On 3 July 1941, Chief of the Army General Staff Franz Halder, noting that the Red Army appeared to have no more reserves to throw into battle, had already given vent to his euphoria. ‘So it’s really not saying too much,’ he noted in his diary, ‘if I claim that the campaign against Russia has been won in 14 days.’220
On 16 July 1941, therefore, Hitler held a meeting to make arrangements for the governance of the conquered territories. In nominal overall charge was the Nazi Party’s chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, named Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. His Baltic German origins made him seem the appropriate man for the job. Rosenberg’s office had been planning to co-opt some of the Soviet Union’s subject nationalities in the area, and in particular the Ukrainians, as a counterweight to the Russians. But these plans were futile. Hitler explicitly removed not only the army but also Himmler’s SS and G̈ring’s Four-Year Plan organization from Rosenberg’s area of competence. And not only Himmler and G̈ring but also Hitler himself envisaged the ruthless subjugation, deportation or murder of millions of inhabitants in the occupied areas rather than their co-optation into a Nazi New Order. In pursuit of this goal Hitler appointed Erich Koch, the Regional Leader of East Prussia, to lead the Reich Commissariat of the Ukraine, with a brief to be as hard and brutal as possible. He fulfilled it with gusto. His counterparts in the Reich Commissariat of the Eastern Land, which included the former Baltic states, and the General Commissariat of Belarus, Hinrich Lohse and Wilhelm Kube, proved respectively weak and corrupt, and were in the end as widely disregarded as Rosenberg himself. Even more than in Poland, therefore, the SS was allowed to do more or less what it wanted in the newly occupied territories.221
Hitler was aware of the possibility that his plans for the racial subjugation and extermination of the indigenous populations of the occupied areas were so radical that they might alienate world opinion. Propaganda, therefore, he said on 16 July 1941, had to emphasize that the German forces had occupied the area in order to restore order and security and liberate it from Soviet control. 222 The invasion was sold to the German people not only as the decisive phase in the war against ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, but also as a preventive measure designed to forestall a Soviet assault on Germany. Indeed, on 17 September 1941 Hitler told his dinner companions that he had been obliged ‘to foresee that Stalin might pass over to the attack in the course of 1941’, while Goebbels already recorded him on 9 July fulminating ‘about the Bolshevik leadership clique which had intended to invade Germany’. How far these statements reflected the two men’s real beliefs is a moot point: both of them knew their words would be recorded for posterity - Hitler’s by Bormann’s stenographers, and Goebbels’s by his secretaries, for by this time he had gone over to dictating his diaries rather than writing them himself, and had signed a contract for their publication after his death.223 But this was certainly the line that was fed to the mass of ordinary Germans.
The announcement of the invasion took most German people almost completely by surprise. On many previous occasions, the imminence of war had been obvious in a massive escalation of hostile propaganda pumped out against the prospective enemy by Goebbels’s media machine. But because Hitler had wanted to deceive Stalin into thinking there would be no attack, such propaganda had been entirely absent on this occasion, and indeed in mid-June there were even rumours that Stalin was about to pay a formal visit to the German Reich. Most people’s attention was still focused on the conflict with Britain and the hope of reaching a settlement. Not surprisingly, therefore, people’s initial responses to the announcement of the launching of Barbarossa were mixed. The student Lore Walb captured the public reaction perfectly in her diary. People felt, she wrote, ‘great apprehension and depression at the same time, but also, somehow, they breathed a sigh of relief’. At least, she felt, the air had been cleared by the ending of the tactically necessary but politically false alliance between Germany and Soviet Bolshevism.224 The local authorities in the rural Bavarian district of Ebermannstadt reported that the people were making ‘anxious faces’ and were concerned ‘that the war was once more dragging itself on long into the future’.225 Luise Solmitz too thought that the invasion of the Soviet Union heralded war without end.226 ‘The first thought we all have is about the length of the war,’ wrote the journalist Jochen Klepper, who had been enlisted as a reserve officer with German units in Bulgaria and Romania, ‘but then the conviction that a reckoning with Russia was necessary sooner or later.’227
Some were worried that Hitler was biting off more than he could chew. Melita Maschmann was walking past a beer-garden by Lake Constance on 22 June 1941, on a visit to her parents, when she heard Hitler on the radio announcing the invasion of the Soviet Union. She later remembered that her initial reaction had been one of fear and apprehension. A war on two fronts had never been a good idea, and not even Napoleon had been able to defeat the Russians.
The people round me had troubled faces. We avoided one another’s eyes and looked out across the lake. Its farther shore was shrouded in mist under a grey sky. There was something cheerless in the mood of that cloudy summer’s morning. Before the broadcast was over it had started to rain. I had a sleepless night behind me and I was cold. I walked along the shore in a fit of depression. The water lapped, grey and indifferent, against the quayside. There was one thing the invasion of Russia would certainly mean. The war would be prolonged for many years, and there would perhaps be immeasurably greater sacrifices.228
The stunning victories of the German armies, trumpeted over the media from 29 June 1941 onwards, raised some people’s spirits and convinced many of them that the war might not last so long after all; yet enthusiasm continued to be outweighed by apprehension amongst the great majority. 229 An official in Ebermannstadt summarized reactions with remarkable honesty some weeks later, on 29 August 1941. The number of people who ‘are passionately following the progress of events, from fanatical enthusiasm’, he wrote, ‘is infinitesimally small. The great mass of people waits for the end of the war with the same longing as the sick person looks for his recovery.’230
IN THE TRACKS OF NAPOLEON
I
Within a few days of retreating to his dacha in despair, Stalin recovered his nerve, if indeed he had really lost it. Some thought he had retreated into temporary isolation like Ivan the Terrible centuries before, to demonstrate his indispensability. A State Defence Committee was set up, with Stalin himself in the chair. His retreat had given him the chance to rethink his role. On 3 July 1941, the same day that Franz Halder confided to his diary his belief that victory had already been achieved by the German forces, Stalin spoke to the Soviet people over the radio, for the first time not as Communist dictator but as patriotic leader. ‘Brothers and sisters,’ he said, ‘friends!’ This was an entirely new note. He went so far as to admit that the Red Army had been unprepared for the attack. The Germans, he said, were ‘wicked and perfidious . . . heavily armed with tanks and artillery’. But they would not prevail. The Soviet people had to organize civil defence and mobilize every ounce of energy to defeat the enemy. It was necessary to form partisan groups behind the lines to cause as much damage and disruption as possible. Silence, lies and evasion, people felt, had at last been replaced with some kind of truth.231 Communist Party propaganda began to emphasize the defence not of the revolution but of the motherland. The party newspaper, Pravda (‘Truth’), dropped the slogan ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’ from its masthead and replaced it with ‘Death to the German Invaders!’ Nikolai Moskvin noted on 30 September 1941 that ‘the mood of the local population has changed sharply’. From constantly threatening to betray him to the Germans, they came round to the patriotic cause after learning that the occupation authorities were keeping the collective farms going because it made it easier to collect the grain for transporting back to Germany.232
The speech’s patriotic appeal was all the more powerful because people were already beginning to learn the bitter realities of German occupation
. Stories of the horrors of the prisoner-of-war camps mingled with eyewitness reports of the mass shooting of civilians and the burning of villages by German troops to produce in the still-retreating ranks of the Red Army a determination to fight the enemy that had been almost entirely absent in the first chaotic days of the war. When the city of Kursk fell, the Germans arrested all the healthy male inhabitants, penned them into open barbed-wire enclosures without food or water, and then put them to work, guarded by Germans wielding rubber truncheons. ‘The streets are empty,’ noted a Soviet intelligence report. ‘The shops have been looted. There is no mains water and no electricity. Kursk has collapsed.’233 Minsk, reported Fedor von Bock, was little more than a ‘heap of rubble, in which the population is wandering about without any food.’234 Other cities and towns were reduced to a similar state. They were deliberately starved of supplies by their German conquerors, who requisitioned the bulk of foodstuffs for themselves, in a situation already rendered critical by the removal of large quantities of supplies by the retreating Red Army. Hitler declared that it was his firm intention ‘to raze Moscow and Leningrad to the ground, so as to prevent people staying there and obliging us to feed them through the winter. These cities are to be annihilated by the air force.’235 Many people fled the advancing German troops - the population of Kiev, for instance, fell by half, from 600,000 to 300,000 - but even for those who were left, staying alive quickly became a priority in every occupied area. The German military issued a stream of orders imposing curfews, drafting young men into forced labour, requisitioning winter clothing, and executing hundreds of citizens in reprisal for every supposed act of arson or sabotage.236 Looting by German troops was as widespread as it had been in Poland. ‘Everywhere,’ wrote General Gotthard Heinrici caustically on 23 June 1941, ‘our people are looking for harnesses and take the horses away from the farmers. Great wailing and lamentation in the villages. Thus is the population “liberated”.’237 Their requisitioning of food, he added on 4 July 1941, was thorough and comprehensive. ‘But the land will likely soon be sucked dry.’238 The troops’ behaviour quickly alienated even people who had initially welcomed them as liberators from Stalin’s tyranny. ‘If our people were only a bit more decent and sensible!’ lamented Hans Meier-Welcker. ‘They are taking everything that suits them from the farmers.’ Meier-Welcker saw soldiers stealing chickens, tearing beehives apart to get at the honeycomb, and throwing themselves upon a gaggle of geese in a farmyard. He tried to discipline the looters, but it was a lost cause.239
One army officer reported on 31 August 1941 from another part of the front:
The population not only in Orscha, but also in Mogilev and other localities, has repeatedly made complaints concerning the taking of their belongings by individual German soldiers, who themselves could have no possible use for such items. I was told, amongst others, by a woman in Orscha, who was in tears of despair, that a German soldier had taken the coat of her three-year-old child whom she was carrying in her arms. She said that her entire dwelling had been burnt; and she would never have thought that German soldiers could be so pitiless as to take the clothes of small children.240
Orders from Army Headquarters threatening punishment for such acts remained a dead letter. In Witebsk troops removed all but eight of the town collective’s 200 cattle, paying for only twelve of them. Huge quantities of supplies were stolen, including a million sheets of plyboard from a local timber yard, and 15 tons of salt from a storehouse. When the weather turned cold, troops began stealing wooden furniture from people’s houses to use as fuel. In the south, Hungarian troops were said to be ‘taking everything that was not nailed down’. The local people referred to them as ‘Austrian Huns’. Scores of thousands of troops were forcibly billeted on townspeople, eating them out of house and home. In desperation, many women turned to prostitution. In some areas the incidence of venereal disease among German troops soon reached a rate of 10 per cent. The establishment of 200 official army brothels for the troops in the east did little to alleviate this situation. Rapes were far from uncommon, though rape was not used as a deliberate policy by the army; yet of the 1.5 million members of the armed forces condemned by court-martial for offences of all kinds, only 5,349 were put on trial for sexual offences, mostly as a result of complaints by the female victims. The courts dealt with this kind of offence leniently, and arrests for looting and theft even fell after 22 June 1941. Clearly the army was turning a blind eye to misbehaviour by the troops in the east, so long as it did not affect morale.241 Theft and rape went alongside wilful acts of destruction. German army units amused themselves in the various palaces that dotted the countryside around St Petersburg by machine-gunning mirrors and ripping silks and brocades from the walls. They took away the bronze statues that adorned the famous fountains of the Peterhof Palace to be melted down, and destroyed the machinery operating the fountains. The houses in which famous Russian cultural figures had lived were deliberately targeted: manuscripts at Tolstoy’s Yasnaya Polyana were burned in the stoves, while the composer Tchaikovsky’s house was trashed and army motorcycles driven over the musical manuscripts that littered the floor.242
From the outset, the military adopted a reprisal policy that was brutal in the extreme. As in Serbia, German army units raided Ukrainian, Belarussian and Russian villages, burning the houses and shooting the inhabitants, in retribution for even the smallest supposed act of sabotage. They had little compunction in destroying what seemed to them to be scarcely habitable dwellings anyway. ‘If one had not seen with one’s own eyes these primitive circumstances among the Russians,’ wrote the soldier Hans-Albert Giese to his mother on 12 July 1941, ‘one could not believe that such a thing still existed . . . Our own cowstalls at home are sometimes like gold in comparison to the best room in the homes in which the Russians choose to live. They are perhaps a worse rabble than the Gypsies.’ A few days later he referred to Russian villagers as ‘bush negroes’.243 Senior army officers were equally contemptuous of the civilian population of Russia, which Manstein, entirely typically, described as a land far from Western civilization. Rundstedt was constantly complaining of the dirt in the quarters he took up in the southern sector of the front. The inhabitants of the Soviet Union seemed bestial, Asiatic, dull and fatalistic, or cunning and without honour, to officers and men of all ranks alike.244 On entering the Soviet Union, Gotthard Heinrici felt he had entered another universe: ‘I believe that one could only do it justice if we did not, as we have here, enter it gradually, on foot, but instead travelled to it as in a sea-voyage to a strange part of the globe and then, as one left our own shores, cut off all internal ties with the things we are used to at home.’245 This was a kind of negative tourism: ‘There will be hardly anyone in this miserable land,’ wrote one soldier from the conquered area, ‘who does not think gladly and often of his Germany and his loved ones at home. Things here are really even worse than in Poland. Nothing but dirt and tremendous poverty rule the roost here, and one simply cannot understand how people can live under such circumstances.’246 It did not matter, therefore, how harshly these miserable, half-human people were treated. Hundreds of civilians were taken as hostages; they were customarily shot when the next act of partisan resistance occurred. ‘We are now experiencing war in its entire tragedy,’ reported Alois Scheuer, a corporal, born in 1909, who belonged to the older generation among the troops, ‘it is humankind’s greatest misfortune, it makes people rough and brutal.’ Only the thought of his wife and children, and his Catholic faith, prevented him from ‘becoming almost without feeling in spirit and soul’.247 German military violence against civilians soon dissipated the support the invaders had initially won from the local population. Partisan resistance prompted further reprisals, leading more to join the partisans, and so the escalating cycle of violence continued. ‘The war is being cruelly fought on both sides,’ confessed Albert Neuhaus in August 1941.248
A few months later, he reported a commonplace incident of a kind that must have happened many time
s before. ‘In a neighbouring village that we passed through this afternoon, our soldiers had hanged a woman from a tree because she had been stirring up people against the German troops. So we are making short shrift of these people.’249 A keen photographer, Neuhaus thought nothing of taking a snap of an alleged partisan hanging from a tree and sending it back home to his wife.250 Everywhere German troops burned villages to the ground and shot civilians by the thousand.251 The speed of the German advance meant that many Red Army units found themselves cut off; they then continued fighting behind the front, joining with local people to create partisan bands to harry the enemy in the rear. This enraged the German troops, who, just as they had in Poland in 1939, considered this somehow unfair. ‘Lost soldiers,’ reported General Gotthard Heinrici on 23 June 1941, just one day into the invasion, ‘are sitting everywhere in the great forests, in innumerable farmsteads, and often enough shooting from behind. The Russians in general are fighting the war in an insidious manner. Our people have cleared them out several times, without pardon. ’252 ‘Our people,’ he wrote on 6 July 1941, ‘beat and shot dead everything that was running around in a brown uniform.’253 On 7 November 1941, Heinrici was forced to tell his interpreter, Lieutenant Beutelsbacher, who had been carrying out executions of real or imagined Soviet guerrilla fighters, ‘he is not to hang partisans up 100 m in front of my window. Not a pretty sight in the morning.’254
Faced with such horrors, Soviet soldiers and civilians began to listen to Stalin’s new, patriotic message and fight back. Encouraged by Stalin, more and more young men took to the woods to form partisan bands, raiding German installations and intensifying the vicious circle of violence and repression. By the end of the year, the overwhelming mass of civilians in the occupied areas had come round to supporting the Soviet regime, encouraged by Stalin’s emphasis on patriotic defence against a ruthless foreign invader.255 Escalating partisan resistance went along with a dramatic recovery of the fighting effectiveness of the Red Army. The cumbersome structure of the Red Army was simplified, creating flexible units that would be able to respond more rapidly to German tactical advances. Soviet commanders were ordered to concentrate their artillery in anti-tank defences where it seemed likely the German panzers would attack. Soviet rethinking continued into 1942 and 1943, but already before the end of 1941 the groundwork had been laid for a more effective response to the continuing German invasion. The State Defence Committee reorganized the mobilization system to make better use of the 14 million reservists created by a universal conscription law in 1938. More than 5 million reservists were quickly mobilized within a few weeks of the German invasion, and more followed. So hasty was this mobilization that most of the new divisions and brigades had nothing more than rifles to fight with. Part of the reason for this was that war production facilities were undergoing a relocation of huge proportions, as factories in the industrial regions of the Ukraine were dismantled and transported to safety east of the Ural mountains. A special relocation council was set up on 24 June and the operation was under way by early July. German reconnaissance aircraft reported what to them were inexplicable massings of railway wagons in the region - no fewer than 8,000 freight cars were employed on the removal of metallurgical facilities from one town in the Donbas to the recently created industrial centre of Magnitogorsk in the Urals, for example. Altogether, 1,360 arms and munitions factories were transferred eastwards between July and November 1941, using one and a half million railway wagons. The man in charge of the complex task of removal, Andrej Kosygin, won a justified reputation as a tirelessly efficient administrator that was to bring him to high office in the Soviet Union after the war. What could not be taken, such as coalmines, power stations, railway locomotive repair shops, and even a hydro-electric dam on the Dnieper river, was sabotaged or destroyed. This scorched-earth policy deprived the invading Germans of resources on which they had been counting. But together with the evacuation, it also meant that the Red Army had to fight the war in the winter of 1941-2 largely with existing equipment, until the new or relocated production centres came on stream.256
The Third Reich at War Page 24