War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942

by Robert Kershaw

  The bizarre tenuously develops into the norm. Violence and death, cruel behaviour and the taking of life became unremarkable behaviour. Killing, on or off the battlefield, lay outside this category. Although ‘normal’ behaviour on or around a battlefield is a paradoxical misnomer, killing human beings – dispensing death – was a searing emotional experience. The impact in psychological terms is unpredictable. Such uncertainties are the only constant in this bizarre and fast-changing environment. Fear is the result.

  ‘Then one day, you’re right up against it. You are chatting with one of your mates when suddenly he folds up, just settles in a heap, and is stone dead. That is the real horror. You see the others stepping over him, just as anybody steps over a big stone he doesn’t want to catch his heel on, and you see your mate’s death no differently from any of the others that are dead – those whom you’ve already learned to think of as never really having lived, as being just lumps of earth.’

  This was the supreme pressure on individual soldiers. Not just dying but worse, becoming a meaningless and soon forgotten official statistic. Zeiser explained:

  ‘That’s when you get the horrors and after that it is always a nightmare; it never, never stops, the real fear of being wiped out, the fear of merciless nothingness, the fear of thinking any moment you may be one of those who never were living creatures.’(6)

  Fear of becoming a casualty was accentuated by the ‘strangeness’ of the very land the Wehrmacht had invaded. Families at home would have no idea where it was and what it was like, where they died. War correspondent Felix Lützkendorf, serving with an SS unit in the Ukraine, wrote:

  ‘This land is endless, beneath an endless sky with roads trailing endlessly into an incalculable distance. Each village and town seems just like the one that preceded it. They all have the same women and children standing dumbly by the roadside, the same wells, the same farmsteads … If the column comes off the road and moves on a compass bearing across fields, we look like lost world circumnavigators seeking new coasts beyond these oceans.’(7)

  War developed into a form of pseudo-tourism to many German soldiers, whose previous knowledge of the world had been cycling or walking to the next village or town. One soldier had described his campaign experiences in France in May 1940 in terms of a ‘Strength through Joy’ trip comparable to prewar sponsored Nazi party outings. Another soldier, writing in the assembly area before the start of the Russian campaign, described how his ‘long journey up to the edge of the Russian border’ had ‘enabled him to view half of Europe’ at no effort or expense to himself. Russia, however, offered few attractions. Three weeks into the Russian campaign a Gefreiter complained, ‘It’s not like it was in France here. We had everything we wanted there; here, there is absolutely nothing.’(8) Another soldier observed cryptically that they had exchanged their previous ‘Polack’s (Polish) shacks’ for Russian ‘dog kennels’.

  ‘Yesterday we moved out of our beautiful quarters and are now lying in a cursed lousy shack, with more filth than I have ever seen’.

  Physical conditions matched the rigours of campaigning. Soldiers accustomed to well-appointed barracks in Germany became increasingly depressed as the operation dragged on, outpacing the length and discomforts of all previous campaigns. ‘These immense plains, huge woods with a few dog kennels here and there, make a dissolute impression,’ wrote one soldier. It was ‘uninteresting to the eye’, with ‘sad-looking wooden huts, forests and marshes. Everything,’ he said, ‘seemed to lose itself in an endless expanse.’(9)

  As the advance continued, so did apprehensions. ‘Orientation in Russia is as difficult as it is in the desert,’ remarked one soldier. ‘Only you do not see the horizon – you are lost.’ Another commented:

  ‘The immense space was so vast that we had many soldiers who became melancholy.

  ‘Flat valleys, flat hills – flat valleys, flat hills, endless, endless. There was no limit. We could not see an end and it was so disconsolate.’(10)

  ‘Where is this endless war driving us?’ asked 33-year-old Günther von Soheven, fighting on the southern front.

  ‘There is no identifiable objective in terms of space across countryside stretching ever further away. Even more depressing, the enemy is becoming even more numerous, even though we have offered up huge sacrifices’.

  Soldiers were becoming homesick. ‘The distances grow immeasurably,’ concluded von Soheven, ‘but our hearts remain close.’(11)

  Determination to finish the campaign was, however, matched by an equal Russian stubbornness to fight on. It was not difficult to dehumanise an enemy who chose to resist fanatically within an alien landscape for no logical reason despite apparent defeat. National Socialist propaganda sowed the insidious seed, which fell upon the receptive minds of soldiers already exposed to racist doctrine. Unteroffizier Wilhelm Prüller, a motorised infantryman with the 9th Panzer Division, wrote on 4 July, ‘we have heard the most horrible things about what the Russians are doing to our prisoners’. The 8th Company of his Schütze Regiment 11 was badly mauled in a Russian ambush and lost 80 men. ‘The wounded Kameraden were worked over by the Russians with gun barrels until they were dead.’ Prüller’s anti-Semitic comments depersonalised the enemy. Like many German soldiers, he was surprised to encounter Russian women in uniform. Inside a Russian pocket they came upon ‘women, completely nude and roasted,’ who ‘were lying on and beside a [destroyed Soviet] tank. Awful.’ He indignantly concluded, ‘it’s not people we’re fighting against here, but simply animals.’ American soldiers similarly dehumanised their Japanese foes in the Pacific Theatre, and later the Vietcong in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s; a reaction, therefore, not unique to purely totalitarian societies. Prüller later observed, ‘among the Russian dead there are many Asiatic faces, which look disgusting with their slit eyes’. He was impressed by the strangeness of it all. In a park in Kirovograd the soldiers bathed in a small pond. ‘It’s curious to see the Russian women shamelessly undressing in front of us and wandering around naked,’ he wrote. ‘Some of them look quite appetising, especially their breasts … Most of us would be quite willing to… but then again you see the dirty ones and you want to go and vomit. They’ve no morals here! Revolting!’(12)

  Tank gunner Karl Fuchs with the 7th Panzer Division offered a similarly maligned view of Russian prisoners of war to his wife:

  ‘Hardly ever do you see the face of a person who seems rational and intelligent. They all look emaciated and the wild, half crazy look in their eyes makes them appear like imbeciles. And these scoundrels, led by Jews and criminals, wanted to imprint their stamp on Europe, indeed on the world. Thank God that our Führer, Adolf Hitler, is preventing this from happening.’(13)

  German Wochenschau newsreels viewed in July dwelt on portrait shots of Mongol prisoners of war and other Asiatics. The commentary poked fun at ‘a small sample of the particularly horrible types of sub-human Bolsheviks’. These sentiments were reflected in letters sent home from the front. One signaller wrote:

  ‘We are deep in Russia in the so-called “paradise” which calls upon [German] soldiers to desert. Terrible misery reigns here. People have been unimaginably oppressed for two centuries. We would rather all die than accept the torment and misery these folk have had to put up with.’(14)

  Over-confidence upon meeting an allegedly ‘inferior’ foe, based purely on racist criteria, bred a contempt during the early stages of the campaign that was soon punished.

  At the end of June 1941 III/IR9 was wood-clearing around a road north-east of the city of Bialystok, near the village of Krynki. A young Panzerjäger Leutnant, despite warnings to the contrary, arrogantly insisted on pushing ahead of the road clearance through woods probably infested with Russian soldiers. The Panzerjäger platoon pressed on and was barely out of sight of the supporting German infantry before the vehicles were heard to stop. Inhuman shrieks of pain soon rent the air, interspersed with shouted commands in Russian. Major Haeften, the infantry company commander, ordered a hast
y assault to rescue the ambushed antitank platoon. The lead platoon led by Feldwebel Gottfried Becker encountered a scene of carnage they ‘could only gradually, very slowly, allow to sink in’. They were sickened by what they saw. ‘Here and there a body jerked convulsively or danced around in its own blood.’ The nearer the rescuing troops approached the macabre scene, the greater their appreciation of the atrocities visited upon the wretched Panzerjäger.

  ‘The majority of the German soldiers had their eyes gouged out, others their throats cut. Some had their bayonets stuck in their chests. Two soldiers had their uniform jackets and shirts ripped apart and their naked stomachs slit open, glistening entrails hung out of the bloody mass. Two more had their genitals cut off and laid on their chests.’

  German soldiers ‘stumbled as if in a trance’ onto the road to survey a scene of utter desolation. ‘The swine,’ muttered one soldier while another retched into the road; a third man stood and stared, his body shaking as he silently wept. News swept quickly through the division. The regimental commander had objected to the Commissar Order, but the next political commissar captured was handed without scruple to the military police and shot.(15)

  The Russian soldier, previously accorded scant respect, became on object of fear. He responded in kind to the excesses inflicted on him and his people. ‘I was always afraid of the Russians,’ admitted German soldier Erhard Schaumann with Army Group Centre, ‘not only because of that mass of humanity, but because they were so close to nature.’ Russian soldiers were the master of their environment, the forests and swamps, and were particularly adept at night fighting. ‘Whereas we,’ Schaumann said, ‘by virtue of our culture, were unable and hardly suited to react to everything like an animal, close to nature.’(16) Ignorance of the enemy bred fear which, in turn, encouraged inhuman behaviour; as Panzer soldier Hans Becker commented, ‘bestiality breeds bestiality’. He felt, ‘there is no defence for the fantastic atrocities which we inflicted on their race.’(17) Roland Kiemig, another German soldier, conjectured after the war:

  ‘If I was attacked like the Russians by the German “hordes”, and to them we were simply “Fascist hordes”, which is how we did partly behave, then I would have fought to the last.’(18)

  On 1 July 1941, nine days after the start of the campaign, 180 German soldiers belonging to Infantry Regiment 35, Infantry Regiment 119 and artillerymen were captured in a sudden Russian counter-attack on the Klewan–Broniki road in the Ukraine. They belonged to two motorised infantry formations which blundered into a superior Soviet force of one and a half divisions and were overwhelmed. The prisoners, most wounded, were herded into a clover field alongside the road and ordered to undress. Gefreiter Karl Jäger hurriedly began to pull off his tunic having ‘had to hand over all valuable objects, including everything we had in our pockets’. Prisoners were generally compliant in this initial phase of capture, in shock and concerned for their lives. The wounded soldiers had difficulty undressing. Jäger recalled a fellow NCO, Gefreiter Kurz, struggling to undo his belt because of an injured hand. To his horror he saw ‘he was stabbed behind in the neck so that the bayonet came out through his throat’. Shocked, the other soldiers frantically removed their tunic jackets. Another severely wounded soldier was kicked and clubbed around the head with rifle butts. Totally cowed, the German prisoners were shoved north of the road in groups of 12 to 15 men. Many were half-naked and ‘several completely naked,’ recalled Jäger. Oberschütze Wilhelm Metzger said, ‘the Russians … grabbed everything we had, rings, watches, money bags, uniform insignia, and then they took our jackets, shirts, shoes and socks.’ Private Hermann Heiss had his hands roughly tied, like many others, behind his back. They were then forced them down into thick green clover by the Russian soldiers. Heiss described how:

  ‘A Russian soldier stabbed me in the chest with his bayonet, at which point I turned over. I was then stabbed seven times in the back. I did not move any more. The Russians evidently assumed I was dead… I heard my comrades cry out in pain and then I passed out.’

  ‘Suddenly the Russians started to shoot at us,’ said Private Michael Beer. Bursts of automatic and machine gun fire swept through the separated groups of tied-up and semi-naked German prisoners. Karl Jäger, led north of the road, started with surprise as shooting broke out among the groups following behind. ‘Panic reigned after the first shots, and I was able to flee,’ he said. Handgrenades were tossed in among groups of officers and NCOs who had been singled out for special treatment. They suffered appalling injuries.

  The next morning soldiers and Panzers from the 25th Division combed through the field: 153 half-naked bodies were found, their pale white skins pathetically outlined against a background of lush green clover. One group of 14 soldiers had their genitals hacked off. Among the corpses was a severely wounded Hermann Heiss. He was comforted by German soldiers. Glancing around the scene of total devastation, he ‘saw the head of my comrade’ who had screamed out in pain ‘was split open… Most of the others were dead’ or later died of their wounds. There were only 12 survivors.

  Open trucks were driven up and stacked high with half-naked corpses. They were a jumble of tangled limbs grotesquely stiffened into untidy rigor mortis. Sunlight glinted from the hobnails of distended boots spilling over the side flaps of the lorries which had been lowered to accommodate them. A soldiers’ cemetery was established outside the church in Broniki. The effect on the soldiers of the 25th Division obliged to tidy up the scene of the massacre can be imagined.(19) They quietly resolved to avenge their comrades.

  Eye and genital mutilations were inflicted with such frequency on German prisoners during the early part of the campaign that it increased unease even further at the prospect of possible capture by the enemy. The rapidity of Blitzkrieg often punished reckless advances, so that prisoners of war were not solely a Russian phenomenon. Over 9,000 German soldiers were reported missing in July, 7,830 in August and nearly 4,900 in September 1941.(20) Although the death rate of Germans falling into Russian hands was to decline later, at this stage 90% to 95% perished.(21) These numbers pale into insignificance compared to the fate of millions of Soviet PoWs, but they were enough to promote unease among German soldiers. Captured Soviet documents revealed the fate of some German PoWs. One Soviet 26th Division report dated 13 July 1941 observed 400 enemy dead had been left on the battlefield west of Slastjena and ‘some 80 Germans had surrendered and were executed’. Another captured company-level report, submitted by a Captain Gediejew on 30 August, referred to enemy dead, captured guns and mortars and ‘15 wounded men who were shot’.(22)

  Russian radio intercepts and documents provide a wide spectrum of reasons for disposing of German PoWs. Enemy soldiers who fought rather than surrendered and troublesome wounded were often shot. Unexpected tactical developments or a lack of transport to carry prisoners away might also seal their fate. Summary execution during interrogation might occur as a result of refusing to give military information or to encourage others to talk. German excesses, in short, were matched by a like response. Food was always short and therefore not readily available for prisoners. Rewards were also offered for inflicting high German casualties. Executing Nazis and officers also happened, manifesting outrage through ‘tit for tat’ killings. Resistance to the German foe was, in any case, to be prosecuted totally. A Soviet Fifth Army document dated 30 June revealed:

  ‘It has frequently occurred that Red Army soldiers and commanders embittered by the cruelties of the Fascist thieves … do not take any German soldiers and officers prisoner but shoot them on the spot.’(23)

  The practice was criticised for wasting intelligence as well as discouraging the enemy to desert. Maj-Gen Potapov commanding Fifth Soviet Army ordered his commanders to explain to soldiers that killing PoWs ‘is detrimental to our interests’. Prisoners, he emphasised, were to be properly processed. ‘I categorically forbid shootings on individual initiative,’ he ordered. Another document captured from the Soviet XXXIst Corps, signed by the Chief Commiss
ar of the propaganda department on 14 July 1941, revealed ‘prisoners have been strangled or stabbed to death’. It argued ‘such behaviour towards PoWs is politically damaging to the Red Army and merely strengthens the will of the enemy to fight… The German soldier, when he is captured, ceases to be the enemy,’ it stated. The aim was ‘to take every measure necessary to capture soldiers and especially officers’.(24)

  However, the reality at troop level was that Russian soldiers – like their German adversaries – had been equally and quickly brutalised by the pitiless ideological nature of the fighting. Soviet PoW interrogations conducted by the Germans at Krzemieniec in July 1941 found:

  ‘No general order has been given to kill all German officers, NCOs and men upon capture. The shootings and torturing to death of German soldiers are explained by captured Soviet soldiers, commissars, officers and doctors as stemming from individual or special orders. These are given to the troops by commissars or officers or both. A junior commissar stated that such orders are given primarily by battalion and regimental commanders to whom commissars are accountable.’(25)