The German War (74 page)

Two days after the invasion began, Peter Stölten was in the thick of the battle with the British 2nd Army for control of Caen. Facing units of the British 7th Armoured Division in front of Bayeux, the Panzer-Lehr Division was exposed to bombardment from the ships at sea, field artillery and the massive bomber fleets which gave cover to the British and American landings. On 10 June Stölten wrote home to tell his parents that his few belongings had been shredded by aerial machine-gunners and that, with his stubble, he resembled the leader of a robber band. ‘The responsibility is enormous. But everywhere, iron calm,’ he wrote. Despite his three years of military service, it was Stölten’s first full-scale battle, and calm nerves under fire became the guarantee that the line would be held. To their west, the 352nd Infantry Division had crumbled under the onslaught, opening a gap in the German line, which the British exploited, launching a flanking incursion into the rear and briefly occupying the village of Villers-Bocage before being driven back by a company of SS heavy tanks. The German line held, just.
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On 20 June, Stölten wrote home that ‘We are still all very grave, but we are calm in a way that exists only on the western front. I don’t have any cases with [bad] nerves.’ In the same letter he reported that the day before he had participated in a failed counter-attack during which his own vehicle had fallen into a ditch, its gun pointing downwards, while he had watched helplessly as two of his closest friends were burned in their tank. He told his parents how another close friend had been ‘shot up next to me’ in his machine five days earlier.
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On 26 June, the American 7th Corps captured the heavily destroyed and, for now, unusable port of Cherbourg. Even so, Caen, one of the first objectives of the landing force, continued to block the Allied breakout from the Normandy peninsula. Controlling the Caen Canal and the river Orne as well as a road hub, it gave the Germans a defensive position while denying the Allies the flatter, less wooded land where they would be able to establish airfields. On 2 July, Peter Stölten learned that his division was being pulled out of the line and sent westwards to shore up the defence of Saint-Lô against the Americans. Complaining about the break in the fighting and relishing his buccaneering role, he treated his family to a cheerful turn of phrase worthy of Ernst Jünger, declaring that ‘a life without exciting impressions has become unbearable for un-bourgeois like us’.
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It would take the British until 18 July to drive the Germans out of Caen, and the Americans would not capture Saint-Lô from the Panzer-Lehr Division until the day after that. Hemmed in by the high hedges and copses of this bocage country, both sides were constrained by poor manoeuvrability and visibility. By now, Peter Stölten was no longer in the front line: in early July, his company was withdrawn in order to rebuild another unit, the 302nd Panzer Abteilung. Set on staying with his comrades and defending heroically to the very end, Stölten objected strenuously and jumped on a motorbike to persuade his regimental commander to rescind this ‘most senseless, stupid and upsetting order of my life’. He failed. On his furious ride back, Stölten crashed. ‘[Your] Son in field hospital, unfortunately not wounded … but result of accident’, he wrote sadly and laconically home from the military hospital at Le Mans on 8 July.
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Shocked by the accident and afraid that he might lose his left eye, Stölten also feared that he would be court-martialled for his recklessness in riding a motorbike alone. He spent the first week in Le Mans lying in bed and imagining ‘all eventualities from a penal battalion to prison to reduction to the ranks’. He also knew that the accident had let him escape almost certain death. When the colonel consigned the charges against him to the waste paperbasket, he could not rejoice. Instead, he told Dorothee how he and the group of young officers who had gone through training together had appraised their military situation at the beginning of the invasion and

came to the sober and simple conclusion that none of us would draw his head out of the noose and that our lives were now over … And now that not one of these lieutenants is still alive and all the Tigers are missing, I know that only my accident … saved me from what we expected.

He also found the enforced break from the fighting difficult to bear, confiding to Dorothee that he needed the comradeship, the tension and the oblivion of the front-line.
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While Stölten was recuperating, the remnants of his proud division were slowly ground down by the overwhelming superiority of the 140,000 Allied troops attacking them. On 25 July, 2,000 Allied bombers flew in to pound the German positions in the most devastating demonstration of airpower on the battlefield so far. The Panzer-Lehr Division lay directly in their path. By the time its shattered remnants were finally ordered back to Alençon for rest and refitting on 5 August, the division had virtually ceased to exist: it emerged from Normandy with twenty functioning tanks. After penning the American and British forces onto the Cotentin peninsula for six weeks, the rest of the German 7th Army now found itself virtually encircled in the Falaise pocket.

Peter Stölten’s eyesight was saved and he was released from the field hospital in Le Mans. Convalescing in a hotel at Verdun, he was plunged into depression, plagued by a sense of guilt for his friends and no longer sure what he was fighting for. On 24 July, he wrote to Dorothee that the ‘world’ seemed ‘hardly interesting any more, just monotonously sad and composed of an indescribable mixture of apathy and tension’. Two days later he told her that he hoped she would forget him, because ‘I am ashamed that for a whole week I am just nothing, anything but a strength inside . . . It is so paltry what I can give you.’
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He found his release, not in his chosen métier of drawing or painting, but by writing feverishly into the night. He was composing not a diary or a memoir but a dramatic dialogue between three young men, all soldiers, and two young women. Giving two of the men the names of his dead friends, Theo and Karl, and one of the women the captivating vitality of his fiancée Dorothee, he let his characters argue out his own dilemmas amongst themselves. Karl got the best lines, claiming that there was neither God nor purpose in war, in men crawling towards their own death like flies towards a gigantic swatter. Theo took the opposite, religious stance, insisting that men fall back in awe of the mystery of the divine:

‘My ways are not your ways, for as high as the heavens are above the earth, so are my thoughts above your thoughts.’ All that we find and say bears the imprint of the limitations of man. But religious awe is the first step beyond the painful experience of man’s boundaries: to want to know the infinite – but only to be able to know the finite.

In the character of Angelika, Stölten dwelt on Dorothee: ‘Imagine yourself as a flower, which flowers, ripens, spreads its seed, withers and falls back to the earth.’ Not surprisingly, it was Angelika’s love of life which brought the three young men back on track, and led the quietest of the three, Michael, to make his impassioned plea for the transfiguring quality of human love. Only love could escape the physical and mortal confines of the human body: ‘Love! It is the longing for a union with the better and the will to melt into the beautiful. In this feeling and will we want to learn to overcome the world like Empedocles.’
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Stölten admitted to Dorothee that he had made his literary challenge of giving meaning to war ‘easy by giving the last, most important word to Hölderlin (not the Bible), and insuring myself with good odds’. If Stölten turned to the lyric poet’s drama
Empedokles
for inspiration, it was Hölderlin’s
Hyperion
which provided the measure by which Stölten had tried to live in Normandy: ‘You are now put to the test, and must show who you are.’ By the time his division had been destroyed and his closest friends killed, Stölten knew that the Allies enjoyed a technological superiority which the Germans could not expect to defeat: ‘over time it is the material [advantage] that wins’, he had written to Dorothee. He saw how profoundly the war had changed from the adventure which he – and his whole cohort of boys out of high school – had feared that they would miss out on in 1939–40. But in one key respect, he remained unchanged. He had been educated in the patriotic virtues of ‘devotion’, ‘courage’, ‘readiness for action’, ‘self-sacrifice’ and ‘loyalty’ – and these still held good.
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Raised in German pietism and educated in theology in Tübingen in the the late 1780s and early 1790s, Hölderlin had lost his faith. So too had Willy Reese and Peter Stölten, who turned away from the Catholic and Protestant churches of childhood. This had not turned them into materialists or nihilists, despite Reese’s flirtations with Jünger. ‘For it is certain’, Stölten wrote in his dramatic dialogue, ‘that one thing does not exist: nothingness.’ These late-Romantic ‘wanderers’ remained fixated on their own spiritual journeys.
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On 19 June, while Stölten followed the Normandy battles from his field hospital, in Belorussia Soviet partisans went into action, laying more than 10,000 charges under the railway tracks west of Minsk. For the next four nights they returned, inflicting heavy damage on the tracks supplying the German front, between Vitebsk and Orsha, Polotsk and Molodechno, as well as those back towards Minsk, Brest and Pinsk. Although German rear units fought off many of the attacks, over a thousand transport points were severed, preventing the Germans from moving reinforcements and supplies up the line. They hampered the lateral movement of troops across the front as well as the retreat.

Mustering over 140,000 men, the 150 Soviet partisan brigades in Belorussia were amongst the most powerful resistance forces in German-occupied Europe and had survived large-scale efforts to clear them out of the forests. In the brutal struggle to control the rear, the German 9th Army had cleared entire regions, designating them ‘dead zones’ and forcing the adult population into mobile ‘work camps’. By rounding up the children and holding them hostage in separate ‘villages’, the Wehrmacht prevented their parents from running away or joining the partisans. As the German occupation became ever more murderous – culminating in forcibly transfusing blood for the wounded from children – even local Belorussian collaborators and police units began to join the partisans. The German methods also had a military price: by committing significant forces to ‘pacification’ in the rear, the overstretched German armies no longer possessed reserves which could be rushed in to resist a Soviet attack.

During the night of 21–22 June the Red Air Force began bombing the German rear with relative impunity. As day dawned on the third anniversary of the 1941 invasion, Soviet reconnaissance battalions began to penetrate the German lines. Wehrmacht commanders were expecting the Red Army to renew their attack where it had proved most successful in the winter and early spring of 1944: either in the north, where the siege of Leningrad had been lifted and where the Red Army had begun an offensive against the Finns on 10 June; or in the south, where the German armies had been pushed out of the Crimea and far back across the Dniepr, so that they now lacked any natural defensive barrier to protect them. In confirmation of German expectations, the heaviest concentrations of Soviet armour remained in the south. But the main attack fell where the Germans least expected it: against Army Group Centre, which had defended itself so effectively during the autumn of 1943.

This time, Soviet commanders did not launch mass human-wave attacks on the German guns as they had done previously. They had lost too many men and Soviet generals had finally learned some key tactical lessons from the Germans. The way through the German minefields was opened by specially adapted tanks with ploughs attached to detonate the mines in their path. The infantry was protected and supported by tanks, self-propelled guns, artillery and bombers acting as an integrated unit. These were the tactics which the Wehrmacht had deployed so successfully in 1941, but now the Soviets enjoyed huge superiority in armour and firepower. The assault continued at night, lit by searchlights and flares.
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At a strategic level too, fundamental lessons had been learned. The main points of attack were carefully chosen and took the German High Command completely by surprise. At Bobruisk, Rokossovsky’s 1st Belorussian Front used wooden bridges and causeways to attack through the seemingly impenetrable Pripet marshes, a flanking movement which brought them into the German rear. Meanwhile the Soviet 3rd Army broke through the German lines further north. It was the first time the Red Army had launched a classic German ‘pincer’ attack and the result was the destruction of the German 9th Army. Trapped in a pocket around Bobruisk, it was rapidly pushed into fighting for the ruins of the town itself. When the town fell on 29 June, the journalist and writer Vasily Grossman witnessed the results:

Men are walking over German corpses. Corpses, hundreds and thousands of them, pave the road, lie in ditches, under the pines, in the green barley. In some places, vehicles have to drive over the corpses, so densely they lie upon the ground . . . A cauldron of death was boiling here, where the revenge was carried out.

Shelled and bombed in a confined area, some 50,000 Germans died. Another 20,000 were captured; only 12,000 men were able to escape westwards, abandoning almost all the weaponry.
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To the north, the breakthrough at Vitebsk and Orsha was no less successful, with Soviet forces crossing the Dvina river late on 24 June. By the 27th, both towns had fallen and Soviet commanders were in a position to pour fresh mechanised armies through the enormous gaps ripped in the German front line. As they rushed westwards to Minsk and secured the river crossings over the Svisloch, they bypassed the bulk of the German 4th Army, the pride of Army Group Centre, which was pinned down in a series of battles to the east of the city. By 4 July, it was trapped in just the kind of massive envelopment which it had meted out to Soviet armies in Belorussia three years earlier. And just as the Red Army’s plight had been made worse by Stalin’s repeated ‘halt’ orders in 1941, so on 27 June 1944 Hitler issued yet another stand-fast directive, refusing to let Bobruisk, Vitebsk, Orsha, Mogilev or Minsk be surrendered until it was too late to save most of the troops. Even if Hitler had been more flexible – and not mistaken the situation for the one his armies had faced in the retreat from Moscow in December 1941 – it is doubtful whether this could have saved Army Group Centre. Between 22 June and 4 July, it lost twenty-five divisions, more than 300,000 men. It would lose at least another 100,000 soldiers in the following weeks, dwarfing the defeat of Stalingrad by comparison, as the German death toll for the first time topped 5,000 for every day of fighting. Willy Reese met the onslaught on the Vitebsk sector and belonged to the large number of those officially listed as ‘missing in action’; in the end, they would be counted amongst the 740,821 German soldiers who died on the eastern front in the second half of 1944.
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