege was only the opening chapter in a long saga of suffering and abuse. The newly installed German overlords were treating the enforced labourers, many of them Jews, with ruthless severity.
The most brutal guards were the ethnic Germans who had lived in Brest-Litovsk for generations. To Wolfram, it was as if they were unleashing centuries of repressed hatred on those whose lives they now held in their hands.
He was no less horrified to see how they behaved towards their Soviet prisoners of war. A group of captives was in the process of digging a trench through the centre of town, overseen by their vengeful guards. Wolfram was rooted to the spot, watching an old man throw shovelfuls of earth up from the trench. Each time he paused to catch his breath, the guard smashed him across the head with a spade.
Although Wolfram did not know it at the time, these prisoners of war were actually among the most fortunate of the hundreds of thousands captured by the German army. When Minsk had been taken, some 300,000 Soviet troops were taken prisoner. When Bryansk and Vyazma were seized, the Germans netted a further 650,000 men. Most were starved to death, murdered in cold blood or imprisoned without shelter in the cruel months of midwinter.
The inhumanity that Wolfram witnessed in Brest-Litovsk was but a pale reflection of the atrocities being carried out in the surrounding towns and villages. In the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Soviet Russia, four einsatzgruppen or paramilitary task forces had moved in with orders to execute small groups of Jews and partisans working behind their front line. By the autumn of 1941, these paramilitary groups were organising mass executions of the local Jewish population. The death toll had already topped 750,000 by the time Wolfram arrived in Brest-Litovsk.
The slaughter had been ordered by Hitler and Himmler, who made it clear that it was to be undertaken with a ruthlessness exceeding that of all
previous killings. ‘Even the child in the cradle must be trampled down like a poisonous toad,’ said Himmler. ‘We are living in an epoch of iron, during which it is necessary to sweep with iron-made brooms.’
Secrecy was imperative. Hitler issued numerous directives on the importance of ensuring that the butchery remained covert and hidden. ‘We are not to publicise our objectives to the world,’ he told his SS chiefs.
Wolfram witnessed scenes of barbaric treatment meted out to Jews in Brest-Litovsk. Although he knew all too well that vile things happened in war, neither he nor any of his comrades had any notion of the scale of the executions being carried out behind the scenes.
Even if they had known, they could do little, given their own unhappy predicament. There was an overriding feeling that everyone was trapped in the same terrible boat. Wolfram and the others lived in constant terror of what the future held for them.
They knew nothing of the einsatzgruppen death squads and were equally ignorant of the ethnic cleansing that was sweeping through the area around Brest-Litovsk. Not until after the war did Wolfram first learn of the mass murder of Jews, partisans and Soviet prisoners of war.
The ignorance of these young conscripts is not entirely surprising, given that deception was a key ingredient in the Nazi extermination programme. The gas vans used to kill some 350,000 Jews in the Soviet lands looked innocuous enough as they drove through the countryside.
The SS officer in charge of one such fleet of death vehicles, August Becker, ordered them to be made to look like mobile homes so as not to arouse suspicion: ‘[they were] disguised as house trailers, by having a single window shutter fixed to each side of the small vans and, on the large ones, two shutters, such as one often sees on farmhouses in the country.’
This folksy exterior belied the gruesome fate that awaited those within. The exhaust pipe was vented up through the floor of the rear cabin, enabling sixty people to be killed by poisoning and asphyxiation in each short ride to the mass grave.
The full horror of the outrages being visited upon the occupied territories was to remain unknown until 1946, when a small number of those who committed them were put on trial at Nuremberg. It was during the cross-examination of Otto Ohlendorf, head of Einsatzgruppe D, that the extraordinary level of planning and secrecy surrounding the policy of extermination was finally revealed. Ohlendorf spoke with precision, detachment and astuteness, proudly admitting that the 500 soldiers under his command had liquidated 90,000 men, women and children. He showed no remorse or regret, except when he spoke of his own men. His fear, throughout the killing process, was that they might become emotionally exhausted by conducting mass murder in secret and on a daily basis.
The train shunted slowly out of the sidings of Brest-Litovsk and began to push deep into Belorussia. There was a detectable change in the landscape as they headed southwards: at first, the fields were studded with coppices, which gradually merged into woods. Suddenly, one morning Wolfram awoke to find that the woods had thickened into forests whose giant spruce trees were wilder and darker than anything he had seen in the Schwarzwald.
‘Vast forests and wild meadows,’ he wrote in a letter to his parents. ‘Houses made of wood with straw on the roof, or wooden slates.’ This was a land that had yet to be touched by Stalin’s plans for a modern agro-industry.
In one forest clearing Wolfram glimpsed his first Orthodox church. Its characteristic onion dome had a certain similarity to the Bavarian baroque, but its glittering cusp, topped by the double-barred crucifix of Eastern Christendom, signalled that they were now far from home.
Most of the churches in Belorussia and the Ukraine had been forcibly closed by Stalin some years earlier. One of the first actions of the invading German army had been to reopen them, earning them much gratitude from the pious faithful. Now, on Sundays and on feast days, the bells clanged in the crisp morning air and the faithful trooped to their re-established parishes.
Every railway junction and every siding was crowded with truckloads of soldiers being transported eastwards towards Stalingrad: Romanians, Italians, Spaniards and Hungarians, as well as large numbers of Germans. The Italians yelled anti-Stalin slogans, while the Spanish volunteers sang and shouted, but the Hungarians and Romanians, more wary of their German allies, went past in silence.
At one point the train skirted the outer suburbs of Kursk, which had become a key tactical position of the German front line. The men were left in no doubt that they were close to the front when mortars started exploding all around them.
The train looped back into the Ukraine and Wolfram took comfort in a renewed familiarity with the landscape. In places, it looked like rural Swabia. ‘Ukraine is beautiful,’ he wrote in a letter. ‘Really thick black earth, cornfields and sunflower fields everywhere. Sometimes we saw villages which I liked very much – lovely clean-looking whitewashed houses with big thatched roofs.’
The weather changed dramatically as they headed southwards towards Dnepropetrovsk and Mariupol. The cool spring breezes faded in an instant: now, summer arrived in a pulsating furnace of heat. It was stiflingly hot in the airless train compartment.
As Wolfram and his comrades neared Dzhankoi, on the Crimean peninsula, they caught their first glimpse of the distant Caucasus mountains, their silver-white backbone picked out like a bright line of chalk by the blinding August sunshine.
The men were by now so hungry and exhausted that the heat and brightness started to play tricks with their eyes. When they saw the most beautiful silhouette of a city, they all got excited, trying to work out which one it could be, but then, in a flash, it disappeared and they realised that the entire city had been a mirage.
Just a few hours after this enticing vision, the train pulled into a siding on a bleak area of steppe some distance to the north of Feodosia. After a journey lasting more than four weeks, they had at long last arrived at their destination.
Feodosia had until recently been a handsome Black Sea resort – a place of fin-de-siècle villas and luxurious sanatoria frequented by fat-bellied apparatchiks of the Soviet Communist Party. In the course of three successive battles, the town had been besieged, lost and then finally recaptured by the German army, suffering such severe damage each time that its once-elegant waterfront, all stucco and pillars, now lay in ruins.
Wolfram assumed he and his comrades would be billeted inside the town. Instead, they were transferred northwards to a remote spot within striking distance of the Sea of Azov.
His first impression was of dryness and heat; he had never been anywhere so hot. ‘Sand and more sand,’ he wrote in a letter to his parents. ‘And no trees anywhere. It’s really, really scorching; and the sea is nowhere near as beautiful as the North Sea. It’s mostly calm – there are no shadows anywhere.’
He dreamed of the mountains above Oberammergau. ‘I’d give anything to be on a big cold glacier,’ he wrote. ‘A waterfall or green meadows with fruit trees. I’d prefer that to the whole of the sea.’
The men’s tented encampment was close to the military airfield – a desolate spot with no sign of the customary German efficiency. The camp itself was a blighted wasteland, its ditches and open sewers awash with fluvial waste. Swarms of flies spread disease and infection. Wolfram and his comrades had almost constant diarrhoea.
‘There are a few people living here,’ he wrote, ‘but I don’t know how. Nothing grows. We’re close to a Ukrainian village. The houses are built of mud and the people are very poor. They spend the whole day lying on mattresses outside their house.’ Wolfram had little contact with the locals, with the exception of the Tartars, who were friendly towards the Germans because of their hatred of Stalin.
The men were set to work on hard physical labour for twelve hours a day, digging trenches and constructing defensive earth banks. The only respite came in the morning and the evening when they were allowed to swim in the sea.
The front line was just across the Kerch Straits, less than fifty miles from Feodosia. As night fell, the men�
�s sleep was disturbed by the menacing drone of Russian planes in the skies overhead, skirting low over the landscape as they looked for positions to bomb. ‘It can be very loud when the Russians come,’ wrote Wolfram. ‘But so far, nothing has happened to anyone in our group.’
The hard work left the men continually hungry and thirsty. ‘I’d love to have something sweet and fresh,’ wrote Wolfram to his parents. ‘There’s no fruit here. If you want to send me something, please send me brause powder – the one where you add water and it tastes like lemon juice.’
He was feeling seriously anxious about the trials that lay ahead. Although he was relatively safe while still working for the Reich Labour Service, that safety would come to an end with the inevitable summons into the Wehrmacht.
‘Here you can see what war is,’ he wrote, ‘even if the only danger at present is from bombs and sickness. But we are experiencing quite a lot and I can’t say it’s particularly nice. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.’
Wolfram remained in the countryside to the north of Feodosia for four weeks. He was then transferred to a village near Kerch, closer to the front, which had been recaptured from the Soviet army in the spring. ‘All I can say,’ he wrote in a letter home, ‘is that this is the arsehole of the world. It’s not a very elegant expression, but the only place more depressing can be the desert…everything is dead.’
Kerch, like Feodosia, bore the scars of the recent fighting. Soldiers and civilians jostled through the ruined streets, each carrying their personal burden of misery. ‘Large numbers of German and Romanian soldiers,’ wrote Wolfram, ‘as well as men from the Reich Labour Service. And there are also lots of Russians sitting on the pavements…young girls with make-up and very dirty children.’ The civilian population was trapped in a war zone with no money, no shelter and precious little food.