The German War (53 page)

German people, you must know: if the war is lost, then you are annihilated . . . This war is not the Second World War, this war is the Great Race War. Whether the German and Aryan stands here or whether the Jew rules the world, that is what is at stake and that is what we are fighting for out there.

The response to Göring’s harvest festival speech within Germany was immediate and overwhelming, summed up for the SD in the comment that he ‘spoke to the heart and the stomach’. His speech reconnected the population with the leadership, at a time when propaganda drives exhorting German workers to increase their productivity and ‘performance’ or to volunteer for sporting activities after work had been failing. Whereas civilian morale had remained depressed throughout the summer, at the start of autumn 1942 it rebounded and would continue to be upbeat and optimistic for the next few months. To most Germans, the war still remained one of national defence, but during 1942 they had adapted to its changing character, learning to scour occupied Europe for the resources to fight a much longer and deeper kind of struggle. That brought with it a half-articulated, often discomforting awareness of how imperial and genocidal their war had become.
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10

At the beginning of April 1942, Halder put the finishing touches to a new plan of campaign in the Soviet Union. The arguments of the navy, with its proposals to join the Japanese in a ‘war of continents’ against the British and Americans, had been rejected in favour of the army and the land war against the Soviets. As Hitler explained to Nazi leaders a few weeks later, once the ‘business in the east’ was settled, ‘then the war is practically won for us. Then we will be in the position of conducting a large-scale pirate war against the Anglo-Saxon powers, which in the long run they will not be able to withstand.’ Hitler continued to believe that Britain would be forced to negotiate peace once the Soviet Union was defeated; and without its British ally, America would be unable to reach Continental Europe. The German leadership had gambled too far to stop gambling now.
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After its recent catastrophic failure to gauge Soviet strength, German Army intelligence had carried out a new assessment; but, again, the Germans severely underestimated Soviet armament, troop numbers and reserves, assuming that their principal adversary could not recover from the winter losses. Luckily for them, Soviet intelligence was equally poor and the Red Army was preparing for Army Group Centre to resume its attack on Moscow. Instead, the entire German effort was concentrated on Army Group South and the conquest of the Caucasian oilfields. ‘If I don’t get the oil of Maikop and Grozny,’ Hitler declared to General Paulus, commander of the 6th Army, ‘then I must wind up this war.’ Whereas in 1941 tradition-conscious Prussian generals had wanted to focus on defeating the Red Army in a decisive battle of annihilation for Moscow, Hitler had been more interested in seizing the breadbasket of Ukraine and the oil wells. Now the two views were merged, as it was accepted that cutting the Soviet economy off from its energy lifeline would force the Red Army to stand and fight: the Wehrmacht could conquer the resources the Reich needed and it could win the war in the east.
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Halder’s ‘Operation Blue’ aimed at advancing towards the Caucasus along the Black Sea coast. Its first objectives were to take Sebastopol and the Kerch peninsula so as to eliminate any attack on the German lines from the south. The focus on Army Group South was as much a matter of necessity as of design. At the end of March, 95 per cent of German divisions were still not regarded as capable of offensive action. By the start of May, the eastern front was still short of 625,000 men and 90 per cent of the vehicles which had been lost in the previous nine months had not been replaced. Army Group South garnered the bulk of the resources: of its sixty-eight divisions, seventeen had been partly rebuilt, while the great majority – forty-eight divisions in all – had been completely reconstituted. Whereas in June 1941 the invasion had taken place across a broad front, involving all three army groups, in this campaign the task of Army Groups North and Centre would be to absorb losses of materiel and hold their lines.
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On the northern front, the young infantryman Wilhelm Abel knew that when their precious tanks were sent south, this ruled out a ground assault on Leningrad. But he was able to tell his sister back in Westphalia that they still had enough artillery and air power to bombard the city relentlessly. He speculated whether the Russian campaign would conclude in time for them to invade England that year and wreak vengeance for all the air raids. Meanwhile, in the early May sunshine, he and his comrades went fishing in Lake Ladoga with hand grenades.
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Thousands of kilometres to the south, Helmut Paulus was stationed by the river Mius, on one of the most south-easterly points of the eastern front. He was one of the last to hear of the German offensive. On 1 July 1942, his sister and mother heard the special reports on the radio that Sebastopol had fallen and the long-awaited summer campaign had begun. Helmut, meanwhile, was worrying about life back in Pforzheim: he had read that potatoes were being rationed for the first time, had heard disturbing comments from a returning comrade about ‘the mood and life at home’ and wondered if his mother was right to give up her chocolate ration for him. Like all the other veterans in his unit, he was furious that they had just been put through another training exercise. He could hardly believe the amounts of precious artillery shells wasted in it, to say nothing of accidental casualties. One of theirs was caused by a fresh recruit throwing his hand grenade too short. A comrade had come up with an appropriate ‘philosophy’: ‘If you don’t get hit at the front, then they fire one up your arse from behind, but, in any case, you’ve got to go.’
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As the first week of July ticked by and the radio at home carried news of the huge offensive to the north-east of his lines, things continued as before in the Mius sector. Training was stepped up, with long forced marches and the occasional strafing by a Soviet biplane. When the men watched a comedy,
The Merry Vagabonds,
Helmut was struck by the change it revealed: ‘Laughter has become rare amongst us . . . If you think that pretty much every one of them has at least ten Russians on his conscience, you do have to wonder a bit at this boisterousness.’
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Finally, on 11 July, came the order to move. In baking heat, the men waded across the Mius, the water lapping above their boots, heading for a village the Soviets had already evacuated. Soviet deserters told the German engineers where the minefields lay. A few hundred metres beyond the village, Helmut’s company suddenly ran into rifle and machine-gun fire and had to dig in, spending the night shivering in their wet clothes, their shirts bathed in sweat and their trousers soaked from the river crossing, while artillery and mortars joined in the Soviet fire. They had been heading in the wrong direction, and during the night most of the company was pulled back. Helmut was one of the twenty-four men left to hold the position, cowering the next day in their foxholes with no communication to their rear and surrounded on three sides. By the end of the second day of the offensive, they had not eaten for forty-eight hours and had to keep sending men out with cooking pots on a half-hour trek to bring back brackish water.

Just as their unit was being relieved, Helmut heard an incoming mortar shell. Instinctively he leaped out of his trench. It landed 10 metres behind them and ‘ripped both legs off a comrade who jumped out behind me’, he wrote home, ‘while nothing happened to me’. After a night spent hunting for food in the abandoned Soviet bunkers, on the next day’s march they were able to beg some bread and dried biscuit from mountain troops and collect water from the streams they passed. That night they finally caught up with their baggage train and field kitchen. There was no hot food, but there was at least bread, butter, coffee and a slab of chocolate for each of them. As Helmut lay down in the shade of a wood writing his latest letter home, for the first time he heard the sounds of the major German bombardment. While the artillery barrage thundered, wave after wave of Stukas, hundreds of them, screeched down on to the line of concrete bunkers which the Soviets had built in the winter. ‘Till now the enemy air force and artillery were always overwhelmingly superior wherever we were. What an indescribable feeling this barrage is for each one of us,’ he wrote on the eve of their own attack.
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Instead of being sent in, Helmut’s company was suddenly withdrawn from their trenches, squeezed into trucks and taken back all the way across the Mius again. Marching mostly at night to avoid the heat of the July sun, Helmut Paulus was being sent further south towards Rostov. He lost his metal spoon and had to ask his family for a replacement, unwilling to make do with a wooden one like the locals – ‘designed for the mouth of a crocodile and with which no educated central European can eat’. The news that Krasnyi Luch – the city they had faced all winter and spring – had fallen confirmed that the ‘Russians have given up their entire fortified line’. His impression, from the settlements they passed through, was that they were about a day behind the retreating Red Army, and closing. Led by a platoon of engineers checking for minefields, they had to march at the ready. They kept their machine gun assembled, however awkward and heavy it became by the end of a 40-kilometre march. When they came to a damaged bridge, they repaired it with wooden door and window frames they ripped out of the village houses nearby, and kept going.
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The summer heat, low casualties and rapid advance across the steppe ensured that morale remained high. On 26 July, the company reached Rostov-on-Don. Driving through the city at first light, Helmut was amazed to see the station full of abandoned locomotives and rolling stock. They crossed the Don on a large ferry and spent the rest of that night marching, often wading through the marshland on the eastern side of the great river. When they finally reached a small settlement and encountered resistance, the Stukas did most of the work, sparing them close combat.
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Having slept in the Soviet trenches, they moved out again the next morning at 7.30 a.m., crossing the steppe for 20 kilometres, battle-ready. The rearguard Red Army troops they met simply raised their hands in surrender. Once the Germans had left the Don marshes, things kept speeding up. Helmut watched with delight as their own tanks now came past and took over the advance across the firm terrain. Finally released from the ‘Halt orders’ which had hamstrung its ability to manouevre in 1941, the Red Army did not wait to be encircled and was in headlong retreat, making use of the supply of trucks being delivered by its new US ally. In pursuit of their motorised enemy, the German infantrymen had to make ever longer forced marches, mostly on foot. The few German trucks were used sparingly. ‘Completely exhausted and over-strained, eyes burning for sleep, nerves totally overstrung,’ Helmut wrote after marching well into the night. Their own artillery had not kept up and, ‘as so often, we infantrymen were left to our own devices’, facing the enemy on their own. Together with a neighbouring company they slowly worked their way forward towards a village, losing some wounded but taking many prisoners. They found ‘eggs, milk, butter and first-rate white bread, which tasted wonderful after the strains of the last two days’. The prisoners came as a great relief: some of them were immediately set to carrying the heavy ammunition boxes across the endless grasslands.
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Such front-line deployment of Red Army prisoners was becoming increasingly common, and marked a huge shift during the first six months of 1942. The German rear was no longer swamped by huge numbers of prisoners as in 1941, because the Red Army evaded encirclement battles by continuing to retreat eastwards. The transit camps for prisoners of war, or
Dulags,
changed character. From being the sites of mass starvation, such as the one Konrad Jarausch had overseen until he was carried off by the typhus epidemic, the camps took on a new role of screening prisoners and manufacturing ‘auxiliary volunteers’, as they were called. Arriving in Belorussia in May 1942, the Solingen high-school teacher August Töpperwien was soon fully immersed in this work. Already in December 1941, the Germans had begun deploying prisoners in support roles and even in some combat units. Despite an explicit order from Hitler forbidding such measures, the number of ‘Russians’ in Wehrmacht uniform kept climbing in the spring and summer of 1942. Most ‘volunteers’ simply wanted to escape the festering and famine-ridden camps and were allotted menial, non-combat roles, as servants to officers, medics, cooks, translators and drivers of trucks or horse-drawn carts. It was the simplest and most practicable way of making up the chronic under-strength of German units. As the 134th Infantry Division tried to rebuild itself after its disastrous retreat to the German lines in the December blizzards, it even placed former Red Army men in combat roles. Hitler repeated his ban on further recruitment of ‘Eastern troops’ in February and June 1942, to no avail. Starved of German replacements to make good their losses, the Army High Command itself issued guidelines to circumvent its Supreme Commander’s orders and suggested that every division in the east could take on 10–15 per cent of its strength from Red Army ‘volunteers’. Once the Soviet ‘volunteers’ proved their value in fighting their former Red Army comrades in anti-partisan action in the rear, Army Group Centre began to create full combat units under German officers. By 18 August, Hitler relented, signing off on a directive which formally acknowledged the existence of the ‘Eastern troops’ and established regulations for their pay, ranks, uniforms and relations with German personnel. By the end of the year, nearly half of the men in the 134th Infantry Division were ‘Russian volunteers’. In order to avoid associating the new units with Russian nationalist traditions, they were given geographical rather than historical names – ‘Dniepr’, ‘Pripet’ or ‘Berezina’.
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