War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 (44 page)

Such treatment was not without moral and morale implications for their captors. It accentuated the ‘dehumanisation’ of the foe which made the execution of such excesses more bearable. Soldier Roland Kiemig explained after the war:

‘We had been told the Russians were sub-human Bolsheviks and they were to be fought. But when we saw the first PoWs we realised that they weren’t sub-human. When we shipped them away and later used them as “Hiwis” [
helpers],
we realised they were absolutely normal people.’

There may have been doubts about the ‘justness’ of their cause, but they were not widespread. ‘We knew this was no defensive war, forced on us,’ admitted Kiemig, ‘it was an idiotic war of aggression and a glance at the map showed it could not be won.’
⁽²⁴⁾
Pressure manifested itself in other insidious ways. Schütze Benno Zeiser stopped his friend Franzl beating Soviet prisoners. He said:

‘Let me be! I can’t bear any more of it! Stop looking at me like that! I’m clean barmy! I’m plum loony! Nothing but this bloody misery all the time. Nothing but these creatures, these wretched worms! Look at them wriggling on the ground! Can’t you hear them whimpering? They ought to be stamped out, once and for all, foul brutes, just wiped out.’

Franzl had suffered a nervous breakdown. ‘You must see it,’ he said, ‘I simply can’t stand this any longer!’
⁽²⁵⁾

National Socialist propaganda had ‘dehumanised’ the enemy even before the campaign had begun. Russian commissars were separated from soldiers on capture and executed. Maltreatment and the indiscriminate shooting of Russian PoWs was not solely the result of specific orders from above, neither was it necessarily conducted in a disciplined manner. Division and other records indicate that ‘wild’ and often indiscriminate shootings of Soviet PoWs began during the very first days of the campaign. Senior officers objected to this on discipline rather than morality grounds. The fear was that excesses might lead to anarchy in the ranks and intensify bitter Russian resistance. General Lemelsen, the commander of XXXXVIIIth Panzer Corps, rebuked his troops in an order three days into the campaign, complaining:

‘I have observed that senseless shootings of both PoWs and civilians have taken place. A Russian soldier who has been taken prisoner while wearing a uniform and after he put up a brave fight, has the right to decent treatment.’

He did not, however, question the ‘ruthless action’ the Führer had ordained ‘against partisans and Bolshevik commissars’. Soldiers interpreted his directive so liberally that a further directive followed within five days to curb their exuberance.

‘In spite of my instructions of 25.6.41 … still more shootings of PoWs and deserters have been observed, conducted in an irresponsible, senseless and criminal manner. This is murder! The German Wehrmacht is waging this war against Bolshevism, not against the United Russian peoples.’

Lemelsen was perceptive enough to grasp that ‘scenes of countless bodies of soldiers lying on the roads, clearly killed by a shot through the head at point blank range, without their weapons and with their hands raised, will quickly spread in the enemy’s army’.
⁽²⁶⁾

Excesses were commonplace. Gefreiter Georg Bergmann, with Artillery Regiment 234 near Aunus on the northern Finnish front at the end of August, witnessed the bizarre spectacle of unit vehicles driving by at high speed with Russian prisoners perched on the engine bonnet or mud-guards. ‘Most fell off because of the tremendous speeds and were “shot whilst trying to escape”,’ he said. Infantry Gefreiter Jakob Zietz spoke of six Russian PoWs captured by his 253rd Infantry Division company, who were press-ganged into carrying their ammunition near Welikije Luki. ‘They were totally exhausted as a result of the heat and their efforts and fell to the ground, unable to march any further.’ They were shot. Others died clearing mines or transporting ammunition forward into the front line.

During the evening of 27 August, thousands of Soviet PoWs were jammed into a prisoner collection point at Geisin near Uman. The compound was designed to hold only 500 to 800 persons, but with each passing hour 2,000 to 3,000 prisoners arrived to be fed and then sent onward to the rear. No rations arrived and the heat was stifling. By evening 8,000 were packed into the camp. Oberfeldwebel Leo Mellart, one of the 101st Infantry Division guards, then heard ‘cries and shooting’ in the darkness. The sound of firing was obviously heavy calibre. Two or three 85mm Flak batteries nearby had engaged a grain silo inside the barbed wire perimeter with direct fire, ‘because the prisoners had allegedly tried to break out’. Mellart was later told by one of the watch-keepers that 1,000–1,500 men had been killed or severely wounded.
⁽²⁷⁾
Poor organisation and administration had resulted in chronic overcrowding, but the Stadtkommandant of Geisin was not prepared to risk a break-out.

There was no place in the ordered German military mind or tactical doctrine to deal with civilian irregulars. This had historically been the case during the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 and was repeated again during early occupation phases of World War 1. German soldiers considered it wrong or somehow unfair’ for the enemy to continue fighting in the rear after having been overrun or encircled, fighting on in a hopeless situation. In Russia, unlike previously in the west, the enemy refused to follow the convention of orderly surrender. Irregulars were termed ‘bandits’ in German military parlance and treated as such. Thousands of Russian soldiers found themselves cut off from their parent formations during huge encirclement battles. On 13 September 1941 OKH ordered that Soviet soldiers who reorganised after being overrun and then fought back were to be treated as partisans or ‘bandits’. In other words, they were to be executed. Officers of the 12th Infantry Division received guidance from their commander:

‘Prisoners behind the front line… shoot as a general principle! Every soldier shoots any Russian who is found behind the front line and has not been taken prisoner in battle.’
⁽²⁸⁾

Such a command would not be considered unreasonable to soldiers sympathetic to the convention that warfare should be open and fair, giving the edge, of course, to German organisational, tactical and technological superiority.

German soldiers were incensed by snipers. Driver Helmut K___, writing to his parents on 7 July, complained his unit transporting material from Warsaw to the front had suffered 80 dead, ‘32 of them from snipers’.
⁽²⁹⁾
Resulting repressive measures raised the level of violence. There was virtually no partisan activity in the Ukraine following the invasion apart from stay-behind Red Army, Communist officials and NKVD special groups. After the encirclement battle at Kiev, partisan operations in the Army Group South area considerably increased. In the Army Group Centre area partisan groups were to control 45% of the occupied area, but initially activity was on a small scale.
⁽³⁰⁾
Sniping was the initial manifestation of resistance. During the advance to Leningrad, artillery soldier Werner Adamczyk was fired upon by people who were ‘not in uniform’ and ‘not shooting too badly’. He was surprised and indignant:

‘Now it seemed we would also have to fight civilians! It was enough to fight the Russian Army. Now we could not even trust civilians any more.’
⁽³¹⁾

Any resistance in rear areas was always referred to as by ‘bandits’ or ‘civilians’. Karl D___wrote in his diary at the beginning of July:

‘To our right were wheatfields. Precisely at that moment a civilian fired out of the corn. The field was searched through. Now and then a shot rang out. It must be snipers. There are also Russian soldiers who have hidden in the woods. Time and again shots sounded off.’
⁽³²⁾

Another soldier, Erhard Schaumann, described how:

‘The Russian population hadn’t fled but stayed in underground bunkers, as we realised much later. We received highly accurate incoming mortar fire where our unit was encamped, which caused very heavy losses. There must be some Russians [
observing
] nearby, we thought, to be aiming so well.’

On investigation they hauled out many people from the earth bunkers. Schaumann became reluctant to explain the subsequent course of events.

Schaumann:
‘Ja – they were brought in, questioned, then I’d hear… ‘

Interviewer:
‘Where were they taken?’

Schaumann:
‘To the battalion or regimental commander or division commander, and then I’d hear shots and knew they had been executed.’

Interviewer:
‘Did you see that too?’

Schaumann:
‘I did.’

Interviewer:
‘Did you participate?’

Schaumann:
‘Do I have to answer that? Spare me this one answer.’
⁽³³⁾

Peter Petersen remembered an old school friend, an SS Untersturmführer, on leave from the front. He had received ‘a terrible bawling out’ from his superiors for his reluctance to shoot prisoners. His personality, Petersen observed, had completely changed from his school days.

‘He was told that he would learn this was no Kindergarten war. He would be sent to take command of a firing squad where he would be shooting partisans, German deserters, and who knows what else. He told me that he had not had the courage to refuse to obey this order, since he would have been shot.’
⁽³⁴⁾

An atmosphere of uncertainty reigned behind the front. Soldiers felt beleaguered and isolated. Korück 582 – a rear-area security unit operating behind Ninth Army – was responsible for 1,500 villages over an area of 27,000sq km. It had only 1,700 soldiers under command to execute this task. No support was forthcoming from Ninth Army, which had been 15,000 men short at the start of the campaign. Partisan activity encompassed 45% of its operational area. These security units were often commanded by old and incompetent officers aged 40–50 years, compared to a front-line average age of 30 years. Korück 582 battalion commanders were almost 60 years old and their soldiers were poorly trained. Feelings of vulnerability and prevalent danger existed in these zones which, paradoxically, could be as active and dangerous as the front line.
⁽³⁵⁾

Walter Neustifter, an infantry machine gunner, said, ‘you always had to keep partisans in mind’. Atrocity fed on atrocity.

‘They had fallen upon the whole transport and logistic system, undressed the soldiers, put their uniforms on and passed all the captured material around with a few rifles. So, to frighten them, we hanged five men.’
⁽³⁶⁾

Peter Neumann, an officer in the 5th SS Division ‘Wiking’, following a revenge massacre after partisan atrocities against German soldiers, explained:

‘We of the SS may be ruthless, but the partisans also wage an inhuman war and show no mercy. Perhaps we cannot blame them for wishing to defend their own land, but all the same, it is clearly our duty to destroy them… where does true justice lie? If such a thing even exists.’
⁽³⁷⁾

‘When we marched into the Soviet Union,’ declared Hans Herwarth von Bittenfeld, a junior infantry officer, ‘we were regarded initially as liberators and greeted with bread and salt. Farmers shared the little they had with us.’ All this changed with the self-perpetuating vicious circle of atrocities and revenge attacks. Villages were caught helpless in the middle. ‘The disaster was the Nazis succeeded in driving people who were willing to co-operate with us back into the arms of Stalin,’ he said. Von Bittenfeld’s view was ‘we lost because of the bad handling of the Soviet populace’. Russian ‘Hiwis’ that worked with the Wehrmacht were not all pressed labour. ‘The idea originated,’ he explained, ‘from the soldiers, not the General Staff.’
⁽³⁸⁾

Atrocities were an inescapable fact of life on the Eastern Front. Leutnant F. Wilhelm Christians also spoke of being ‘greeted with real enthusiasm’ in the Ukraine. ‘But behind the Panzers came the SD Security troops’ which was ‘a very sad and grim experience’. In Tarnopol, Christians recalled, ‘Jews were driven together, with the help, I must also say, of the Ukrainians, who knew where their victims lived. ‘My general’s reaction when I reported this to him was that it was forbidden, with immediate effect, for any member of his division to participate in these measures.’
⁽³⁹⁾

There were a myriad factors that caused German soldiers to participate in or ignore excesses. They were isolated in a strange land, beset by numerous pressures and had of course to enact the disciplined violence expected of soldiers at war. Most had never left Germany or even been beyond their home districts before. They were then subjected to a form of group insanity. War corrupts, whatever the political beliefs, and a high level of culture is not necessarily a guarantor of civilised values. SS officer Peter Neumann with the 5th SS Division ‘Wiking’ recalled how a friend dispassionately executed a group of Russian ITU civilians. (These were
Isspraviteino Trudovnoie Upalvelnnie
– the Central Administration of Corrective Training – responsible for sending people to concentration camps.) He shot them with his Mauser rifle. Neumann observed:

‘These characters were by no means saints, and probably had no hesitation in sending any poor devil guilty of some minor offence off to the mines in Siberia. But all the same I stopped for a moment rooted to the spot by Karl’s amazing coldbloodedness. His hand didn’t even tremble.

‘Is it possible that this is the same fellow I once saw, in short pants, playing ball on the sands down by the breakwaters of the Aussen-Alster in Hamburg?’
⁽⁴⁰⁾