The German War (30 page)

On the eastern front itself, soldiers adapted to mass killing in various ways. Individual moral and psychological make-up and the dynamics within their small units were filtered through different levels of exposure, experience and involvement. These varied greatly, especially between the front and the rear. Front-line mechanised units, like Fritz Farnbacher’s, witnessed the selective killing of political commissars and Jewish prisoners and the torching of villages. These were fleeting events, before the units moved on. Those like Helmut Paulus, Wilhelm Moldenhauer and Hans Albring, who followed the vanguard or were stationed in the rear, saw much more. On the eve of the invasion General Gotthard Heinrici, a devout Lutheran in command of the 43rd Army Corps, made his own sense of the orders from on high authorising the execution of ‘Jewish Commissars’, by reasoning that the front would be protected by a ‘preventive terror’ waged in the rear. It was here, behind the lines, that the real orgy of mass killing unfolded.
³²

When the 221st Security Division occupied Białystok on the morning of 27 June 1941, the streets were silent and deserted. After drinking heavily, the 500 men in the 309th Police Battalion fired indiscriminately through windows, before driving hundreds of Jewish men into the synagogue and setting it alight in an act of arson which destroyed much of the city centre. Some Wehrmacht officers intervened to curtail the wanton violence, and the divisional commander, General Johann Pflugbeil was seriously annoyed when the officer in charge of the police battalion was too drunk to report for duty. But Pflugbeil made his own sympathies clear. When a group of Jewish men threw themselves to the ground in front of him and begged for his protection, a policeman unbuttoned his trousers and urinated on them. General Pflugbeil simply walked away. Afterwards, he tried to gloss over the resulting massacre of 2,000 Jews in his report and awarded decorations to some of the police.
³³

Racial violence often also had a sexual dimension. On 29 June, German forces entered Riga, the Latvian capital, and an eye witness reported that the officers of a regiment from Baden-Württemberg immediately set up a drinking den to which they ‘forced several dozen Jewish girls to come, to undress fully, to dance and to sing. Many of the unfortunate women were’, he continued, ‘raped, then led out into the courtyard and shot.’ Freed from the strict controls enforced in occupied western Europe, soldiers on the eastern front could – and did – perpetrate extreme sexual violence with impunity.
³⁴

Paulheinz Wantzen’s contact in the Münster SD, Karl Jäger, had indeed been seconded, as the journalist had surmised in June 1941. When Jäger reached Gumbinnen in East Prussia, he joined the SS
Einsatzgruppe
A, operating under the overall command of SS-Brigadeführer Dr Franz Walter Stahlecker. Jäger took charge of one of its five
Einsatzkommandos
and followed Army Group North into the Lithuanian city of Kaunas on 25 June. Here local nationalists orchestrated their own massacres with German encouragement, punishing the Jews for their country’s occupation by the Red Army. On the first night alone, more than 1,500 Jews were killed in the streets and several synagogues burned. Local women witnessing the pogrom held their children up high or climbed on to chairs and boxes so that they could see better, and German troops crowded in to take photographs. From 2 July, the SD took over security police duties from the Wehrmacht and the Lithuanian nationalists, many of whom they enrolled as armed auxiliary police. Because of the speed of the German advance, the
Einsatzgruppen
had to patrol huge swathes of territory and so each group split up, leaving its smaller
Kommando
s to operate more or less independently. Karl Jäger, a former maker of musical instruments, kept a precise log of their tour of duty, starting with the execution of 463 Jews in one of the circle of military forts surrounding Kaunas. By the end of July, their ‘total carried forward’ on Jäger’s list came to 3,834.
³⁵

In late August, Himmler increased the number of men allotted to the
Einsatzgruppen,
especially those operating in Belorussia and Ukraine in the rear of Army Groups Centre and South, who were dealing with much larger Jewish populations spread over much greater distances than in Lithuania. They copied the procedures of Stahlecker’s
Einsatzgruppe
A and, instead of targeting only Jewish men of military age, started killing Jewish women and children as well. But it was also becoming clear that the men might be needed for labour, and Karl Jäger had been compelled by strong protests from the German civil administration and the Wehrmacht to spare the 34,500 Jewish workers and their families who remained in Kaunas, Šiauliai and Vilnius, although he still recommended their sterilisation. On 1 December 1941, Jäger filed his final report on his
Einsatzkommando
’s activities, commenting on the difficulties of organising so many daily operations, often involving a round trip of 160–200 kilometres from Kaunas. He and his men had also cleared out the local prisons, releasing those held on ‘spurious charges’ or to settle local scores. Teenage girls who had applied to join the Communist Youth in order to get work were set free by the Germans, whereas the Communist officials were given ‘ten to forty lashes with the whip’ before being shot. Jäger concluded triumphantly, ‘Today I can confirm that our objective, to solve the Jewish problem in Lithuania, has been achieved by EK 3.’ His men had executed 137,346 ‘Jews, Jewesses and Jewish children’.
³⁶

Despite the logistical difficulties posed by the terrain, in other respects things generally went smoothly. In particular, there was less friction between army officers and the SS than in Poland, and tensions arose only when army personnel intervened. On 20 August, men of the 295th Infantry Division discovered some eighty or ninety Jewish children on the first floor of a house in the Ukrainian town of Belaia Tserkov, lying and sitting on the floor in their own faeces. The soldiers were shocked and turned to their military chaplains for help. Having learned that their parents had already been executed, Lt-Col. Helmuth Groscurth, the division’s General Staff officer, tried to save the children, setting a cordon of troops to prevent the SS and Ukrainian militiamen from taking them away. Groscurth was an unusual officer. Through the winter of 1939–40, he had been one of the key liaison men at Army General Staff headquarters in Zossen, helping Admiral Canaris and Colonel Hans Oster to persuade Franz Halder to lead a military coup against Hitler. As part of his effort to recruit dissidents among the military elite, Groscurth had collected evidence of SS atrocities in Poland. At that time, no other senior general had followed Johannes Blaskowitz, the military commander in Poland, and dared to protest to Hitler.
³⁷

At Belaia Tserkov, Groscurth could only take his case as far as the commander of the 6th Army, and he had to couch his argument against shooting the Jewish children in terms acceptable to his superiors. Thus, he argued, it would have been more humane to have killed the children at the same time as their parents: having failed to do so, the children should be cared for. At 6th Army Headquarters, Field Marshal von Reichenau angrily quashed Groscurth’s plea, and two days later the SS and their Ukrainian militiamen shot the children.
³⁸

On 10 October, Reichenau clarified matters by issuing a general order to all his troops to co-operate fully in exterminating the Jews:

There is still a lot of uncertainty regarding the behaviour of the troops towards the Bolshevist system . . . The main aim of the campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevist system is the complete destruction of its forces and the extermination of the Asiatic influence in the sphere of European culture. As a result, the troops have to take on tasks which go beyond the conventional purely military ones. In the eastern sphere the soldier is not simply a fighter according to the rules of war, but the supporter of a ruthless racial [

] ideology and the avenger of all the bestialities which have been inflicted on the German nation and those ethnic groups related to it.

For this reason soldiers must show full understanding of the necessity for the severe atonement being required of the Jewish subhumans. It also has the further purpose of nipping in the bud uprisings in the rear of the Wehrmacht which experience shows are invariably instigated by Jews . . .

Only in this way will we fulfil our historic duty of liberating the German people once and for all from the Asiatic-Jewish threat.

Reichenau was one of the most Nazi of German generals. He had joined the Party back in 1932, when it had still been illegal for members of the German armed forces to do so. He endeared himself so much to Hitler that he occasionally alarmed the more traditional top brass, including his immediate superior Gerd von Rundstedt. Not on this occasion: within two days, Rundstedt issued Reichenau’s order to the whole of Army Group South. Hitler was delighted with Reichenau’s ‘excellent’ formulation, and, on 28 October, the Army High Command instructed all other army leaders to issue similar orders; by mid-November, it reached units of Army Groups Centre and North.
⁴⁰

*

In the first eighteen days of the invasion, Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Centre advanced 500 kilometres, reaching the gap between the Dvina and Dniepr rivers and between Vitebsk and Orsha. Just behind this front line lay the city of Smolensk. On 10 July, Bock’s troops launched their assault, two panzer groups leading the encirclement of Smolensk against the fierce resistance of the five Soviet armies protecting it. Instead of pulling back as the German pincers began to close around the city, fresh Red Army troops poured in, giving impetus to continual counter-attacks. It took until 27 July for the Germans to close the pocket and the fighting continued for a further five weeks before the remaining 300,000 Soviet troops surrendered. It was a major victory: the Red Army lost at least 1,300 tanks, the Germans less than 200. With Guderian’s tanks in control of the Yelna crossing of the Desna river, at the end of July the main highway to Moscow lay open.
⁴¹

The victory closed the first phase of the German campaign, beyond which no detailed plans had been made. The Wehrmacht was two weeks ahead of Napoleon, whose Grande Armée had taken Smolensk on 18 August 1812. From the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Walther von Brauchitsch, and Chief of the General Staff, Franz Halder, down to the front-line commanders like Bock, Guderian and Hoth, the generals wanted to follow the example of the French emperor and push on to Moscow as swiftly as possible. Brought up on the lessons of Napoleonic warfare theorised by the great nineteenth-century strategist Carl von Clausewitz, they adhered to his notion of the ‘decisive battle’, in which the enemy’s forces could be concentrated and destroyed. Nothing seemed more likely to produce this than an assault on the Soviet capital. Hitler had never singled out Moscow as the main objective of the campaign, however, and spent a week arguing with Halder over what to do next, pitting economic against military logic. The Nazi leader wanted to turn the armoured divisions southwards and capture Ukraine, whose grain was vital to Germany’s food security. Ukraine also held the gateway to the Caucasian oilfields. Oil and grain would turn the Reich into an autarkic superpower, enabling Germany to reflate the western European industries and withstand a long war of attrition with Britain and even the United States.
⁴²

On 18 August, to Halder’s and Bock’s dismay, Hitler decided for Ukraine and against Moscow, ordering Guderian’s panzer group to swing southwards. Halder later blamed the outcome of the war on this decision, but never did the Chief of the General Staff ask himself whether the military’s mantra about a single ‘decisive’ battle was the correct strategy for victory in a war on this scale. In fact, Hitler’s unorthodox – and unexpected – directive led to some of the Germans’ most decisive victories in the war.
⁴³

The August days were hot, but the nights were already turning chilly. During the night of 20 August, Robert R. dreamed that he was with his wife at home in Eichstätt. The pious couple were at a memorial service for the fallen in the cathedral. He drew her attention to the graves – ‘Look, there are so many of them!’ Then he knelt down before the altar, until someone snarled at him to move on. But in the altercation he lost sight of Maria and saw, instead, that a post office had been set up in the cathedral and people were frantically sorting the soldiers’ mail. While he looked for Maria in the packed congregation, people asked him whether it was true that he had died too. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘I’m alive!’ He went to kneel in the front pew – ‘which I take to be reserved for me’ – and found himself thinking, ‘Oh, now I won’t see Maria any more.’ It was then that Robert’s comrades nudged him awake to prepare for an attack on the small town of Pochep. Full of premonitions of his own death, Robert kept thinking about what had prompted this dream, putting it down to the mail that had been delivered to them in their forward positions earlier that evening. Unable to read Maria’s letters in the darkness, he had kept on looking at the photo of their 2-year-old son Rainer she had sent him, till he had fallen asleep.
⁴⁴

While the German artillery barrage on Pochep began, hitting a flock of geese in a village on the outskirts, Robert read his wife’s letters in the trench in the rapidly brightening dawn. Waiting in his trench all day, he had just started to write to Maria when the order to attack finally came. Dusk was already falling as they approached the village, but the tension kept rising: ‘we’re thinking, once we’re at the edge of the village, direct fire will start, which always has such a terrible effect’. Luckily, darkness fell swiftly, concealing their arrival along the drainage ditches into which they stumbled. Munching apples as they advanced, the soldiers reached a potato field and dug themselves in. When a Red Army soldier suddenly approached ‘doubled over’, one of Robert’s comrades opened fire. Robert and his lieutenant immediately jumped out of their trench and ran forwards, making for a kitchen garden, where an old man started pleading for his life. While Robert tried to comfort him, the old man began kissing his hands and embracing his knees. Finally reassured, he took Robert to where his daughters and sons were hiding in a foxhole in the garden. ‘They come out, weeping from fear and relief, quite small children in their arms. It’s a misery,’ Robert wrote in his diary the next day. ‘I tell them, they can quietly go into the house, no one will set it alight.’ A couple of houses had caught fire during the fighting, probably from the artillery rounds.