The German War (35 page)

It was even worse around Tula and Kashira in the south. For Eberbach’s crack 5th Panzer Brigade of the 4th Panzer Division, the situation quickly became ‘critical’, as they were forced to retreat before the Soviet counter-attack. Vehicles would not start and had to be abandoned, alongside much of the equipment they had carried. Compared to the 40–50 kilometres a day they had covered during the advance, they were now down to a mere 6.5 kilometres. The dreadful slowness of all movement only added to the retreating Germans’ mounting sense of terror and foreboding. The highway from Tula to Orel had become an icy piste, covered in places by drifting snow. Burning ever more scarce fuel just to keep going, the tanks repeatedly had to be dug out of the drifts. With withering irony and tender concern, Fritz Farnbacher surveyed his command:

You really can’t tell what a thrilling business it is each time till the funeral procession gets moving . . . My proud ‘family’ today looks like: at the front, the boss’s car with its front-wheel drive; the differential for the rear-drive croaked yesterday; I fear we may not get over the hills, it’s spluttering a bit, but it goes.

And so it went, each precious vehicle patched up in a different way, the leaf springs distorted under the loads, the oil feed leaking, the first aid trailer hooked up to the truck with the field kitchen. ‘That’s my proud bunch,’ Farnbacher concluded.
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Things were no better for the 296th Infantry Division, as they were forced to give way before the attacks of the Red Army. While the divisional diary laconically noted the ‘Difficult passage . . . in the gullies east of Odoev’, Lieutenant Reinert left a more vivid account: ‘In icy north wind. Waiting in the dark night till they can get down. Each vehicle can follow at 200-metre intervals, the men holding them back with ropes to stop them from sliding down the icy piste into the gullies.’ With carthorses slipping down on their rear haunches into the deep ditches, and the carts and cars after them, men had to keep clambering back up again to lower the next vehicle down. The guns were worst, too heavy to hold. Those that slipped out of control still had to be hauled back out of the way. It took all night for the underfed, inadequately clothed and terrified men to clear the passage, the painful slowness of all movement adding to the cold and fear. On 22 December, Reinert noted, ‘Well, the order: Back! We are completely morally done in. I can’t describe what we feel in these minutes. It’s too enormous. We could howl aloud . . .’ By New Year’s Day, he was reporting that ‘The men suddenly can’t march any further, they fall down and die on the spot or freeze to death on the transport to the next shelter. It is a cruel time.’ Of the 1,000 casualties suffered by the 296th Infantry Division in December, 351 had frostbite.
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In a sombre survey of the state of morale right across its forces, Army Group Centre concluded on 19 December that it had reached crisis point:

The setbacks can be attributed to the physical and mental state of our troops, which has sunk far below the limits of efficiency, fear of being taken prisoner by the Russians, decimated fighting strengths, a shortage of fuel, the strained supply situation, and the poor state of the horses. On top of this, there is a feeling of defencelessness against the heavy Russian tanks . . . This enables the Russians, employing increasingly astounding masses of men despite sometimes extraordinary losses in dead and wounded, to trickle through our own thin lines as a result of the divisions’ exceedingly long sectors of the front.

Describing the Soviet breakthroughs into the German rear, which were causing ‘chaos’, the army group admitted that it could no longer make its own soldiers counter-attack. Under such circumstances, the poorly equipped and scarcely trained new Soviet armies could score very real victories.
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As the two armoured horns of Army Group Centre crumpled, the bulk of the German forces facing Moscow came under sustained – and near fatal – attack. From the last week of December until mid-January, the Red Army tore holes in the German lines, threatening to break up and destroy the entire army group. A breach in the southern sector along the Oka left German troops holding Sukhinichi completely surrounded. Taking back Mosalsk, Zhizdra and Kirov, two Soviet armies opened up a huge semicircle, separating the 2nd Panzer Army from the German 4th Army and creating space for four Soviet armies to advance on Iukhnov and the vital Smolensk–Moscow Highway. In the north, it was just as bad. The Soviet 29th Army smashed its way through the German 4th Army Corps at Staritsa on 29–30 December, and advanced on Rzhev, whose low ridge held the key to the German position. Within three days, the Soviet 39th Army succeeded in breaking through west of Rzhev and swung southwards towards Sychevka. Beyond Sychevka lay Vyaz’ma and the Smolensk–Moscow Highway. It looked as if the Soviet counter-attack was now poised to exploit these gaps in order to execute the kind of huge encirclement which the Germans had used to such effect during the summer and autumn battles. On 12 January, the Red Army opened up a second major gap in the north, at Volokolamsk.
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To the south, things were even worse. Instead of supporting the desperately under-resourced attack on Tula, the 2nd Army had been ordered further south-east to occupy the approaches to the Upper Don, the General Staff’s post-Moscow objective. The Soviet counterattack now found the 2nd Army stranded in the snowy wastes near Efremov, completely isolated from both its neighbours, the 2nd Panzer Army and Army Group South. By 8 December, the Red Army tore a 30-kilometre hole in the German lines, encircling three infantry divisions. By 14 December, Field Marshal Bock anticipated that the 134th Infantry Division might just get through but not the shattered remnants of the 45th; in fact, the commander of the 134th had shot himself the day before. The official diary of the 45th Infantry Division reported ‘ghostly night marches’:

Occasionally the thick ice-cold snowstorm abated and some visibility returned. Everywhere in the east was lit up by huge fires. Parts of the route are covered over and only to be found with the help of locals . . . The whole day, the storm whipped up the fine, powder snow without ceasing and drove it into eyes and faces, till it felt like being in a painful hailstorm . . . It was easy for him [the enemy] to bring his shock troops up to our lines under cover of the snow clouds, so that they were only seen at the last moment.

Here retreat became a panic-ridden flight, with vehicles, horses, heavy weapons, field kitchens, tools, sacks of flour and spare parts simply abandoned. In order to restore discipline, the commander of the 2nd Army, General Rudolf Schmidt, ordered ‘individuals who make defeatist remarks to be singled out and shot as an example’. For the men of the 45th, raised in Linz, comradeship born out of the fear of being left behind helped to keep their narrow columns of dark-clad figures together and moving through the blizzard of white. With no idea where the German lines lay, they depended on local guides, who were often shot afterwards to prevent them revealing their route to their pursuers. Without horses or motor transport, the Germans were forced to drag their wounded on sledges. Between 5 and 17 December, their dead amounted to 233 men, with another 232 missing; but they brought back another 567 wounded. In the end, German planes found them, and, like a variation of ‘Hansel and Gretel’, dropped leaflets to guide their line of march. On 17 December, after eleven days of retreating, as the winter sun was setting, the column met a single German, the liaison officer for the 56th Infantry Division. Having finally reached the safety of their own lines, the divisional command made a swift assessment: ‘Battle-worthiness of the troops zero, because totally exhausted.’
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A week later, on 25 December, the divisional doctor concluded that many soldiers were suffering from ‘nervous exhaustion’. Their clothing had been wet through, their boots poor and worn through for months. He estimated that some 70 per cent of the men were suffering from frostbite, 40 per cent from diarrhoea and vomiting, and all were utterly lice-ridden. Yet, despite their losses and complete encirclement, they had not been destroyed. This narrow difference still separated them from the fate of Napoleon’s Grande Armée. Throughout that winter, while they waited for replacements to reach them from France and Austria, the men from the 45th Infantry Division remained in the front line.

Everywhere, the crisis prompted thoughts of defeat. General Gotthard Heinrici, who had led the infantry attack on the Tula highway, wrote home ten days into the Soviet counter-offensive, predicting that ‘we can’t recover from the blow, for so much is done for’. Fritz Farnbacher could not stop thinking about ‘Napoleon’s Russian experiences’. He was not alone in seeing the shadow of 1812.
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In the rear, a fresh crisis was engulfing Dulag 203, one of the many transit camps for prisoners of war. Despite Konrad Jarausch’s best efforts to dole out food three times a day, he had to admit by 4 January 1942 that he was failing. Prisoner numbers in his section of the camp had risen to 3,000 again and, after months of stripping the surrounding countryside bare, the requisitioning parties were coming back empty-handed. By now typhus fever had also broken out in the camp. On 8 January 1942, he complained to his wife that he had to use his fists so often to keep order when food arrived that his right hand had become swollen. The situation was worse than ever. ‘Hundreds move in the camp around us who are dying of famine,’ he confessed to her. ‘Each distribution of food is a tragedy. The cravings become ever greater till complete exhaustion and indifference set in.’ Even if more provisions arrived in the next few days, it would be too late. Two days later, he reckoned twenty prisoners were dying a day. One Russian prisoner told him, ‘Hitler promised us bread and good treatment and now, after we voluntarily gave ourselves up, we are all dying.’
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The tragedy being played out in Dulag 203 was a microcosm of a human disaster which, for the time being, overshadowed even the
Einsatzgruppen
killings of the Jews. The winter retreat exacerbated the crisis of providing for the 3.2 million Soviet prisoners of war, and epidemics swept through the camps. When the Nazi regime realised in November that it badly needed to deploy prisoners of war to make up for labour shortages in Germany, very few of them were found to be fit enough to be sent to the Reich. On 13 January, Jarausch thanked his wife for all her letters. ‘The love which speaks from them warms me and fills me with thanks,’ he assured her. ‘Now, take care, you and the child.’ He did not tell her that he too had contracted typhus and was writing from the field hospital at Roslavl. A fortnight later, Konrad Jarausch was dead. By that time, at least two million Soviet prisoners had perished in German custody.
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It was not easy to reverse the annihilatory principles on which the German campaign had been planned. On the contrary, the winter retreat bound the German Army in the East
(Ostheer)
together in a common culture marked by mass slaughter. In the summer, the orders from the High Command to execute political commissars and Jewish communists had been interpreted in widely divergent ways, with some divisions screening out all their Jewish prisoners and others not. In October, the Reichenau order was promulgated in Army Group South. It took a further month to reach the other two army groups, coinciding with the final, faltering stages of the German advance, when elite tank divisions took on policing villages to the rear. As they now adopted the same methods of interrogation, pacification and terror practised by the German security divisions behind the lines, they entered a new phase of the war, where decisions on the life and death of Red Army prisoners and civilians were made on the spot without recourse to higher authority. The retreat quickened this process, reshaping the entire outlook and self-understanding of the eastern front.

Faced with an existential threat, the retreating Germans tried to slow down the Soviet counter-offensive by all and any means. As it began its withdrawal from the Tula area on 7 December 1941, the 103rd Tank Artillery Regiment destroyed anything that could be of use to the enemy. ‘Anishino is burning. Every single house is set alight once the troops have left,’ Fritz Farnbacher noted. ‘I don’t set alight the one we stayed in; instead, others do it. The commander too isn’t in favour. But it has to be done, just to slow the Russians a bit. We also aren’t allowed to ask if the civilian population starves, freezes or dies in some other way.’ Retreating troops torched villages and towns, blew up bridges and railway lines and wrecked industrial and power plants. With temperatures regularly down to –30 °C and – 40 °C, the soldiers shed their last remaining moral scruples and drove the entire civilian population out of their villages. It bought the Wehrmacht a small time buffer over the pursuing Red Army, but no more. Weeks before Hitler ordered the German Army in the East, on 21 December, to pursue a ‘scorched earth’ policy it had already become common practice. As Farnbacher tried to square events with his Protestant conscience he sought consolation in the thought that

I still haven’t fired a single shot, neither with a cannon, a pistol nor a rifle or machine gun, I haven’t slaughtered a single chicken or goose, still not set fire to a house, still not given the order to shoot a single Russian, and still not been present at an execution; how strange, almost unbelievable that sounds! But I am so grateful for it. There has been enough murdering, burning, destruction in this most ill-fated of all wars!

But he did not question the military logic of the orders, given ‘just to slow the Russians down a bit’. By 17 December, he wondered as he wrote up his diary in the evening and looked across the hut at their hosts, ‘whether their roof will be burned over their heads all too soon’.
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The Germans mastered their existential crisis by perpetrating extreme violence. It made no difference which part of the Reich the units were recruited from or whether their civilian environment had been hostile to or supportive of National Socialism. Drawn from the Ruhr working class and with an equal mix of Protestants and Catholics, the 253rd Infantry Division went through the same transformation as more Nazified divisions drawn from the countryside. The retreat fomented a potent mixture of rage and fear: rage at having to destroy their own vehicles, guns and heavy equipment and give up territory they had fought hard for; shock at the Soviets’ ability to handle the winter conditions so much better than themselves; terror at their own lack of secure lines to which to retreat. Neither side was taking prisoners any longer. Farnbacher envisaged that when the Soviets saw ‘the burnt villages and the soldiers shot on the roadside’ they would take no Germans alive. On 30 December, he was met with ‘almost bestial’ guffaws when he asked a group of German engineers what information they had gained from the thirty Russian prisoners they were supposed to bring to the collection point. He was shocked by the way they admitted to killing them ‘as a matter of course’. While part of him was outraged, realising how much the men had changed from five months earlier, another part felt compelled to jot down a justification: ‘Just no mercy for these vultures and beasts!’
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