Nine days later, Obergefreiter Erich Kuby, on sentry duty with Army Group North, peered watchfully from ‘foxhole 4’ in a rain-soaked forest. His duty period was two hours by night or three by day before relief. Ahead lay a dead Russian soldier, one of several killed blundering into their position the night before. The body – some 5m away and covered only with a sprinkling of earth – reeked. Kuby resolved to bury him deeper during the next rest period. ‘Better three French campaigns than one Russian’ was the often-repeated catch-phrase voiced by the troops. ‘French beds and the lustrous surroundings were missed.’ The good days were over. ‘The expectation of finding both in Leningrad in the near future,’ reflected Kuby, ‘was replaced by foxhole positions 1, 2, 3 and 4 and so on.’(2)
Kuby and Köhler were articulating a viewpoint fast becoming prevalent among the soldiers on the new Eastern Front. This was ‘Kein Blumenkrieg’ – quite literally ‘a war without garlands’. No glory as there was after the war in France the year before, when victory parades on homecoming were deluged by clouds of flowers tossed by adoring wives and girlfriends while a grateful Reich cheered. Newsreels now mocked ‘so-called “Socialist Workers’ Paradises”’ in the newly occupied areas. Cameras dwelt on rickety filthy balustrades overlooking slum housing for Soviet city workers, while the commentary announced:
‘The mindless uneducated masses are cannon fodder for the Soviets. In just five days German soldiers have been shown a picture of the Soviet paradise which defies all description. This explains why Russia felt the need to cut itself off from the rest of the world!’(3)
Much of the new Ostheer would have preferred that it remained so.
Russia was an unknown. Veterans of the French Blitzkrieg realised there was neither champagne, wine nor booty, nothing to ‘liberate’. The pitiless and total nature of the conflict quickly differentiated it from any other campaign experienced thus far. Any feeling this was a ‘just’ war was diluted by the pressure of excesses dubiously excused by National Socialist Lebensraum rhetoric extolling the survival of the fittest. Contemporary paternal and social democratic societies find it difficult to transfer their experience to the uncompromising ideological framework within which this war was conducted. The army that fell upon Communist Russia believed in Christ: 95% of the German population in 1939 had declared itself Christian, or from a religious order. Of 75.4 million (from 79.4 million) who had professed the faith, 41.9 million were Protestant and 31.4 million Catholic.(4)
Although cynical historians of religious wars would not regard this as auspicious, the Wehrmacht prosecuted the war with soldiers who had Christian caring families at home. Historical experience suggests that periods of protracted conflict are often accompanied by a certain corruption of standards of human decency. This assiduous process is often not immediately apparent to the combat soldier embarking on a campaign. Soon he is exposed to successive emotional experiences that trigger indefinable and often unrecognisable behavioural changes. It can begin by looking for battlefield souvenirs at one end of the spectrum to picking up useful military items such as binoculars and weapons and then even to stealing money and valuables from the dead at the other. This may be explained away by an incontrovertible logic that suggests a corpse has no need of possessions. Looting can in turn deteriorate to rape and organised plunder and later to murder, should the enemy get in the way.
The excesses of SS Einsatzgruppen behind the German front lines are well documented. Four of these special mobile units was formed and trained in the late spring of 1941 specifically to support Operation ‘Barbarossa’. The core of the groups were provided by Heydrich’s Security Police (Gestapo and Kripo) as well as from the intelligence apparatus (Security Service or SD), supplemented by small units of Waffen SS (the military branch of Himmler’s SS). By the middle of July convincing military successes hinted at the likelihood of total victory. Hitler, as a consequence, ordered the intensification of the planned pacification programme due to be conducted behind the rear of the advancing German armies. Security Police battalions were also attached to the Einsatzgruppen. A sociological survey carried out on one of these – Reserve Police Battalion 101 – revealed their unremarkable manning. In fact they were labelled ‘ordinary men’, consisting mainly of prewar police recruits rather than reservists. They came predominantly from the Hamburg area, considered by reputation to be the least Nazi-orientated of German cities. The soldiers were from less privileged backgrounds, 65% working class, while 35% were thought to be lower middle class. By virtue of age, all had been taught before the Nazi period but the majority were party members by 1942. According to their researcher, Christopher R. Browning, they did ‘not seem to have been a very promising group from which to recruit mass murderers on behalf of the Nazi vision of a radical utopia free of Jews’.(5)
War crimes, nevertheless, influenced the nature of fighting on the Russian front. The relevance had been recognised by the commander of the 58th Infantry Division laying siege to Leningrad in October 1941. The German soldier, he warned, was in danger of losing his ‘inner morality’.(6) That this can degrade combat sustainability has been demonstrated by French soldiers in Algeria serving during the past colonial civil war and by American troops in Vietnam. Malaise induced by seemingly pointless, yet officially sponsored, violence reduced the justification of prosecuting the Russian war to German soldiers to one of mere survival. One veteran, Roland Kiemig, claimed after the war:
‘I saw no executions, [but] I heard from people who did. It was no secret. They [the Russians] perished and many of them were killed through hard labour and other methods; that was clear. They weren’t resettled, they were systematically… decimated.’(7)
Another soldier, transport Gefreiter Hans R., gave a sobering description of mass shootings he witnessed during the advance into Russia. Accompanied by his companion Erich, the company commander’s clerk, they saw ‘men and women and children with their hands bound together with wire being driven along the road by SS people’. They decided to investigate. Aged 93, some 40 years later, his description of what happened was delivered in a precise monotone which consciously suppressed the obvious emotion he felt. Outside the village they came across a pit, 3m deep and 2.5m wide. Along its 150m length were hundreds of people, on foot and standing in open-backed lorries. ‘To our horror we realised they were all Jews,’ he said. The victims were tumbled into the ditch and made to lie in rows, alternately head to foot. Once a layer was in place, two SS men moved either side of the ditch with a Russian machine pistol firing automatic bursts into the backs of heads. Single shots rang out afterwards as they strode along the line finishing off the wounded.
‘Then people were again driven forward and they had to get in and lie on top of the dead. At that moment a young girl – she must have been about 12 years old – cried out in a clear piteous shrill voice. “Let me live, I’m still only a child!” The child was grabbed, thrown into the ditch, and shot.’(8)
The official attitude to brutality was permissive. Common decency in such circumstances was a matter of personal inclination. Right and wrong were clouded by ideological imperatives that were administratively applied. The impact of the Commissar Order, for example, became apparent through the conduct of numerous units shortly after the campaign began. Bruno Schneider from 8/IR167 was told by his company commander, Oberleutnant Prinz:
‘Red Army prisoners of war are to be taken only in exceptional circumstances, in other words when there is no other choice. In general captured Soviet soldiers are to be shot and this applies even to women serving in Red Army units.’
Schneider said, ‘the majority of soldiers from my unit did not follow this bloody order as closely as was required.’(9) Individual inclinations were applied with variable results. Martin Hirsch, a 28-year-old NCO from 3rd Panzer Division, was castigated by a soldier from another unit while bandaging a badly wounded Russian during fighting around Brest-Litovsk. ‘What are you doing here?’ he was asked. ‘I told him I was bandaging a soldier’ but �
�he said it was not my job to look after these Untermenschen [sub-humans]’. Hirsch chose to ignore him. ‘He told me he would report me, but I never heard anything more from him.’ His view was that he was ‘quite a callous Nazi, and I was pleased that I never caught sight of him again’.(10)
In the German Sixth Army with Army Group South the Commissar Order had been passed down to battalion level. Killings after the advance began were common enough to be unremarkable. Twenty-four hours into the campaign, Panzergruppe 1 reported to the IC (Intelligence officer) of Sixth Army that both XXXXVIIIth and IIIrd Corps had each taken one political commissar prisoner ‘and handled them appropriately’. According to a 62nd Infantry Division report, nine alleged civilian irregulars and one political commissar, captured in woods north of Sztun, ‘had been dealt with appropriately as per the ordered directive’. Further shootings followed: 298th Infantry Division despatched a commissar on 1 July and 62nd Division shot five, and nine more the next day. The XXXXIVth Corps killed another with one further committing suicide after capture. Commissar executions in Sixth Army became routine: 122 had been ‘despatched’ during partisan operations in LIst Corps’ area by the end of the battle of Kiev. Shootings of 30 or so individuals were occurring throughout the advances.(11)
Soldiers became accustomed to the killings, which altered values, transitioning to a form of group insanity. Combat soldiers, however, rarely kill for uniquely political or ideological convictions. Operation reports by the Einsatzgruppen and other official documents provide factual data and are designed to impress those elements in the higher commands who did possess ideological conviction. Whether they were representative of the Wehrmacht as a whole is debatable. The truth lies in between and is not as clear-cut as academics, quoting solely from documents, might suggest. Helmut Schmidt, a Flak officer, declared in an emotive interview after the war that not all soldiers were completely aware of what was happening. ‘Other people had different experiences from those generally quoted in many documents,’ he stated.(12)
No one is disputing the written official evidence or that atrocities occurred, but whether such experiences were universally shared at all times and at every sector of the front is not so certain. This alternative view shared by Schmidt (who was there) suggests soldiers were too young for political and ideological reflection. They were completely engrossed in the mind-numbing activity of surviving combat while enduring considerable physical hardship. Only much later did the extent of the crimes committed become hideously apparent. As such, they were unsuspecting ‘victims’ themselves of the totalitarian nature of the society to which they belonged. Soldier Roland Kiemig claims the truth dawned only after he had been captured by the Russians himself.
‘As a prisoner of war the Russians called me “Fascist”. I heard of the extent of German crimes for the first time in the camp, not only in Russia but also in the concentration camps. We had not known about that. We didn’t believe it at first and thought it was a little over-exaggerated. They typically referred to us as the “Fascist hordes”. But when they presented credible evidence, one did start thinking.’(13)
There was no time to think in action. In the ranks they became the victim of the common bonding required of soldiers to face adversity, and of a form of National Socialist ‘peer pressure’. Both pressures were sufficient to stifle individual predilections and often conscience. As Kiemig further explained:
‘You mustn’t forget I’m 66 now, I was 17 or 18 then, a different person. I wasn’t strong enough then. It was a kind of machine from which there was no escape – for anybody.
‘What could I have done then? I could have done – what? What way out was there then? It was your duty to serve. If you didn’t like it, then you were punished, and I did not want that.’(14)
Rudi Maschke, serving with the Pomeranian 6th Infantry Regiment, was even more emphatic. ‘Not following these orders,’ he stated, referring to the Commissar Directive, ‘would have cost us our lives ourselves.’(15) Kiemig said, ‘you could get locked up and charged with a military offence’. National Socialism demanded unambiguous conformity. It preached, moreover, that only the strong should survive in a fundamentally competitive society. ‘If you were a “softie”,’ said Kiemig, ‘you would be treated very badly, ridiculed even, and I didn’t want that either.’ The only recourse was to conform.
‘I wanted to stay in between. You might say that wasn’t a crime. But if some people say that most Germans were innocent, I would say they were accomplices. As a soldier I was an “accomplice”.’(16)
What made soldiers accomplices?
The pressures on the German soldier
Fear for the German soldier was the same as for all fighting men through the ages: would he survive the next battle sound in body and mind? There was no shortage of time to dwell on the dubious prospect during the long journey to the front. This might last weeks as the advance progressed deep into Russia. Hospital trains offered the first disenchanting glimpse of what lay ahead, passing the troops as they moved forward on their painstaking journey to the rear. German soldier Benno Zeiser, a driver in a transport unit, started with a naïve view. During training, he and his fellows had been served a diet of victory proclamations on the radio, which led him to believe arrogantly that:
‘Any fool knows you have to have losses, you can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs, but we were going to fight on to victory. Besides, if any of us did stop a bullet, it would be a hero’s death. So hurrah, over the top, come on, charge, hurrah!’
His first glimpse of a hospital train returning from the front quickly dispelled his ‘hurrah’ patriotism. ‘The orderlies began bringing in chaps with limbs missing, uniforms all blood, a mass of bandages, the linen soaked red on legs, arms, heads, trunks, and bloodless agony – distorted faces with sunken eyes.’ One of the soldiers on the train told them what to expect:
‘According to him it was pretty grim. The Reds were fighting desperately and we had had heavy losses. All the same, the advance was continuing swiftly, but it was at a price which made it clear we could not tell how long it would all be as, apart from anything else, the Russians had more men than we, many more.’(1)
Psychological pressure builds up as the soldier approaches the front. The first visible sign is often sight of the enemy’s dead. Many young soldiers had never seen a corpse before. Werner Adamczyk, with a 150mm artillery battery near Minsk, became morbidly fascinated at his guns’ handiwork. ‘The repulsive scene caused me to shake; nevertheless, I found the guts to walk around,’ he said. ‘What I saw then was even more cruel.’ War quickly stripped the veneer of propaganda. Foxholes around him were filled with dead Soviet soldiers. ‘I shuddered and turned around to walk back to the truck’ admitting, ‘the reality of death was just too much to take’. He was troubled. What he had witnessed contradicted earlier briefings that suggested the Russian soldier was ‘poorly trained and not very much inclined to heroism’. Indeed:
‘It became clear to me that they must have been willing to fight to the very end. If this was not heroism, what was it? Did the communist commissars force them to fight to the death? It did not look like it. I did not see any dead commissars.’
Before long the German soldier realised the Russian fighting man was infinitely better than his superiors would like him to believe. ‘With this realisation,’ admitted Adamczyk, ‘my dream of going home soon receded.’(2) German soldier Benno Zeiser was also taken aback at the sight of his first dead Russian. ‘Only such a very short time before, this must have been a living human being,’ he reflected. ‘I thought I would never get rid of the thought after that.’ Kriegsmaler (official war artist) Theo Scharf, advancing with the 97th Division with Army Group South, ‘passed a Red Army soldier, seemingly asleep in the roadside ditch, but covered in thick dust, face and all’.(3) It was the first of many corpses they would all see. Familiarity bred a form of indifference with the passage of time. Benno Zeiser saw more and more Russian dead. ‘And it was not long before I found m
yself merely feeling they were lumps of soil which belonged to the earth they lay on and that they might have been there since ages ago.’ It was less upsetting to view them as if they ‘never had been alive at all’.(4)
Viewing one’s own dead was different, engendering an emotive mixture of bitterness, torment, fear and a feeling of acute loss. Werner Adamczyk recalled burying his first two friends in the battery. ‘That was the end; they were no more. I stood there in anguish’. Both had been blown to pieces in an exploding ammunition truck.
‘I was indeed sorry for the families of these two men. It could have been me. With rising emotions I visualised the reactions of my family and friends, if that had happened to me. For the first time in my life I fully realised what love and affection really meant.’(5)
Zeiser felt ‘it was worse when you saw the first one in our own field grey… and you stare at him, lying there in the same uniform you wear yourself, and you think that he too has a mother and a father, perhaps sisters, he may even have been from the same parts as yourself.’ Prolonged exposure to the stark realities of combat corrupts the accepted codes of normal behaviour. Dead bodies became unremarkable. Zeiser continued:
‘In time you even get used to that. You just don’t really take it in at all when there are more and more who are dead but they are all in German uniform. So in the end you come to reckon yourself on a level with all those others, Russians or Germans alike, lying dead in their various uniforms; you yourself then turn into just one of the creatures who never really did live, you are just another lump of earth.’
War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 Page 30