He did not, however, question the ‘ruthless action’ the Führer had ordained ‘against partisans and Bolshevik commissars’. Soldiers interpreted his directive so liberally that a further directive followed within five days to curb their exuberance.
‘In spite of my instructions of 25.6.41 … still more shootings of PoWs and deserters have been observed, conducted in an irresponsible, senseless and criminal manner. This is murder! The German Wehrmacht is waging this war against Bolshevism, not against the United Russian peoples.’
Lemelsen was perceptive enough to grasp that ‘scenes of countless bodies of soldiers lying on the roads, clearly killed by a shot through the head at point blank range, without their weapons and with their hands raised, will quickly spread in the enemy’s army’.(26)
Excesses were commonplace. Gefreiter Georg Bergmann, with Artillery Regiment 234 near Aunus on the northern Finnish front at the end of August, witnessed the bizarre spectacle of unit vehicles driving by at high speed with Russian prisoners perched on the engine bonnet or mud-guards. ‘Most fell off because of the tremendous speeds and were “shot whilst trying to escape”,’ he said. Infantry Gefreiter Jakob Zietz spoke of six Russian PoWs captured by his 253rd Infantry Division company, who were press-ganged into carrying their ammunition near Welikije Luki. ‘They were totally exhausted as a result of the heat and their efforts and fell to the ground, unable to march any further.’ They were shot. Others died clearing mines or transporting ammunition forward into the front line.
During the evening of 27 August, thousands of Soviet PoWs were jammed into a prisoner collection point at Geisin near Uman. The compound was designed to hold only 500 to 800 persons, but with each passing hour 2,000 to 3,000 prisoners arrived to be fed and then sent onward to the rear. No rations arrived and the heat was stifling. By evening 8,000 were packed into the camp. Oberfeldwebel Leo Mellart, one of the 101st Infantry Division guards, then heard ‘cries and shooting’ in the darkness. The sound of firing was obviously heavy calibre. Two or three 85mm Flak batteries nearby had engaged a grain silo inside the barbed wire perimeter with direct fire, ‘because the prisoners had allegedly tried to break out’. Mellart was later told by one of the watch-keepers that 1,000–1,500 men had been killed or severely wounded.(27) Poor organisation and administration had resulted in chronic overcrowding, but the Stadtkommandant of Geisin was not prepared to risk a break-out.
There was no place in the ordered German military mind or tactical doctrine to deal with civilian irregulars. This had historically been the case during the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 and was repeated again during early occupation phases of World War 1. German soldiers considered it wrong or somehow unfair’ for the enemy to continue fighting in the rear after having been overrun or encircled, fighting on in a hopeless situation. In Russia, unlike previously in the west, the enemy refused to follow the convention of orderly surrender. Irregulars were termed ‘bandits’ in German military parlance and treated as such. Thousands of Russian soldiers found themselves cut off from their parent formations during huge encirclement battles. On 13 September 1941 OKH ordered that Soviet soldiers who reorganised after being overrun and then fought back were to be treated as partisans or ‘bandits’. In other words, they were to be executed. Officers of the 12th Infantry Division received guidance from their commander:
‘Prisoners behind the front line… shoot as a general principle! Every soldier shoots any Russian who is found behind the front line and has not been taken prisoner in battle.’(28)
Such a command would not be considered unreasonable to soldiers sympathetic to the convention that warfare should be open and fair, giving the edge, of course, to German organisational, tactical and technological superiority.
German soldiers were incensed by snipers. Driver Helmut K___, writing to his parents on 7 July, complained his unit transporting material from Warsaw to the front had suffered 80 dead, ‘32 of them from snipers’.(29) Resulting repressive measures raised the level of violence. There was virtually no partisan activity in the Ukraine following the invasion apart from stay-behind Red Army, Communist officials and NKVD special groups. After the encirclement battle at Kiev, partisan operations in the Army Group South area considerably increased. In the Army Group Centre area partisan groups were to control 45% of the occupied area, but initially activity was on a small scale.(30) Sniping was the initial manifestation of resistance. During the advance to Leningrad, artillery soldier Werner Adamczyk was fired upon by people who were ‘not in uniform’ and ‘not shooting too badly’. He was surprised and indignant:
‘Now it seemed we would also have to fight civilians! It was enough to fight the Russian Army. Now we could not even trust civilians any more.’(31)
Any resistance in rear areas was always referred to as by ‘bandits’ or ‘civilians’. Karl D___wrote in his diary at the beginning of July:
‘To our right were wheatfields. Precisely at that moment a civilian fired out of the corn. The field was searched through. Now and then a shot rang out. It must be snipers. There are also Russian soldiers who have hidden in the woods. Time and again shots sounded off.’(32)
Another soldier, Erhard Schaumann, described how:
‘The Russian population hadn’t fled but stayed in underground bunkers, as we realised much later. We received highly accurate incoming mortar fire where our unit was encamped, which caused very heavy losses. There must be some Russians [observing] nearby, we thought, to be aiming so well.’
On investigation they hauled out many people from the earth bunkers. Schaumann became reluctant to explain the subsequent course of events.
Schaumann: ‘Ja – they were brought in, questioned, then I’d hear… ‘
Interviewer: ‘Where were they taken?’
Schaumann: ‘To the battalion or regimental commander or division commander, and then I’d hear shots and knew they had been executed.’
Interviewer: ‘Did you see that too?’
Schaumann: ‘I did.’
Interviewer: ‘Did you participate?’
Schaumann: ‘Do I have to answer that? Spare me this one answer.’(33)
Peter Petersen remembered an old school friend, an SS Untersturmführer, on leave from the front. He had received ‘a terrible bawling out’ from his superiors for his reluctance to shoot prisoners. His personality, Petersen observed, had completely changed from his school days.
‘He was told that he would learn this was no Kindergarten war. He would be sent to take command of a firing squad where he would be shooting partisans, German deserters, and who knows what else. He told me that he had not had the courage to refuse to obey this order, since he would have been shot.’(34)
An atmosphere of uncertainty reigned behind the front. Soldiers felt beleaguered and isolated. Korück 582 – a rear-area security unit operating behind Ninth Army – was responsible for 1,500 villages over an area of 27,000sq km. It had only 1,700 soldiers under command to execute this task. No support was forthcoming from Ninth Army, which had been 15,000 men short at the start of the campaign. Partisan activity encompassed 45% of its operational area. These security units were often commanded by old and incompetent officers aged 40–50 years, compared to a front-line average age of 30 years. Korück 582 battalion commanders were almost 60 years old and their soldiers were poorly trained. Feelings of vulnerability and prevalent danger existed in these zones which, paradoxically, could be as active and dangerous as the front line.(35)
Walter Neustifter, an infantry machine gunner, said, ‘you always had to keep partisans in mind’. Atrocity fed on atrocity.
‘They had fallen upon the whole transport and logistic system, undressed the soldiers, put their uniforms on and passed all the captured material around with a few rifles. So, to frighten them, we hanged five men.’(36)
Peter Neumann, an officer in the 5th SS Division ‘Wiking’, following a revenge massacre after partisan atrocities against German soldiers, explained:
‘We of the SS may be ruthl
ess, but the partisans also wage an inhuman war and show no mercy. Perhaps we cannot blame them for wishing to defend their own land, but all the same, it is clearly our duty to destroy them… where does true justice lie? If such a thing even exists.’(37)
‘When we marched into the Soviet Union,’ declared Hans Herwarth von Bittenfeld, a junior infantry officer, ‘we were regarded initially as liberators and greeted with bread and salt. Farmers shared the little they had with us.’ All this changed with the self-perpetuating vicious circle of atrocities and revenge attacks. Villages were caught helpless in the middle. ‘The disaster was the Nazis succeeded in driving people who were willing to co-operate with us back into the arms of Stalin,’ he said. Von Bittenfeld’s view was ‘we lost because of the bad handling of the Soviet populace’. Russian ‘Hiwis’ that worked with the Wehrmacht were not all pressed labour. ‘The idea originated,’ he explained, ‘from the soldiers, not the General Staff.’(38)
Atrocities were an inescapable fact of life on the Eastern Front. Leutnant F. Wilhelm Christians also spoke of being ‘greeted with real enthusiasm’ in the Ukraine. ‘But behind the Panzers came the SD Security troops’ which was ‘a very sad and grim experience’. In Tarnopol, Christians recalled, ‘Jews were driven together, with the help, I must also say, of the Ukrainians, who knew where their victims lived. ‘My general’s reaction when I reported this to him was that it was forbidden, with immediate effect, for any member of his division to participate in these measures.’(39)
There were a myriad factors that caused German soldiers to participate in or ignore excesses. They were isolated in a strange land, beset by numerous pressures and had of course to enact the disciplined violence expected of soldiers at war. Most had never left Germany or even been beyond their home districts before. They were then subjected to a form of group insanity. War corrupts, whatever the political beliefs, and a high level of culture is not necessarily a guarantor of civilised values. SS officer Peter Neumann with the 5th SS Division ‘Wiking’ recalled how a friend dispassionately executed a group of Russian ITU civilians. (These were Isspraviteino Trudovnoie Upalvelnnie – the Central Administration of Corrective Training – responsible for sending people to concentration camps.) He shot them with his Mauser rifle. Neumann observed:
‘These characters were by no means saints, and probably had no hesitation in sending any poor devil guilty of some minor offence off to the mines in Siberia. But all the same I stopped for a moment rooted to the spot by Karl’s amazing coldbloodedness. His hand didn’t even tremble.
‘Is it possible that this is the same fellow I once saw, in short pants, playing ball on the sands down by the breakwaters of the Aussen-Alster in Hamburg?’(40)
Most soldiers would say that only those who were there truly understand the dilemma. The same men would have been labelled the ‘boys next door’ by their contemporaries. Police Battalion 101, responsible for grim excesses, was manned by unremarkable and ‘ordinary men’.(41) After a soldier has killed, it is correspondingly easier the next time. There are criminal types in any cross-section of society that form part of the dark inexplicable make-up of human kind. Soldiers are not excluded. Indeed, condoned violence on the battlefield presents opportunities to those emotionally susceptible to evil and destructive acts. Artillery Obergefreiter Heinz Flohr saw mothers obliged to witness the execution of their own children at Belaja-Zerkow in the summer of 1941. ‘I had to ask myself,’ he said, visibly moved, ‘are these human beings committing such acts?’ Rape was also not always ideologically repulsive. Gefreiter Herbert Büttner stopped a medical Feldwebel molesting a Russian girl, but the same Feldwebel humiliated a group of Jews later by shaving half their beards and hair during a forcible eviction.(42)
Dehumanising the enemy provided an emotional safeguard of sorts. If the enemy are not people but Untermenschen (sub-human), it matters less what happens to them. Soldiers adrift in a sea of violence within a lethal environment were answerable only to their company commanders and those immediately in charge nearby, nobody else. Perhaps it is unrealistic to expect combat troops to make moral choices. Faced with impossible human dilemmas, it is invariably easier to obey orders. Those unable to recognise there was a choice were ideologically and frequently officially absolved of the responsibility.
Dr Paul Linke, an infantry medical officer, had always thought the commissar shooting order a ‘latrine house rumour’ until his battalion commander ordered his close friend, Leutnant Otto Fuchs, to shoot one. Fuchs, a lawyer in civilian life, had his stuttering ethical protest silenced by his superior officer. ‘Leutnant Fuchs, I do not wish to hear another word,’ he said. ‘Get out and carry out the order!’ The quick-thinking doctor offered to accompany his hapless friend in his sad duty, and promptly led him to the corpse of a Soviet soldier he had earlier discovered in a ditch nearby. The Russian commissar was encouraged to change clothes and bury the corpse in his commissar uniform and then allowed to slip back to his own lines. Two pistol shots fired into the earth disguised the act. Linke ‘hoped it was clear to the [commissar] that both of us would be shot should this ruse ever be discovered’. The Russian gratefully disappeared into the night. The young doctor ‘felt the risk to maintain his honour as an officer was worth it – we do not shoot defenceless prisoners,’ he said. Fuchs had to report to his battalion commander and confirm the execution order had been carried out. ‘I’m sorry Fuchs,’ he admitted. ‘I did not want it either. In the final analysis I delegated my responsibility for the order to you.’(43) Common decency in the final resort was a matter of personal inclination. Some soldiers actually relished the culture of violence, but for the majority, the main bonding factor was the solidarity of the group with whom they lived. Survival depended upon one’s comrades. Right and wrong was not the issue, rather that there were variations in the degree of wrong.
Leutnant Peter Bamm, another medical officer, with Army Group South, observed that the Jewish massacres after the fall of Nikolaev were not approved by front-line soldiers, who felt that their victories ‘gained in grim and protracted battle’ were being used by the ‘others’ – the SS and SD. ‘But it was not an indignation that sprang from the heart.’ After seven years’ domination by the SS and SD, moral corruption ‘had already made too much progress even among those who would have denied it vigorously’. Protest was nullified by actions directed against families back home, as in the case of the wife of an Oberst in his division. Russian atrocities also had an impact upon the maintenance of emotional integrity. Soldiers would do whatever was required to survive. ‘There was no blazing indignation,’ Leutnant Bamm admitted. ‘The worm was too deep in the wood.’(44) There could be no turning back now. Should the enemy ever reach the Reich, there would be the devil to pay.
A degree of ethical disintegration resulted from atrocities which had a negative impact upon the moral component of fighting power within the Ostheer. Ideals, even those directed toward the ideological ends of National Socialism, were compromised. The Christian army that invaded Russia was behaving in the manner of the Teutonic Knights of the 13th century, portrayed in Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevesky. This had an immediate appeal to cinema audiences in an oppressed and threatened Soviet nation. Paradoxically, it diluted fighting power because officially sponsored brutality raised questions of a fundamental and compassionate nature, which led to a questioning of motive. This in turn affected willpower. At the same time the enemy’s moral component was strengthened. These indignities massively increased the resolve to resist. The German soldier began to realise in the absence of guaranteed success, for the first time in this war, that his very survival may be at stake. Conversely the Russian soldier knew he had no recourse but to fight to the bitter end. It was a pitiless prospect.
Unteroffizier Harald Dommerotsky, serving in a Luftwaffe unit near Toropez, was a witness of ‘almost daily executions of partisans, by hanging, by the security service of the SS’. Enormous crowds – predominantly Russians – gathered. ‘It may well be a huma
n characteristic,’ he remarked, ‘this apparent predilection to always be present when one of your own kind is rubbed out.’ It made no difference, he continued, ‘whether it was the enemy or their own people’. Public hangings in Zhitomir often resulted in cheers as lorries drove off leaving victims pathetically hanging in the market place. One witness described how gaily-dressed Ukrainian women would hold up their children to see, while Wehrmacht spectators would bawl ‘slowly, slowly!’ so as to be able to take better photographs.(45)
In Toropez a huge gallows had been erected. Lorries would drive forward, each with four partisans standing in the back. Nooses would be placed around their necks and the lorries driven off. Dommerotsky remembered the occasion when only three instead of four bodies were left dangling at the end of the ropes. The victim was sprawled on the ground, his rope broken. ‘It made no difference,’ the Luftwaffe NCO remarked, he was hauled up onto the lorry and pushed out again. The same happened again. Undeterred, his executioners repeated the ghastly process and yet again the victim fell onto the ground, still very much alive.
‘My friend standing beside me said: “It’s God’s judgement.” I could not work it out either and only responded: “Now they will probably let him go.”’
They did not. As the lorry drove away for the fourth time the rope snapped taut around the victim’s neck, and he kicked his life away as the exhaust smoke dispersed. ‘There was no wailing,’ Dommerotsky remembered, ‘it was sinisterly quiet.’(46)
War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 Page 33