Ostkrieg

by Stephen G. Fritz

  This was followed by his even more famous injunction:

  The Germans are not human beings. Henceforth the word German means to us the most terrible curse. . . . If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day. . . . If you do not kill the German, he will kill you. If you cannot kill your German with a bullet, kill him with your bayonet. . . . If you kill one German, kill another—there is nothing more amusing for us than a heap of German corpses. Do not count days; do not count miles. Count only the number of Germans you have killed. Kill the German—this is your old mother’s prayer. Kill the German—this is what your children beseech you to do. Kill the German—this is the cry of your Russian earth. Do not waver. Do not let up. Kill.57

  Hitler had, from the beginning, intended a war of annihilation against the Soviet system and its people; they were now responding in kind.

  Little evidence of any immediate stiffening of Russian resolve was apparent as German forces pushed southward across the Don and easily broke through the thin crust of Soviet defenses. All across the front, the main obstacle to a rapid advance appeared to be more the blazing heat, fuel shortages, and vehicle breakdowns than enemy resistance. Within a few days, the Germans had crossed the Manych River and seized the towns of Salsk and Proletarskaya, in the process cutting the main railway line to Stalingrad. On 1 August, the Fifty-second Corps, on the extreme left flank, captured the city of Elista in the broiling, desolate Kalmyk Steppe, nearly 200 miles on the way to the fabled city of Astrakhan. By 9 August, the Fifth Corps had sped over 150 miles and seized the strategic rail junction at Krasnodar, the principal city of the Kuban. That same day, Kleist’s Fifty-seventh Panzer, Third Panzer, and Forty-fourth Corps converged on the oil city of Maikop. The next day, having raced 300 miles across the steppe, the Fortieth Panzer Corps reached Piatigorsk, little more than 30 miles from the Terek River, the last major obstacle in front of the oil region around Grozny. Despite these rapid advances, however, the enemy again evaded encirclement, a problem that Halder realized was not likely to be solved given increasing terrain difficulties and fuel shortages. At a conference at Führer Headquarters on 30 July, the head of the OKH reacted to a proposal for further attempts to intercept the enemy with outraged disbelief. “That is rankest nonsense,” he recorded in his diary. “This enemy is running for dear life and will be in the northern foothills of the Caucasus well ahead of our armor.” The OKH, indeed, quickly dropped the idea of encirclements, opting instead to drive forward as fast as possible.58

  These spectacular advances, which seemed evidence of the collapse of enemy resistance, now induced Hitler once again to intervene in the course of operations. Halder had for days unsuccessfully been trying to convince Hitler of the importance of the Stalingrad axis: a drive to the Volga would be over more favorable terrain, would be easier to supply, and would create the defensive shoulder needed to cover the advance into the Caucasus. Halder, then, was greatly annoyed when, at the situation conference on 30 July, Jodl announced “pompously that the fate of the Caucasus will be decided at Stalingrad and that . . . it would be necessary to divert forces from Army Group A to Army Group B. This is a dressed up version of my own proposal . . . [though] no one in the illustrious company of the OKW seemed to be able to grasp its significance.” In the face of a large Soviet buildup at Stalingrad, Hitler now acquiesced and the next day ordered a reinforcement of Army Group B, for the first time making Stalingrad a priority. Less than a week after the start of Edelweiss, then, Hitler’s impetuosity, albeit abetted by Jodl and Halder, resulted in yet another redistribution of forces. List’s Army Group A found itself stripped not only of Manstein’s Eleventh Army, which was on its way to Leningrad, but also now of Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army (and, soon, the Rumanians, as well). His powerful force of five armies reduced to just two, List was left to struggle on with the Seventeenth Army in the west and the First Panzer Army in the east, separated by three hundred miles and now with secondary priority for fuel, ammunition, and replacements. Just as crucially, Edelweiss lost much of its air support. The Schwerpunkt of the summer campaign, if one even remained, had switched once again, this time to Army Group B, even though Hitler demanded that List’s reduced force seize the key objectives set for it. Although List argued that sending a “relatively weak force” deep into the Caucasus would be a “great gamble,” his only consolation was Halder’s sarcastic comment that the diversion of troops would at least ease his supply problems.59

  The consequences of the Führer’s decision were quick and profound. Although Foreign Armies East reported that enemy formations in the Caucasus were “not top-quality troops” and were “increasingly heading for disintegration,” even predicting that the Soviets would likely now turn the burden of the war over to the British and defend the region only on a “slight scale,” Stalin had no such intention, instead using the respite to organize an effective defense along the Terek River line. The swift German advance of the first weeks suddenly stalled in the face of growing enemy reinforcements and increasingly fierce resistance. In many respects, the seizure of Maikop was representative of the new dynamic of the fighting, being both the culmination of German success and the harbinger of tough times ahead. Kleist’s forces took the city, to Hitler’s great glee, on 9 August, but only after hard street fighting and heavy losses. Euphoria at the first of the oil complexes to fall into German hands soon turned to gloom, however, when it was found that the vital oil installations had been destroyed by the Soviets: derricks toppled, power plants wrecked, refineries demolished, and the wells themselves filled with stones and iron parts or sealed with concrete. It was such a thorough and irreparable job of demolition, in fact, that the technical experts sent to rebuild the facilities recommended that the drilling equipment earmarked for the Caucasus would be better employed in Rumania or in the Vienna region than at Maikop. Not only would it have required six months to a year before any significant extraction of oil could begin again, but oil exports to the Reich would have to be sent via the Black Sea, control of which was far from assured. At Maikop in early August, the illusions underpinning the summer campaign began to give way to harsh reality.60

  By mid-August, German forces had left the fertile valleys of the Kuban and reached the foothills of the imposing Caucasus mountain range, over 600 miles long, up to 120 miles deep, and with peaks soaring to heights of more than 16,000 feet. As German troops advanced south, they seemed to be leaving civilization, swallowed up by vast, trackless primeval forests. Supplying even the most basic items in such a primitive area became unimaginably difficult: field kitchens could not keep up, so food had to be brought to the troops by long, grueling marches; ammunition, artillery, and mortar shells were brought forward on horses; the lack of villages meant that most frontline soldiers spent the night in the open even in rain and snow. Not least, the Germans also faced increasing resistance from the Russians, who found the terrain ideal for the defense. Finally, Army Group A fell victim to Paulus’s insatiable demand for troops. The elite Italian Alpine Corps, the Twenty-second Panzer Division, and much of the available air support departed for the Stalingrad region in mid-August, while the Grossdeutschland Division left at the same time for the west, victim of Hitler’s persistent fear of a second front. By the end of the month, Hitler, worried by an enemy buildup near Astrakhan, ordered the Sixteenth Motorized Division to Elista in the Kalmyk Steppe. Over the next few months, supported by Cossack auxiliaries, it patrolled another 150 miles to the southeast to the outskirts of Astrakhan, although the very fact that one division was left to control such vast distances reflected all too clearly the inadequacy of German strength. With forces barely sufficient for one operation, List faced the challenge of simultaneously trying to clear the Black Sea coast, breach the Terek River line and seize Grozny, and capture the high passes through the Caucasus before snow blocked the way. Little wonder, then, that the German momentum slowed perceptibly in late August and bogged down completely in September.61

  By 18 August, t
he tempo of operations had changed completely, with the thirty-mile advances of the first weeks giving way to daily struggles to advance a mile or two. List had hoped a surprise attack launched on the twelfth from Krasnodar and Maikop through the western Caucasus toward the port city of Tuapse, which aimed at pinning Soviet forces against the Black Sea, might finally break enemy resistance. In what was to become an all-too-familiar refrain, however, the twin German thrusts had, after some initial success, by the eighteenth bogged down in the mountains in the face of impenetrable terrain and fierce Soviet counterattacks. Although List still hoped that the opposition was merely that of strong enemy rearguards aiming to delay the German advance, Kleist at the First Panzer Army knew better. Following a mid-August trip to view conditions in the area, Major Engel, Hitler’s adjutant, summarized the mood: “Troops more or less finished. . . . Caucasus south of Krasnodar and Maikop crossable only by four mule-tracks by mountain troops with mules. Creation of a point of main effort in no way possible. . . . Away from roads and paths operation totally impossible because of jungle-like thicket and no visibility. Armored divisions totally inappropriate. Tough Russian resistance in the mountains, heavy losses.” Informed of the difficulties, Hitler’s reaction was typical: “Engel will swallow anything he is told.”62

  Nor were more southerly attempts to push through mountain passes in the direction of the port of Sukhumi any more successful. By the second half of the month, German mountain troops had forced their way to, and in some instances across, the key passes, but a swift enemy response, in the form of small, mobile detachments of combat engineers who blocked the few roads and mountain paths, effectively stymied their movement further. Although German and Rumanian forces crossed the Kerch Straits on 2 September, cleared the Taman Peninsula, and on the sixth reached the key port and naval base of Novorossiysk, thus threatening to roll up the entire Soviet coastal defenses, they could go no further. After five days of heavy fighting, the invaders had by the eleventh managed to push only as far as the southern industrial suburbs, but there the front line remained until early December, when the Germans began abandoning the Kuban. With Soviet reinforcements arriving by sea and determined to defend the area at all costs, German hopes for a swift advance south evaporated into a grim stalemate.63

  Pressed by an increasingly impatient Hitler to break through to the coast, List remained skeptical, recommending, given his shrinking manpower and critical fuel situation, shortening the line and concentrating his mountain troops on a single thrust toward Tuapse. Even this limited move gave the field marshal nightmares as he worried that an isolated thrust by a single formation across the passes would be both impossible to supply and vulnerable to enemy counterattack. Hitler, however, would have none of it, instead demanding that List pursue simultaneous attacks on both Tuapse and Sukhumi, roughly one hundred miles to the south. With tensions rising and time running out before snow closed the passes, Hitler ordered List to come to his headquarters at Vinnitsa on 31 August. There, he confronted the field marshal with, of all things, the accusation that he had failed in his attacks because he had dissipated his strength. Unable to put his misgivings effectively to the Führer, List left the meeting with the promise that he would renew his attacks toward the coast. Once back at his headquarters at Stalino, however, all his doubts resurfaced. On 7 September, he requested that Jodl, as Hitler’s closest operational adviser, visit the army group’s headquarters in order to discuss the situation. That same day, Jodl flew to Stalino, discussed the situation with List for several hours, then flew back that evening to Vinnitsa. By the time of his return to Führer Headquarters, Jodl had come to share List’s concerns, a stance that would unwittingly bring to a head the tension of the last weeks and touch off a serious command crisis.64

  Tempers had been strained at the Werwolf complex at Vinnitsa ever since the Führer had arrived in mid-July, to be confronted with stifling heat (often surpassing 100°F) and mosquito-infested surroundings. Clearly uncomfortable in the heat, impatient with the slow progress of operations, and increasingly paranoid about his food, water, and even oxygen, Hitler was already in a feverish state. When Jodl, who seldom stood up to his domineering boss, gathered his courage and reported that List had faithfully followed all directives given to him and had not engaged in insubordinate behavior, the Führer exploded in an “indescribable outburst of fury.” By siding with List, Jodl had implicitly criticized Hitler’s own conduct of operations and placed the blame for any failures squarely on the Führer. This alone would have been enough to set Hitler off, but the deeper problem lay in the calendar: time was running out. For weeks, Hitler had been subject to alternating moods of euphoria and frustration. On 19 August, for example, he had boasted privately to Goebbels that operations in the Caucasus were going extremely well, that he still expected to seize the oil regions of Grozny and Baku and, once these had been taken, to burst through to the Middle East. Just three days later, however, he flew into a rage at news that mountain troops had planted a German flag on Mount Elbrus, the highest peak in Europe. Speer claimed that he had seldom seen Hitler so enraged, and for days afterward he fumed at the pointless stunt of “these mad mountaineers” who had wasted valuable time and resources when he was concentrating everything on taking Sukhumi. It was, Speer said, as if Hitler believed these few men had ruined his entire operational plan.65

  With that observation, Speer hit the crux of the matter. By early September, Hitler had evidently come to the realization that the goals for 1942, especially reaching the vital Caucasus oil regions, were not likely to be achieved. For the second time a throw of the dice had failed and with it any reasonable chance of a favorable outcome to the war. Believing that his generals had again failed him and deliberately sabotaged his orders, he now demonstratively separated himself as much as possible from their presence. After past contretemps, Hitler had always made small conciliatory gestures to those around him, but this blowup seemed to mark a psychological watershed. Warlimont was shocked by the intense hatred on Hitler’s face, as if he realized that his last gamble had been lost. He now reduced contact with his closest entourage to an absolute minimum: he ate alone, withdrew to his windowless hut, where the two daily military briefings were held “in an icy atmosphere” and which he would leave only at dusk, refused to shake hands with his generals, demanded to see all the directives he had given to Army Group A, and ordered a verbatim record kept of all situation conferences to eliminate further malicious distortions of his words. Although he quietly dropped any further plans for an offensive in the western Caucasus Mountains, he nonetheless dismissed List on 9 September, with hints that other changes were to follow. These seem to have involved a reorganization of the OKW, where, following the capture of Stalingrad, Jodl and Keitel were to be replaced, respectively, by Paulus and Kesselring.66

  In the event, however, the fallout from Hitler’s displeasure settled on the OKH, where Halder’s situation had become increasingly untenable. Relations between the two had hit rock bottom on 24 August when Halder, in a criticism that Hitler could not have missed, complained that soldiers were being sacrificed because their commanders lacked the authority to make even the most basic decisions to deploy them more sensibly. At that, Hitler exploded in withering ridicule of his army chief. “What can you tell me about troops, Herr Halder,” he mocked, “you who even in the First World War only sat in the same swivel chair, you, who don’t even wear the black wound badge.” Deeply humiliated, the chief of staff must have known that his days were numbered, but the final break did not come until a month later, on 24 September, when Hitler finally sacked him. Halder’s nerves, the Führer said, were used up, and his too had suffered from their confrontations. With that, Halder’s long service to Hitler ended, and with his departure came a downgrading of the position of chief of the General Staff. Halder’s successor, Kurt Zeitzler, was an outsider, a young and energetic officer with the reputation of being a Nazi who could be expected to be compliant to the Führer’s wishes. The process of turni
ng the army into Hitler’s tool had been completed. But his desire to have as his new OKH chief a man who was more than just professionally competent, who was, instead, fired with a “fanatical faith in the idea” and the “fervor of a National Socialist credo,” was itself an implicit admission of impending defeat.67

  At the beginning of August, Hitler had prophesied that the next six weeks “would be decisive for the outcome of the war.” By mid-September, the balance sheet, as even the normally optimistic Halder could see, was clearly unfavorable: the Red Army, far from being destroyed, was increasing its strength while the Germans could not make good their losses; the Caucasus operation had stalled; heavy fighting had erupted in Stalingrad; Soviet forces were threatening German positions in the north; and, in North Africa, Rommel’s offensive had petered out at El Alamein. The second culmination point of the war had been reached, and Germany’s time had run out. Hitler’s late July decision to split the offensive, which Halder had been unable to prevent, had been crucial. Until now, German tactical superiority had been able to offset Hitler’s poor operational decisions, but the overall strategic implications of this blunder could not be remedied: given the time factor and the powerful coalition being arrayed against it, the Wehrmacht could not now hope to overcome the disaster on the Volga that would likely result from the Führer’s decision.68

  Indeed, other actions by Hitler at the time suggest as much. On 8 September, he issued a Führer order on “fundamental tasks of defense” that, in its stress on holding the line “under all circumstances,” mirrored Stalin’s “Not one step back” decree. A few days later, he ordered an east-west exchange of battle-weary divisions for the purpose of their rehabilitation, another implicit signal that the war in the east would not be over by winter. On 14 October, finally, he directed all forces, except those battling inside Stalingrad and pushing toward Grozny, to prepare winter lines of defense, an explicit admission of failure. “This year’s summer and fall campaigns,” he announced, “excepting those operations underway . . . , have been concluded.” Once the Soviets decided to withdraw their forces rather than squander them in encirclement battles, there had been little the Germans could do, given their deficiencies in manpower, mobility, and fuel. Hitler, according to his army adjutant, Schmundt, saw no end to the war in Russia and was “at the very end of his tether”: “He hates everything that is field gray . . . and is longing for the day when he could cast off his tunic.” The great operational victories of the spring and summer had yet to be converted into a strategic triumph; whether such could be achieved in the Caucasus or along the Volga remained to be seen.69