Ostkrieg

by Stephen G. Fritz

  Initial announcements of spectacular triumphs that had done so much to raise hopes, in fact, now backfired, as Goebbels recognized. As the summer wore on and it became obvious that the Soviets continued to resist ferociously with seemingly endless manpower reserves, hopes of an early peace gave way to rising concerns. Whatever the scale of victories, propaganda announcements of “Bolshevik atrocities,” bestialities committed by “Jewish criminals,” and the “inhumane way of fighting” of the Bolsheviks did little to reassure the friends and relatives of those at the front. Moreover, the Soviet success in destroying significant grain stocks before they could be seized by the onrushing Wehrmacht forced German authorities to reduce the food ration in late July. Since the weekly meat ration for normal consumers had already been cut in early June, this second reduction was a disturbing blow for a population with long memories of the lean times of 1914–1918 and a leadership sensitive to the link between hunger and revolution.1

  For most Germans, the summer of 1941 meant the end of the good times of the 1930s, when the Nazis had provided jobs and economic security, promoted social programs, and restored a sense of national pride. Daily concerns over food shortages, rising prices, and the fate of loved ones now dominated the popular mood. Already in late June Goebbels worried, “Food situation in Berlin is very bad. No potatoes, few vegetables.” Although the situation improved temporarily, by mid-July he noted that the “extraordinarily precarious” food situation was producing “worries and also some nervousness,” while at the end of the month he fretted that of “a whole series of explosive items in popular opinion” the most troubling was “now the question of food.” By mid-August, fears of a repetition of the “Jewish subversion” of the Great War crept in, SD reports noting that, with an increase in black market activity, “once again an old problem” had become acute. “Unstable prices,” Goebbels noted with concern, “had made people surly and nervous.” In southwest Germany, the SD reported people grumbling that “in this war the little people are the losers once more. . . . Can one still speak of a Volksgemeinschaft?” For a movement intent on creating a society strong enough to withstand the rigors of war, such statements raised alarms. When anxiety over food persisted, the popular mood having grown “somewhat critical in August,” Goering ordered that food rations be maintained at all costs since the enemy’s “only hope is to wear down the morale of the home front.”2

  Goebbels ultimately concluded that, despite the grumbling, morale in Germany remained stable, but he did take note of two potentially explosive problems: signs of panic and nervous strain among the urban population of some of the western German cities exposed to repeated British bombing raids and a growing unease among German Catholics over Nazi actions against religion and the handicapped. Nor were the two concerns unrelated. Although virtually all top Nazis believed that Christianity and National Socialism were incompatible, Hitler, for pragmatic reasons, desired that the “church question” be left until after the war. Nonetheless, by mid-1941, party activists at the local and regional levels had inflamed passions by seeking to break the irksome power of the churches. In part, military success fueled this antireligion campaign as the imminent end of the war made a final reckoning with Christianity possible; in part, the campaign reflected party anger that wartime anxieties had strengthened church ties with the populace. Party actions in the first half of 1941 aimed specifically at reining in the power of the Catholic Church, first by banning Catholic publications, and then by having charity work taken over by the National Socialist People’s Welfare Organization (NSV). The closure of some monasteries raised fears of a renewed state assault on Catholicism, while the action of Adolf Wagner, the Gauleiter of Bavaria, in ordering all crucifixes removed from schoolrooms touched off a storm of protest. Some complained that, while their sons were fighting Bolshevism in the east, Nazi officials were attacking religion at home, while women wrote their husbands in Russia that they had better “come home to fight Bolshevism here.”3

  This disquiet with attacks on the church also merged with anxieties caused by bombing raids in the cities of the heavily Catholic Ruhr industrial area and growing unease over the Nazi policy of euthanasia to create a serious internal crisis. “The heavy night attack on Münster had some regrettable psychological consequences,” Goebbels conceded on 10 July. “These continuing bombardments on a city that in its clerical attitude is also delicate has had an unpleasant effect.” The bishop of Münster, Clemens August Graf von Galen, was responsible for much of the Nazi discomfort. A deeply conservative and anti-Communist individual, he had initially welcomed the assault on the Soviet Union. Nazi actions against the Catholic Church and the persistent British bombing raids, however, caused him to deliver a series of sermons in July denouncing the Gestapo’s suppression of religion. He also protested the closing of monasteries as an affront at a time when “the unity of the Volk needed to be preserved” and people needed special spiritual care. In late July, he wrote a letter to the Reich Chancellery that was a scarcely veiled attack on Hitler himself. His most confrontational action came on 3 August, however, when in a sermon he again condemned the attack on religion, then raised the explosive issue of euthanasia. “There is a general suspicion verging on certainty,” Galen asserted, “that these numerous deaths of mentally ill people do not occur of themselves but are deliberately brought about, that the doctrine is being followed according to which one may destroy so-called ‘worthless life,’ that is to kill innocent people if one considers their lives of no further value for the nation and state.” He then pointed to the obvious implications: people who became invalids, soldiers with severe wounds, anyone who in the opinion of Nazi officials had become unproductive, could be put on the list to be murdered. Who, then, he asked, would protect us? Who could average Germans trust? Who would give the murderer the punishment he deserved?4

  “An outrageous and provocative speech,” thundered Goebbels. “He even had the impudence to assert that our euthanasia efforts will go so far that wounded soldiers, if they are no longer needed for practical work, will be murdered by us.” To Nazi officials, Galen’s speech, in which he implicitly tied the war to murder and none too subtly suggested that the bombing raids were God’s punishment on an unjust government, connected too many dots, for there was, indeed, a connection between war and euthanasia. The pseudoscientific eugenics movement that materialized in the late nineteenth century out of social Darwinism postulated a belief that human inequality was based on genetics and that, by limiting or encouraging the procreation of certain people, the general level of humankind could be improved. Although the eugenics movement had emerged most strongly in Great Britain and the United States, in Germany after World War I it took on a more sinister tone. Eugenics advocates, in a climate poisoned by the recent large loss of life and the economic burdens of a lost war, went beyond customary calls for sterilization of the “unfit” and suggested the right of the state to kill those judged “unworthy of life.” Since the “fit” had given disproportionately of their lives in the war, the state needed to intervene to avoid a demographic disaster. In an idea promoted by the Nazis and embraced by many proponents of “racial hygiene,” the Volk had to be cleansed of the unfit in order again to be healthy. By eliminating the “socially burdensome,” moreover, the state could use its limited resources in a more “socially productive” fashion.5

  Hitler had been an early and enthusiastic advocate of eugenics, and, once in power, the Nazis moved swiftly to implement eugenics measures such as compulsory sterilizations and abortions. These actions resulted in the predictable opposition of the Catholic Church, but Hitler could count on not inconsiderable support from the German medical community. In 1935, he revealed his intention to implement a program of involuntary euthanasia in case of war. In the event, the Nazis had already in the summer of 1939 begun to kill handicapped infants. This “children’s euthanasia” was soon followed by a full-blown program of “adult euthanasia” under the direction of two young, ambitious, and ideologi
cally fanatic officials in the Führer Chancellery, Philipp Bouhler and Viktor Brack. That same summer, Hitler again advocated euthanasia in the context of war, reiterating his belief that mental patients should be killed as hospitals and medical personnel could be better employed caring for wounded soldiers.6

  The link between war and euthanasia was hardened with the German invasion of Poland. Within weeks of the attack, special units began killing mental patients, both Polish and German, in Polish institutions, some by shooting, and some, significantly, through the use of a sealed gas van. In October, Hitler signed an authorization typed on his own letterhead stationery—backdated to 1 September, the day the war began—that stated: “Reichsleiter [Reich Leader] Bouhler and Dr. Med. Brandt are commissioned with the responsibility of extending the authority of specified doctors so that, after critical assessment of their condition, those judged incurably ill can be granted mercy-death.” With that death sentence, the only time he was to affix his signature on such an order, Hitler had sealed the connection between war and euthanasia. The program for adult euthanasia, called T-4 after its headquarters in Berlin (Tiergartenstrasse 4), quickly recruited a pool of doctors to process the necessary forms and began work on six special killing centers. Those to be killed, primarily the German adult handicapped, were transported to the killing centers by special buses, then sent to gas chambers where they were murdered by carbon monoxide gas. By the spring of 1941, in cooperation with the SS, the program was extended into the concentration camps. By the time of Bishop Galen’s speech, over 70,000 and perhaps as many as 100,000 people had already been murdered in the euthanasia killing centers. Public protests unleashed by the bishop’s speech, and the fact that the Nazis felt constrained in moving against Galen in wartime, led Hitler to order an end to the adult euthanasia program on 24 August. Both the children’s and the concentration camp programs were continued, however, with more victims dying after the stop order was issued than before. The stop order also meant that a large staff of professional killers experienced in the methods and techniques of murder by gassing were suddenly available for other assignments.7

  If the euthanasia program was not the direct precursor of the Holocaust, certainly there existed key conceptual, technological, and organizational connections between the two. Moreover, both were vital aspects of the Nazis’ larger project of creating a racial utopia. This demographic vision, subsumed in the larger concept of Lebensraum, encompassed the cleansing of the German Volk, the ethnic restructuring of Central and Eastern Europe, and the destruction of the ultimate enemy, the Jews. Just as importantly, the implementation of this abhorrent scheme could not have been undertaken without war. Hitler’s prophecy, the euthanasia program, the resettlement measures in Poland, the early notions of expelling the Jews from Europe, plans for a vast Jewish reservation in the east—all depended for realization on the stunning successes of the Wehrmacht. At each stage, however, expectations of the imminent realization of this racial utopia gave way to frustration as various obstacles thwarted Nazi planners. Time and again, however, military triumphs opened new avenues for ever more radical ventures. The mid-July burst of euphoria had resulted in the expansion of killing operations to include all Soviet Jews. Similarly, despite the official halt to the euthanasia program, a new round of combat successes in September and October would remove the last barriers to the full-blown implementation of the Final Solution. By the autumn of 1941, the various strands of the Nazi war of annihilation were to merge into one enormously deadly enterprise.

  If domestic protest had stymied Hitler’s euthanasia plans, that same month opposition from the military had paralyzed army operations. Ironically, when the Wehrmacht resumed large-scale offensive action after the August pause, the bitter debate between Hitler and his generals seemed to work to German advantage since it had convinced Stalin of the Germans’ intention to replenish their forces and strike directly at Moscow. Hitler, however, had other plans. Throughout July, even as the fighting raged on the central axis at Smolensk, German forces had continued a steady if unspectacular advance in the south in hopes of seizing the important agricultural and industrial areas of Ukraine before winter. Operations here had been difficult from the outset. Not only did Rundstedt face the largest concentration of the Red Army, but geography favored the defenders as well. Soviet troops could anchor their line on the Carpathian Mountains in the south, while the Pripet Marshes in the north posed an impenetrable obstacle. At the same time, the Ukrainian front was larger in depth and breadth than the other two. Kiev lay some 350 miles from the border, compared to the 200 miles Bock’s forces had to cover to Minsk, while, south of the Ukrainian capital, German forces would have to advance into the wide expanse of the great bend of the Dnieper River. Even if the Soviets collapsed as expected, just occupying this huge swath of territory would have taxed the Germans. Supply was a constant problem, with the usual absence of good roads compounded by incessant rain in early July. Pulling off encirclement battles as in Belorussia would be difficult, especially since the Red Army had a decided advantage in tanks and aircraft. Added to the mix was better Soviet leadership, so the progress of Army Group South lagged significantly behind that of its neighbor to the north.8

  Nonetheless, by mid-July, the Sixth Army had advanced to within ten miles of Kiev, even as ferocious Soviet resistance, attacks from the Pripet area, and worsening supply problems meant that Reichenau had insufficient force to take the city. Still, Rundstedt planned to press ahead to the south, hoping to cross the Dnieper at Cherkassy, Dnepropetrovsk, or Zaporozhye in order to capture the key Donets industrial area in a vast encirclement operation. Because of stout Soviet resistance along the Rumanian frontier west of the Bug River, which accentuated Hitler’s ever-present worries about the security of his oil supply, both he and Halder favored a tighter envelopment. They insisted that Rundstedt turn forces south from Zhitomir along the Bug River in the direction of Odessa on the Black Sea in order to trap Soviet forces in that area. The ensuing encirclement at Uman resulted in the first great German victory in the south as, after weeks of grinding battles, Rundstedt’s forces destroyed some twenty Soviet divisions and bagged over 100,000 prisoners as well as large quantities of equipment and supplies. Nonetheless, the skillful Soviet defense, poor roads, and rain that hindered German movement enabled large enemy forces to escape to the east. Thus, even though Stalin regarded the battle at Uman to be little short of a disaster and, in response, issued his notorious Order No. 270 that declared surrender a form of treason and allowed the arrest of the families of commanders who capitulated or retreated, the Germans had not accomplished their goal.9

  For the Soviets, however, something far worse than Uman was brewing. By 20 August, having reached Kremenchug, 180 miles to the southeast of Kiev, the Germans controlled virtually all the territory west of the Dnieper. Over 300 miles straight north, the leading spearheads of Army Group Center had occupied Yelnya. In between these two powerful pincers, whose apex was roughly 300 miles to the west at Kiev, lay the entire Soviet Southwest Front, comprising six armies with well over fifty divisions. Intense Soviet attacks from the Pripet Marshes against the northern wing of the Sixth Army had prompted increasing German concern for the viability of any further advance east and southeast into the vital Ukrainian industrial areas as well as stretching Hitler’s patience to its limit. His directive on the twenty-first for Army Groups Center and South to cooperate sprang as much from his frustration at continued enemy resistance in the Pripet area, which also made any further move on Moscow impossible, as it did from any larger strategic consideration. Guderian’s Second Panzergruppe would have to be diverted to the south despite his reservations about the road and fuel situation as well as the need for his units to be replenished. With many of his divisions reduced to little more than reinforced regiments, with barely 30–50 percent of the normal complement of tanks, and seriously low on gasoline and oil, supply officers estimated that it would take eight to ten days just to bring his forces up to 60 percent o
f normal strength. Halder, concerned as ever about the need to conserve resources for the attack on Moscow, also undermined Hitler’s directive by limiting the number of units of the Second Panzergruppe assigned to this new operation.10 At the outset, then, even though the conditions existed for a great encirclement battle, neither the Germans nor the Soviets seem fully to have recognized the possibilities (and dangers) in the situation. Stalin, in fact, rejected Zhukov’s suggestions that Soviet troops be withdrawn to more defensible positions, transferring the troublesome general to the Leningrad front.

  Despite his doubts about the operation, Guderian received orders to begin a southerly push on 25 August. At 5:00 A.M. on what would prove to be a blisteringly hot day, General Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg’s Twenty-fourth Corps, with only about one-third of its tank strength operational, set off for the Desna River. Initially, it made rapid gains, even capturing a key bridge at Novgorod-Seversk intact. The primitive, sandy roads that limited progress to forty miles before the columns had to be refueled as well as the habitual ferocious Soviet resistance quickly slowed the advance. By the twenty-seventh, the Third Panzer and the Tenth Motorized Divisions had been so weakened that they had to go on the defensive, with only the Fourth Panzer capable of offensive operation. At that point, Army Group Center relented and released another two and a half mobile divisions to Guderian, but it took another four days for resupply sufficient to allow the resumption of the offensive. Bock admitted on the thirty-first that, with both his flanks under attack, Guderian was “in a difficult situation.” On 1 September, the Twenty-fourth Corps continued its advance, but strong enemy resistance, poor roads, rainy weather, damaged bridges, and inadequate provisions slowed the German advance to a crawl. The next day, following the loss of a bridgehead south of the Desna, a sense of crisis pervaded the German High Command. “Guderian’s description of the situation was so pessimistic,” Bock noted, “that I had to decide if I should propose . . . that the armored group be pulled back across the Desna.” On the fourth, an anxious and dissatisfied Hitler intervened, demanding that Guderian concentrate his forces for the drive south. The latter requested still more reinforcements, a demand that led Bock seriously to consider dismissing him. On the sixth, torrential rains turned the roads into a muddy quagmire that ground all movement to a halt.11 Despite later images of a swift encirclement operation, by the end of the first week of September the Second Panzergruppe struggled to maintain any momentum at all.