The German War (34 page)

At this critical juncture, when the elite mobile divisions of Army Group Centre were starting to do the tasks normally carried out by the Wehrmacht’s security and rear area divisions who worked closely with the police battalions and the SS
Einsatzgruppen,
Reichenau’s order of 10 October reached them. The commander of the 4th Panzer Division urged his men to ‘become essentially still harder in the struggle against the Bolshevik-Jewish threat’. Driving back to their quarters from a briefing session for company commanders on 17 November, Fritz Farnbacher learned from his captain that the ‘key point is ruthless action and crack down against the Russians’. As the young pietist squirmed inside, he tried to find some kind of inner distance from what he had heard: ‘What was laid out in several hours of discussion is not in itself fundamentally German’, he concluded. Meanwhile, the division issued new and clear ‘Watch-words for the day’:

21.11.41: Carrier and inciter of the Bolshevik idea is the Jew.

German soldier, always consider, where Jews still live, there is no security behind the front. Jewish civilians and partisans do not belong in the prisoner-of-war camps, they are to be shot . . .

25.11.41: The population must be more fearful in its bones of German measures than of the terror of roaming Bolshevik remnants and partisans. For Bolshevik subhumans, there is no mercy, not for women and children either. Partisans and accomplices to the next tree!

In the following weeks, such mottos justified burning villages, killing inhabitants who resisted or seemed suspect, or driving them out into the freezing snow and forests. German soldiers now acted on their own initiative and began killing Jews and shooting Soviet prisoners rather than taking them to distant reception points. Judging how to respond to civilian threats was no longer the prerogative of senior officers, and the log of official executions dwindled. As this central element of military discipline disappeared, the genocidal war of the rear finally caught up with the front line. There was no shortage of prosaic reasons for killing civilians, let alone the Red Army soldiers who had remained at large in the forests. The further the Germans advanced and the thinner and more isolated their lines became, the more they feared the partisans. Their anxieties were justified. By late December, partisan units were able to retake villages and towns, even from Schweppenburg’s elite 24th Panzer Corps.
⁸⁵

Often German ‘pacification’ measures had more to do with soldiers’ sense of isolation and vulnerability than with any real threat from partisans or civilians. Fritz Farnbacher still chronicled instances where ‘suspicious’ civilians were killed, but he was becoming harder to shock. He decided his men should return to villages where they had requisitioned food before, rather than forage further afield and risk landmines, even if it meant ‘taking their last cow away!’ As the Germans shivered and huddled together in their thin grey lines against the vastness of the white landscape, the snow effaced landmarks and even removed the distinction between land and sky, both lost in a blend of grey and white.
⁸⁶

While the Reichenau order spread through the German Army on the eastern front, the verbal assault on the Jews also reached a new height. Hitler opened the rhetorical floodgates himself on 2 October, with his Proclamation to the soldiers on the eastern front to take Moscow, declaring that their key foes were ‘Jews and only Jews!’ The next day, he repeated the point to the home front in a speech at the Berlin Sportpalast. On 8 November, the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler lectured his audience about how he had ‘come to know these Jews as world arsonists’. The ‘entire national intelligentsia’ of Russia ‘had been slaughtered and a mindless, forcibly proletarianised sub-humanity left behind over which an enormous organisation of Jewish commissars – that is in reality slave-holders – rules’. Hitler hammered his point home: ‘This struggle is now, my old Party comrades, really a struggle not just for Germany but for the whole of Europe, a struggle to be or not to be!’
⁸⁷
The turn to apocalyptic rhetoric was unmistakable as Germany took on the mantle of a pan-European crusade against ‘Judaeo-Bolshevism’. Goebbels devoted his regular article in the weekly
Das Reich
on 16 November 1941 to telling his readers that ‘The Jews are guilty’. He also reminded them of the Führer’s ‘prophecy’ of 1939 that the Jews would perish if they started another European war:

We are now witnessing the fulfilment of this prophecy; the fate befalling the Jews is harsh, but it is more than deserved. Pity or regret is completely out of place in this case. In triggering this war, world Jewry completely miscalculated the forces it could muster. It is now gradually being engulfed by the same extermination process that it had intended for us and that it would have allowed to happen without any scruples, had it had the power to do so. But now it undergoes destruction according to its own law: ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth!’

*

Poorly shod, poorly clothed and poorly fed, the 4th Panzer Division was still meant to attack. The frontal assault on Tula having failed, Guderian tried to keep the momentum going, bypassing the town to the south-east and pressing on towards Kolomna and the eastern outskirts of Moscow. On 24 November, the 2nd Panzer Army took Venev and Mikhailov, and moved on Kashira, a town which the Red Army could not afford to lose because it supplied Tula’s power. Here, on 30 November, in a lull in the fighting outside this town east of Moscow, Robert R. took time out to write to Maria. Two days earlier their vehicle had broken down and had to be pushed through the snow in the midst of an artillery bombardment. Robert jotted down briefly what happened when a shell fragment hit one of his comrades: ‘R. Anton is hit, ripping his chest open. He dies. Before marching off G. has to paint a sign for the graves quickly. No wreath, no steel helmet.’ Robert’s thoughts were dwelling ever more on death. Only his young son helped anchor him to the hope that ‘so much has been promised for the future and He who promised it to us does not lie.’ After helping to burn down the village of Mikhailovka, Robert had fallen prey to a new bitterness and self-doubt. A fortnight later, he had been sent back to Mtsensk to recuperate and given light guard duty at a prisoner-of-war camp. The sick and starving prisoners he saw there left Robert unable to eat for most of the three days of his posting.
⁸⁹

Robert spared Maria from sharing in these experiences but he did tell her about his state of mind:

I’ve very seldom wept. Weeping is no way out as long as you are in the thick of things. Only when I’m back with you again, resting and getting over it, will we have to weep a great deal and it will also help you to understand your husband . . . ‘Sympathy’ here is pointless, if it replaces help and action. What is growing is a feeling of human poverty and the guilt of mankind, which has its roots in each individual. A deep shame is growing. Sometimes I am even ashamed to be loved.

What he feared most now was his own moral disintegration, the ‘inner decay in place of the external one’. His sole remedy remained ‘love and the secret [of the] family’. It was to be his final letter. As the Germans were slowly driven back, Robert R. was severely wounded on 4 December. His comrades carried him for 7 kilometres, but were unable to save him. They found a fitting spot to bury him near the entrance to a Soviet school. The four school exercise books in which Robert had kept his diary were brought home to his wife Maria by one of his comrades.
⁹¹

The Germans redoubled their effort to take Tula, this time by encirclement. But, as an officer in the 4th Panzer Division’s 12th Rifle Regiment complained, the men were ‘underfed, overtired, badly clothed’, their fighting power ‘frighteningly slight’. Fritz Farnbacher realised that his comrades in the division’s artillery were exhausted too. They prayed that the Red Army was even weaker than they were, a hope shared by divisional command. On 2 December, the 24th Panzer Corps at last managed to cut the Tula–Moscow road and, the next day, they severed the last rail link between Tula and Serpukhov. At temperatures of −32 °C, General Gotthard Heinrici’s 43rd Army Corps was desperately fighting its way through to them from the west. But the Germans could not bridge a final 9-kilometre gap to complete the encirclement. On 5 December, Guderian halted the attacks and persuaded the commander of Army Group Centre, Fedor von Bock, to let him call off the offensive. He relinquished his headquarters at Tolstoy’s old house at Yasnaya Polyana, leaving seventy German dead buried in the park near the writer’s grave, and four Russians hanging in the village square.
⁹²

7

At 2 a.m. on 6 December 1941, Soviet artillery and mortars began shelling the lines of the 12th Rifle Regiment of the 4th Panzer Division. It was the night of St Nicholas when parents leave presents in their children’s shoes in Germany. On the Russian front, the temperature had dropped to −40°C. When the guns fell silent again, Smilo Freiherr von Lüttwitz sank back into the sleep of an exhausted regimental commander. At 3.30 a.m. he was woken again by the sound of his own side’s heavy gun firing back. He sent an adjutant out and discovered that two Red Army battalions had silently infiltrated a long ditch into the middle of the village. Their approach was involuntarily quiet: it was so cold that neither side’s rifles and machine guns would fire. Lüttwitz’s men were saved only because they had set up one machine gun under the overhang of a roof, which kept it warm enough to work. With it they managed to drive the attackers back.
¹

The leading sections of the German vanguard immediately registered that their fortunes had changed for the worse. Stranded in the snows where their attack on the Tula–Moscow road had stalled, the beleaguered panzer divisions and the 43rd Army Corps were the most exposed to the Soviet counter-attack which began that night. It took longer for this realisation to percolate through to the rest of the German vanguard. On 6 December Lieutenant Hans Reinert’s main worry was trying to stay awake in his stuffy staff hut as he busied himself with the 296th Infantry Division’s operational plans. He did not register that anything had changed until the following night, when he was woken again and again by urgent phone calls. Staring bleary-eyed at the massed waves of attacking infantry, Reinert found it hard to fathom how Soviet commanders could be so profligate with their men’s lives. Nor could he grasp where these new masses of troops had come from: ‘It’s like a river. You can divert it, but then more fresh water flows down it.’ He found the purpose of the attack equally baffling:

And it’s not a battle for a continuous front. It’s a battle for settlements. There’s nothing between them! . . . We keep asking ourselves why the Russians make these pointless attacks, repeatedly at the same positions which we have now closed up around, so that nothing can escape us any more. What are they trying to achieve? Yes, maybe they’ll get some settlements, [but] so what?

The divisional staff calculated that this one engagement alone cost the Red Army at least 2,000 men.
²

It was not only Hans Reinert and Smilo von Lüttwitz who were taken by surprise by the Red Army’s enormous counter-offensive. As late as 4 December, the staff of Army Group Centre as a whole had been confident that, with their own offensive tailing off, they were about to see a long winter lull. According to their intelligence, the Red Army could not ‘launch a counter-offensive with the forces currently available’. They could not have been more wrong. In mid-October, a mere 90,000 men had defended Moscow. Six weeks later, the Soviets had raised whole new armies from scratch and moved experienced troops from the Far East, so that the capital was now defended by over a million men, equipped with 8,000 guns and mortars, 720 tanks and 1,370 aircraft. Buoyed by their successes – and still more by the biblical scale of Soviet losses in the autumn battles – the Germans continued to underestimate the strength and striking power of their enemy. From the Chief of the General Staff, Franz Halder, and the commander of Army Group Centre, Fedor von Bock, down to brigade and regimental commanders such as Eberbach and Lüttwitz, and on to junior officers like Fritz Farnbacher and Hans Reinert, the entire German chain of command remained convinced of their own superiority. They clung to the comforting belief that the Red Army remained on the point of collapse despite all the mounting evidence to the contrary. This was a delusion born of a habit of victory, which gave an extraordinary unity of perspective to German soldiers on the eastern front. Events over the following months would shatter the supreme confidence with which they had set off to conquer Moscow, but the illusions they had about their own capacity to go on fighting and winning against the odds would survive.
³

The German encirclement of Moscow had frozen to a halt in mid-execution, the front lines shaped like a great, lopsided crescent, 600 kilometres from end to end. The horns of the assault, led by the tank divisions, were the first targets of attack, and as they recoiled they exposed the main body of the German 4th and 9th Armies which held the middle of the front on both sides of the Moscow highway. For much of December, January and February, the whole of Army Group Centre would be threatened with destruction. The northern horn of the German attack had closed to within 30 kilometres of the Kremlin, the crews of Georg-Hans Reinhardt’s 3rd Panzer Group briefly winning the crucial bridgehead over the Moscow–Volga canal, the last physical barrier before the northern suburbs of the city. It was here that elite Red Army troops, drawn from the Siberian, Far Eastern and Central Asian divisions, launched their counter-attack on 6 December. Within a day, Reinhardt was reporting that his best troops were ‘no longer . . . operational’ and that it was ‘impossible to seal off enemy penetrations or even launch counter-thrusts’. With Soviet tanks suddenly appearing in their rear, the Germans succumbed to a
Panzer-Schreck
of their own. The official diary of the panzer group which two weeks earlier had looked poised to take Moscow betrayed something of its present straits: ‘Many individual soldiers can be seen here and there with a horse-sleigh or leading a cow . . . The men themselves look indifferent . . . Practically nobody is contemplating repulsing the many enemy air raids. Soldiers killed by bombs are simply left lying there.’
⁴