War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942

by Robert Kershaw

  ‘Many, weak with hunger, fell onto the road and were shot. After the road was empty again of prisoners one saw countless dead lying by the sides. A number of the prisoners were seen carrying bits of human bodies [an arm, or foot etc] in their pockets [to eat]. If one fell the others would immediately fall on him to strip him of clothing and take anything to eat. They all appeared starved and in terrible condition and had an animal look about them.’(20)

  Soviet prisoners were transported to the rear by rail, in open goods wagons, even after the retreat had started. Exposed to cold, rain and snow, up to 20% perished before they reached their destination. One-fifth of 5,000 Russian PoWs transported over 200km from Bobruisk to Minsk between 20 and 21 November froze to death. Obergefreiter Franz Wesskallnies, with 161st Infantry Division, saw Soviet prisoners arriving at Ebenrode in East Prussia in mixed open and enclosed goods wagons in temperatures of −18°C. The cars were so overfilled the prisoners could not lie down, and had to sit there [in the open] for six days with no food.’ They were so hungry and thirsty that they subsisted on snow and grease scraped from the wagon wheels. ‘Several lorries,’ Wesskallnies said, were required to take away the bodies’ of Red Army men found in every compartment. When they arrived at the camp there was no accommodation ready. Prisoners were obliged to dig holes inside the perimeter to gain protection against the elements.(21)

  German soldiers caught up in the retreat reaped the whirlwind of these excesses. Quarter on the Eastern Front was rarely given or, for that matter, anticipated. At the end of December the port town of Feodosia on the Crimean Peninsula was overrun by a surprise Russian amphibious assault. The resident German 46th Division hurriedly evacuated, abandoning 160 severely wounded cases in the Feodosia hospitals. When the town was recaptured in February 1942, the ice-blackened corpses of these wounded littered the beach alongside the hospital by the Black Sea. They had been thrown out of second floor windows onto the sand and hosed down with water so they froze to death in the sub-arctic temperatures.(22)

  During the early morning hours of 27 December Amadeo Casanova, a member of the Spanish ‘Blue Division’, was defending a position with German troops north of Novgorod. One of the Spanish companies was attacked and encircled by the Russians. A rapid counter-attack was mounted to extract them, and during this fighting a Spanish lieutenant and four soldiers were wounded and had to be left behind. ‘Shortly after,’ Casanova testified, we found them dead. In all cases the Russians had nailed their heads to the ground with pickaxes.’(23)

  There was dread throughout the retreat at the prospect of capture by the Russians. Eye gougings, genital mutilations and arbitrary shootings continued. ‘Fear of what would happen if captured by the Soviets,’ remarked one regimental history, was what kept the German soldier on his legs’; adding, ‘no small number shot themselves when in doubt.’(24) It was another nagging fear eroding morale and gnawing at nerves, magnifying further the desperate situation the troops felt themselves to be in. On 20 December Oberarzt Hans-Georg Suck’s battalion, retreating with Guderian’s Second Panzer Army, had fallen back to Plawsk, south of Tula. Lights had not been allowed within the column, which was being pursued by Soviet ski troops. As they moved through an unknown village the Panje wagons being used for the wounded and ammunition began to skid and slide over an uneven part of the road. Such an expanse of sheet ice was unusual in a village main street and merited investigation. Suck shone his pocket lamp on the surface of the road and recoiled in horror. A naked corpse stared back at him through the shimmering ice. ‘We found several naked bodies lined up next to each other’ under the ice, he said. There was no time to investigate the scene minutely because the enemy was in hot pursuit and closing. They realised they were German ‘because there were pieces of German uniform scattered by the roadside’. The soldiers were much depressed and alarmed by this gruesome discovery in temperatures of −42°C to −48°C. ‘Our comrades,’ he surmised, must have had to undress in the road, were made to lie down in the street, and then covered with water so as to construct a stretch of road!’(25)

  Fear and comradeship kept German units intact. Leutnant Haape, retreating with Infantry Regiment, 18 said:

  ‘We had our cowards in the earlier fighting but they had been weeded out, for it was better to be one man short than to have a man who might start in a panic… At some time or another we had all been ready to run in blind fear, but the natural impulse was to stick it out with everyone else.’(26)

  Leutnant Erich Mende concurred, stating, ‘only one thing steadied the nerves, and that to a lesser or greater degree sustained you, and that was a sense of comradeship.’ Everything else was otherwise subsumed in the ‘awful automation of war’. He said:

  ‘You knew you had a friend to your right and another to the left. If you were hit, they would help. If he was hit, you would go to him. And when someone shot at you, you fired back. One didn’t think about it, that one killed or was killed. The motto was: “you or me.” Either one killed or was killed in turn.’(27)

  More than simply a will to survive was required to weld the German front together. As the army group fell back, a vitriolic debate raged between the operational army groups staffs and the strategic (OKH and OKW) level staffs to identify a way out of the crisis. By the third week in December, deep Soviet penetrations on both flanks of Army Group Centre were threatening to develop into a double envelopment of the entire German Central Front. There was a stark choice: retreat or fight. The former was the course currently being conducted and favoured by German field commanders, a prompt and extensive withdrawal to a suitable defence line. This had been identified as roughly the line between Kursk, Orel and Gzhatsk. The risk, and this was occurring in some sectors, was that enemy units thrusting between retreating German columns might inflict a sudden moral collapse. At the very best, considerable matériel would be lost and lines of abandoned guns and vehicles testified to this fact.

  To stand and fight was, in the eyes of field commanders, a suicidal option. Success in this scenario was achievable only if German defensive endurance was superior to Soviet offensive capability. The present weakness of German fighting units seemed to preclude that. Moreover, such a course of action would result in the overrunning of units, and their loss would forfeit any opportunity of husbanding resources for a spring offensive in the central sector. Field commanders and the staff preferred the risk of a winter retreat to the certainty of annihilation if they stood their ground in the face of the Russian assault. Adolf Hitler provided a characteristic solution to this dilemma in a Teletype to Army Group Centre on 18 December.

  ‘Commanding Generals, commanders and officers are to personally intervene to compel troops to fanatical resistance without regard to enemy that may break through on their flanks or in the rear.’

  The instruction was an uncompromising stand and die’ order. This is the only way,’ the Führer added, ‘to gain the time necessary to bring up the reinforcements from Germany and the West that I have ordered.’ Two days before, Hitler had telephoned von Bock to order Army Group Centre to cease all withdrawals and defend in its present position. German soldiers would take ‘not one single step back’.(28)

  General Günther Blumentritt, the Chief of Staff to Fourth Army, was in conference with his Commander-in-Chief and other corps commanders in mid-December. They were totally engrossed in co-ordinating the move westward of their increasingly vulnerable army. A steadily widening gap had opened between von Kluge’s Fourth and Guderian’s Second Panzer Army. There were no reserves to restore the increasingly dangerous situation on the southern flank, which threatened to cut Fourth Army’s single supply line to the rear. One motorised division was already marching westwards to Yukhnov. The withdrawal of Fourth Army units south of the Moscow-Smolensk highway was being discussed when Blumentritt was summoned to the telephone to speak to his personal friend and counterpart at Army Group Centre, Chief of Staff General von Greiffenberg. ‘You’d better make yourself comfortable where you are,’ he said. A
new order has just arrived from Hitler. Fourth Army is not to retreat a single yard.’ Blumentritt was aghast:

  ‘According to every calculation, it could only mean the destruction of the Fourth Army. Yet this order was obeyed. Units already moving westwards were turned about and brought back to the front. Fourth Army prepared to fight its final battles, only a miracle could save it now.’(29)

  Adolf Hitler had personally assumed the mantle of Commander-in-Chief of the Army. The Ostheer would fight where it was and, if necessary, perish.

  Chapter 17

  The order of the frozen flesh

  ‘Vorwärts Kameraden, wir müssen züruck!’ (Advance men – we’ve got to get back!)

  German infantry humour

  ‘Not one single step back’… the hold order

  ‘This retreat order has reduced me to dumb resignation,’ admitted an officer in the 198th Infantry Division. ‘I don’t want to think about it any more,’ but he appreciated that, in order to survive, ‘thinking and forethought is more necessary than before’. Obergefreiter Huber from Infantry Regiment 282 recalled unforgettable days battling on the Nara, with long nights, the cold, snowstorms – grey sinister days with artillery impacts and a constant racket among the smoke and crackling explosions of the fearsome “Stalin organs”’. The interminable retreat depressed the infantry officer. He was uneasy.

  ‘Awful weeks of withdrawing through the thick snow-covered countryside and impenetrable woods stood before us. Short insecure pauses in empty half-destroyed villages, a harassed existence in icy cold with driving snow and long hours of darkness. Will it be possible to rebuild a front? Will substantial combat-ready units ever turn up? Will we be able to hang on?’(1)

  When the ‘hold’ order was received at battalion level in the Fourth Army sector, it was met with incredulity. Infantry Regiment 9, part of 23rd Infantry Division, heard:

  ‘The High Command has ordered that the present withdrawal movements around the Lama [river] are to be halted, and the division is to concentrate on both sides and now go firm. The Lama position must be defended to the last man!’

  Commanders were to be held personally responsible for the order’s execution. Feldwebel Gottfried Becker’s initial reaction when told to dig was, ‘OK, OK we hold the position, but could someone please tell me which one?’ His commander, Leutnant Bremse, pointed to a hole in the ground partially filled with snow. ‘It was not completely prepared,’ he agreed, ‘but they could do it now.’ Each man in Becker’s platoon had the same unsettling thought: ‘He has got to be kidding!’ They had completed a seemingly endless march through snow and ice with no sleep, and fought countless rearguard actions. Now they were instructed to dig a position virtually from new, in rock-hard frozen ground. Mindful of the Soviet approach, they commenced digging. Becker shovelled snow out of the half-constructed trench, complaining that ‘those at the “top” had to be nuts’. Bremse was not sympathetic. ‘That’s it,’ he said, ‘shut your mouths and get on with it – now! Dig!’(2)

  Obergefreiter Huber from the 98th Division reached his objective at 02.00 hours on Christmas Eve.

  ‘Christmas morning dawned and now we had to occupy the edge of a wood. Thirty hungry spectres groped their way back to the position with shrunken cheeks, wearing summer uniforms with threadbare coats in temperatures of below −30°C. They had torn gloves, boots with holes and many wore laced-up shoes. Balaclava head-overs were soaked in sweat beneath chalk-smeared helmets. Stomachs were empty. They had two machine guns still in working order and some rifles. The route took them across fields, meadows, ditches and holes, into which the unsteady stumbled. Finally they arrived at the “position” at the end of the wood – a pair of holes half full of drifted snow. An icy wind cut through the position, quickly coating helmets and balaclavas from top to bottom with a thin coating of ice.’(3)

  Adolf Hitler had confounded the plans of his military advisors. Viewing an impending collapse of the front with dismay, he resolved to relieve his generals of command initiative. He took pride in his proven ability to master and profit from a crisis. The ailing Generalfeldmarschall von Brauchitsch, the German Army Commander-in-Chief, followed the hapless von Rundstedt from Army Group South into retirement. Von Brauchitsch became the scapegoat both for the failure of‘Barbarossa’ and the present winter crisis. Next came Generalfeldmarschall von Bock, who, in predicting disaster unless his Army Group was allowed to retreat, received a much earned ‘rest’ on 20 December. Generaloberst Guderian, evading orders to ‘stand fast’, was relieved from active duty on 26 December. General Erich Hoepner, the aggressive commander of Panzergruppe 4, enraged Hitler in early January as he retreated westward to avoid encirclement. Stripped of command, rank and privileges, he was forbidden to wear uniform in retirement. Strauss, the commander of Ninth Army, was cashiered one week later, and von Leeb, the Commander of Army Group North, was relieved on 17 January. During the subsequent winter, over 30 generals, corps and division commanders and senior officers were removed from command. They were the leaders that had brought the Ostheer with dramatic success to the very gates of Moscow. Now they were gone. Hitler, in removing them, completed the physical and moral transformation the Ostheer had been undergoing since June 1941. The last vestiges of Weimar and General Staff influence were gone. The Ostheer and Wehrmacht became the military arm of a National Socialist Reich.

  Cashiering so many senior commanders in the midst of the winter crisis had an inevitable impact upon the flow of operations. Hitler’s aim was indeed to minimise fluidity. His instinctive reaction, grounded on his veteran World War 1 experience, was that soldiers in a fast-moving crisis or retreat are more easily controlled when instructed to stand fast. An unequivocal ‘stand and fight’ order, whatever the seriousness of the situation, removed immediate uncertainties. Soldiers crave decision and clarity of intent at times of crisis. The German soldier sought clear direction and order.’ Panzer Leutnant F. Wilhelm Christians later explained:

  ‘Don’t ask me if we complained, or if we had a mind of our own. What remained for us to do? There was no freedom of action, or indeed even the idea of it! Nobody debated whether he would participate! Such issues were never raised. We were given a mission and we took orders seriously.’

  This resolve was not simply a mindless adherence to duty. ‘A feeling of comradeship sustained us also,’ said Christians, ‘right up until entry to a Soviet concentration camp.’(4) Soldiers did what was required to live.

  The next impact of the turmoil created by the extensive command changes was to stultify initiative at the front. The Ostheer was asked to perform the unthinkable, and elements would need to be sacrificed to achieve it. Hitler did not want his commanders to think; they were required to obey. As a result, strategic and operational control went to the supreme commander, virtually by default. An important source of advice and professional assessment was silenced in the process. The very command philosophy of the German Army, Auftragstaktik, designed to confer maximum initiative in accomplishing assigned tasks, was compromised. In one of those bizarre parodies of warfare, centralisation was imposed on the German military machine at the very time its opponents began to realise the virtues of decentralised control. The Wehrmacht had already demonstrated that the war-winning edge conferred by Blitzkrieg was dependent upon it.

  The first phase of the Soviet counter-offensive clearly drove the Germans back from Moscow but did not destroy the bulk of the Panzer forces. Zhukov’s original concept had been to gain space in front of Moscow, but the near-total collapse of the Army Group Centre front exceeded even the most sanguine Soviet expectations. As the three main German infantry armies were locked in combat, the beginnings of a possible double envelopment began to form. This encapsulated the area of Rzhev and Ninth Army in the north and a developing split between Fourth and Second Panzer Army creeping towards Vyazma in the south. Having planned and configured for a shallow set-piece battle, the Russians were unable to sustain wide-ranging penetrations without further supplies, r
eplacements and fresh units. Momentum petered out as the distance between the advancing armies and their supply bases widened. Hitler coincidentally decided at the same moment that Army Group Centre should stand its ground and fight. A crucible of experience resulted from this decision for which a special German Winter Medal entitled In Osten 1941–42’ was struck. German soldiers, with typical black humour, immediately labelled it The Order of the Frozen Flesh’.

  Feldwebel Gottfried Becker, holding on the Lama river line with Infantry Regiment 9, was driven from his bunker by artillery fire on Boxing Day. Shelter was crucial for Becker and his men, but they had no idea of the overall situation as they fell back to a village. There was no way of knowing which houses were enemy held, and which by German troops. It was not until his rifle slipped involuntarily from his grasp that Becker realised, in a moment of heart-stopping panic, that he had left his gloves behind in the bunker. All feeling had gone from his hands and he could not even hold his weapon. Frostbite had already reached the tissue-damaging stage. Becker had no option but to follow scores of walking wounded and struggle back through 20km of deep snow to seek treatment in the rear. He trudged through the snow accompanied by another lightly wounded soldier, towing on a sledge a more serious casualty shot through both knees. The man’s knees had swollen to the size of ‘two children’s heads’ but he displayed ‘immense stoicism’, Becker said. ‘He did not complain once despite being tipped several times into deep snow.’ Morale in the rear was low. There was a reluctance to accept the sledge-borne casualty at the division aid post, but Becker did at least manage to purloin some food and drink. He decided to continue on foot alone to seek treatment for his badly frozen hands.