The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  Stalin also ordered a series of massive ethnic cleansing operations to remove what he and the Soviet leadership thought of as potential by subversive elements from the theatre of war. More than 390,000 ethnic Germans in the Ukraine were forcibly deported eastwards from September 1941. Altogether there were nearly one and a half million ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union. 15,000 Soviet secret policemen descended upon the Volga to begin the expulsion of the ethnic Germans living there, removing 50,000 of them already by the middle of August 1941. Similar actions took place in the lower Volga, where a large community of German descent was living. In mid-September 1941, expulsions began from the major cities. By the end of 1942, more than 1,200,000 ethnic Germans had been deported to Siberia and other remote areas. Perhaps as many as 175,000 died as a result of police brutality, starvation and disease. Many of them spoke no German, and were German only by virtue of remote ancestry. It made no difference. Other ethnic groups were targeted too - Poles, as we have seen, were deported in large numbers from 1939, and, later in the war, up to half a million Chechens and other minorities in the Caucasus were removed for having allegedly collaborated with the Germans as well. In addition, as the German forces advanced, the Soviet secret police systematically murdered all the political prisoners in the jails that stood in their path. One hit squad arrived at a prison at Luck that had been damaged in a bombing raid, lined up the political prisoners, and machine-gunned up to 4,000 of them. In the western Ukraine and western Belarus alone, some 100,000 prisoners were shot, bayoneted, or killed by hand-grenades being thrown into their cells.257 Whatever their impact on the war effort, such actions stored up a bitter legacy of hatred which was to lead within a very short time to horrific acts of revenge.

  II

  The Soviet will to resist, expressed in these various ways, operating from top to bottom of the hierarchy, quickly became apparent to the German military leaders, who soon realized that the war was not going to end in a matter of weeks after all. Army Group Centre had managed to encircle huge numbers of Soviet troops, but in the north and south the Red Army had only been driven back, and the German advance was slowing down. Far from melting away, the Red Army was beginning to find ways to bring fresh reserves to the front, and it was starting to mount successful counter-attacks on a local basis. Well before the end of July, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock was forced to deal with repeated counter-attacks by the Soviet forces. The Russians were becoming ‘impudent’, he noted. ‘Victory has not yet been won!’ ‘The Russians are unbelievably tough!!’258 ‘Day by day,’ one ordinary soldier wrote in a propaganda tract, the troops had to endure ‘the piercing screams of the Bolshevik hordes, who seem to rise from the earth in dense masses’.259 Particularly around Smolensk, on the way from Minsk to Moscow, to the east of the river Dnieper, the Soviet commanders Zhukov and Timoshenko had begun a series of heavy counter-attacks on 10 July 1941 in an attempt to disrupt the advance of General Heinz Guderian’s panzer group towards the city. Poorly equipped, badly co-ordinated and inadequately supplied, the Soviet resistance failed, but it slowed down the German advance and inflicted heavy losses of men and equipment on Guderian’s forces, whose supply lines were now seriously over-extended. Ordinary soldiers shared the view that the Russians were unexpectedly tough.260 The German armies were subjected to constant harassment and repeated attacks. ‘The Russians are very strong & fight with desperation,’ wrote General Gotthard Heinrici to his wife on 20 July 1941. ‘They appear suddenly all over the place, shooting, fall upon columns, individual cars, messengers etc. . . . Our losses are considerable.’261

  Indeed, the Germans had lost over 63,000 men by the end of the month.262 On 22 July 1941 Heinrici confided to his wife: ‘One does not have the feeling that in general the Russian will to resist has been broken, or that the people want to drive out their Bolshevik leaders. For the moment one has the impression that the war will go on, even if Moscow is taken, somewhere in the depths of this endless land.’263 Over the next few weeks, he returned again and again in his letters to express his amazement at the Russians’ ‘astonishing strength to resist’ and their astounding ‘toughness’. ‘Their units are all half-destroyed, but they just fill them with new people and they attack again. How the Russians manage it is beyond me.’264 German military intelligence had failed to register the presence of the huge Soviet reserve units to the east of the Dnieper, from which fresh troops were constantly being moved to the front.265 Little more than a month after the invasion had begun, leading German generals were beginning to recognize that the Soviet Union was the Third Reich’s ‘first serious opponent’ with ‘inexhaustible human resources’.266 By 2 August General Halder was already beginning to think of how to supply German troops with winter clothing.267 Nine days later he was seriously concerned:

  In the situation as a whole it is becoming ever clearer that we have underestimated the Russian colossus, which has consciously prepared for the war with the absolute lack of restraint that is peculiar to totalitarian states. This conclusion applies to its economic as well as its organizational forces, to its transport system and above all to its purely military capacity to operate. At the outset of the war we reckoned with about 200 enemy div[isions]. Now we are already counting 360. These div[isions] are certainly not armed and equipped in our sense of the words, and tactically they are often poorly led. But they are there. And when a dozen of them have been destroyed, then the Russians put up another dozen.268

  And even Halder’s gloomy statistic was in fact a substantial underestimation of the strength of his opponent. Moreover, the German troops were suffering heavy losses - 10 per cent of the invasion force was dead, wounded or missing by the end of July 1941. ‘In view of the weakness of our forces and the endless spaces,’ he concluded gloomily on 15 August 1941, ‘we can never achieve success.’269

  While the Red Army drew on vast reserves to replace the millions of soldiers lost or captured in the first months of the campaign, the German armed forces had already used up most of the manpower available and had very few fresh troops to throw into the fray. In late July, Guderian pushed on with his armoured forces and took control of the area of land between the two rivers Dvina and Dnieper, but the overstretched German forces left gaps in their defences, and the Red Army, fired with new enthusiasm for the battle, launched a series of counter-attacks that began to give Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, commanding Army Group Centre, serious cause for concern. As the relentless assaults continued, he was forced to concede ‘that our troops are tired, and as a consequence of the heavy losses among the officers do not exhibit the necessary steadiness either’. ‘I have almost no reserves left to pit against the enemy’s massing of strength and his relentless attacks,’ he confessed on 31 July 1941. By the end of the first week in August he was seriously worried about ‘the slowly declining fighting value of our troops under the impact of constant attacks’. How, he wondered, would his forces ever be able to continue their advance under such conditions?270

  Quite apart from this, moving around the countryside was far more difficult than it had been in France, Holland or Belgium. Metalled roads were few and far between, totalling only 40,000 miles in all the vast expanse of the Soviet Union. One soldier noted that even the made-up roads were so full of potholes that his unit preferred to march along the ditch that ran along next to it.271 The railways ran on a broad gauge to which it was difficult to transfer Western European rolling stock after the Red Army had removed virtually all the Soviet locomotives, goods wagons and passenger coaches, and destroyed or sabotaged tracks, bridges and viaducts. And even without these problems, the country was too sparsely supplied with railway lines to transport with any rapidity the huge quantities of men and supplies the Germans brought into the fray. German jeep and truck production was still relatively low despite the motorization drive of the 1930s, and motor vehicles in any case were restricted in their use by the shortage of fuel. In these circumstances, the German and allied armies relied heavily on horses - at least 625,000 of the
m on the Eastern Front - for basic transport, hauling artillery pieces, carrying ammunition and pulling supply carts. Horses were often better able to negotiate the muddy and treacherous tracks that passed for roads in Eastern Europe. ‘Thank God for our horses!’ exclaimed Meier-Welcker some months later:

  At times they are the last and only thing we can rely on. Thanks to them we made it through the winter, even if they died in their thousands from exhaustion, lack of fodder and their tremendous exertions. Horses are especially important in the wet summer of this year and the often thickly wooded, boggy and impassable terrain of our present sector. The motorized troop units in our area shrank to miserable objects last winter and spring.272

  But horses were also slow-moving, unable to go at much more than walking pace for most of the time. The vast bulk of the infantry, as always, trudged along on foot.

  As the invasion proceeded, the wear and tear of flying almost continual missions began to tell on the German aircraft. By the end of July 1941 there were only just over 1,000 planes in operation. Command of the air counted for little if there were too few bombers to inflict significant damage on Soviet war production. The expanse of Russia was too vast for the German air force to establish permanent air superiority, however great its effectiveness in a tactical role. Stuka dive-bombers terrified enemy infantry by the screaming noise of their engines as they plunged out of the sky, but they were extremely vulnerable to attack from fighter planes, while the bombers most commonly deployed, the Dornier 17 and the Junkers 88, lacked the range to be effective against Soviet installations. Troop losses by this time, including missing, wounded and killed, were over 213,000. The rest, as Bock had observed, were beginning to suffer from exhaustion after more than a month of non-stop combat. Spare parts for tanks and armoured personnel carriers were in short supply. On 30 July 1941 the Army Supreme Command ordered the advance to pause and regroup. Little more than a month after it had begun, the invasion had started to lose its momentum.273

  Dividing the invading forces into Army Groups North, Centre and South, intended to advance tangentially to one another, was a measure partly necessitated by the presence in the area of invasion of the vast and impenetrable Pripet marshes. But it meant that the German armed forces were unable to concentrate on a single, unstoppable, knockout blow. By August 1941, it was already clear that the advance could not resume on all three fronts simultaneously. A choice had to be made between putting the weight of the next phase of the assault in the north, towards Leningrad, the centre, towards Moscow, or the south, towards Kiev. The leading German generals, following the classic Prussian military doctrine of going for the enemy’s centre of gravity, wanted to continue on to Moscow. But Hitler, whose contempt for the Russian troops was boundless, did not think this would be necessary; for him, securing the economic resources of the western parts of the Soviet Union was the primary aim; the Soviet state would crash into ruin in any case. After the victories in France and the west, neither Halder nor the other generals who thought like him felt able to gainsay the Leader. On 21 August 1941, after a good deal of debate, Hitler rejected the army’s request to continue pushing on towards Moscow, and ordered the generals to divert forces from Army Group Centre to strengthen the attack in the south, take Kiev, secure the agricultural resources of the Ukraine, and then head on for the Crimea, to deprive the Russians of a possible base for air attacks on the Romanian oilfields. Further troops and resources were detached from the centre to bolster the drive towards Leningrad. But Germany’s Finnish allies lacked the resources, the manpower and indeed the political will to push the Soviet forces back very far beyond the old Russo-Finnish border, and the German advance was slowed down by fierce Soviet resistance. A frustrated Hilter announced on 22 September 1941 that he had ‘decided to erase the city of Petersburg from the face of the earth. I have no interest in the further existence of this large city after the defeat of Soviet Russia’.274 The threat proved to be empty bluster.

  Field Marshal Fedor von Bock telephoned Halder and told him that the decision to focus on the southern sector was misconceived,

  above all because it puts in question the attack on the east. The War Directives are always saying that the point is not to capture Moscow! I don’t want to capture Moscow! I want to destroy the enemy army, and the mass of this army is standing in front of me!! The turn away towards the south is a sideshow, however large it might be, through which a question-mark is placed over the execution of the main operation, namely the destruction of the Russian armed forces before the winter - it does not help at all!!275

  A disappointed Bock could only give vent to his frustration in the pages of his diary: ‘If the eastern campaign after all its successes now fades away into a dreary defence,’ he wrote, ‘that’s not my fault.’276 Halder was just as irritated, criticizing in his diary the ‘zigzag in the Leader’s individual orders’ that the switch of target involved.277 Yet at first, Hitler’s decision to weaken his forces in the centre did not seem to pose a problem. German armoured divisions from Army Groups Centre and South under the command of Heinz Guderian, who had caused Bock considerable irritation with his insistent and intemperate demands, broke through the Soviet lines, repelled a massive counter-offensive launched in late August and early September, and captured a further 665,000 prisoners, along with 884 tanks and over 3,000 artillery pieces. Kiev, Kharkov and most of central and eastern Ukraine were occupied in late September and October, and on 21 November 1941 German forces took Rostov-on-Don, opening up the prospect of cutting off oil supplies to the Red Army from the Caucasus and harnessing the industrial resources of the Donets Basin. These were among the greatest German military victories of the war.278

  Even before the assault on Kiev, German losses in terms of killed, missing, wounded or invalided out had mounted to nearly 400,000, and half the German tanks were out of commission or under repair. Bock hailed the operation as ‘a brilliant success’ but added that ‘the main strength of the Russians is standing unbroken in front of me, and - as before - the question remains open as to whether we will succeed in smashing it and exploiting the victory before winter comes in such a way that Russia cannot recover in this war’.279 Hitler thought this was still possible. The German forces, he told Goebbels on 23 September 1941, had achieved the breakthrough they had been looking for. German troops would soon encircle Moscow. Stalin, Hitler thought, was bound to sue for peace, and this would inevitably bring Britain to the negotiating-table too. The way was open to a final victory. Yet Hitler did not now expect this to occur immediately. He was already resigned to accepting that the war would go on until the following spring. But the huge victories of the preceding months left him optimistic that the war would be over by the middle of 1942 at the latest.280 Substantial numbers of troops were transferred back to Army Group Centre, now reinforced with fresh supplies, and strengthened by more forces from the north for a resumption of the march on Moscow. Bock had got his wish.281 2 million German soldiers and 2,000 tanks, backed by massive air-power, advanced on the Soviet capital in October 1941 in a fresh campaign named ‘Operation Typhoon’, once again encircling the Red Army forces and taking 673,000 prisoners and enormous quantities of equipment. Addressing the traditional annual assembly of Party Regional Leaders and ‘Old Fighters’ in Munich on 8 November 1941, the anniversary of the failed 1923 beer-hall putsch, Hitler declared: ‘Never before has a giant empire been smashed and struck down in a shorter time than Soviet Russia.’282