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After the Church’s previous silence, the bishop’s call had the impact of a ‘letter from the Apostles’, Albring assured his friend, Eugen Altrogge: ‘Believe me, you can’t remain silent about such things any more . . . What these barbarians want to destroy is not just the Church but the spirit of Christianity and German history and culture in
Helmut and his comrades were part of the 11th Army. Fighting alongside Romanian troops, they formed the most southerly wing of the 3.5-million-strong force invading the Soviet Union.
As the ‘England attack’ failed, he convinced himself that blockading Britain and eliminating her Soviet ally would create another means to bring Britain to the negotiating table. But the German dictator’s strategic choices also fulfilled a long-cherished desire to destroy ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ and conquer colonial ‘living space’ in the east, goals Hitler had openly proclaimed in Mein Kampf.
With that the hour has come in which it is necessary to go into action against this conspiracy of the Jewish-Anglo-Saxon warmongers and Jewish power-holders of the Bolshevik Centre in Moscow . . .
When a ragged column of prisoners finally marched across the screen, people shouted, ‘Savages’, ‘Sub-humans’, ‘Convicts’. Outraged women complained that their menfolk had to ‘fight against such
Ley was also the first to remind Germans of Hitler’s warning of 30 January 1939, when he had prophesied that a new world war would lead, not to the destruction of the Germans, but to the destruction of the Jews.
When the Germans held a service of their own, the peasants came along, bringing their icons and weeping openly at their liberation. As Albring wrote to his friend, ‘here everyone knew what this simple military holy communion meant to each Russian after twenty-four years of suffering’. By contrast, as they marched through the first villages where
‘He who plunders will be shot’ seemed to reassure the villagers and one woman began to cook a large pot of eggs for the whole company, while others brought out flasks of milk and pickled cucumbers. Despite the reassuring placards, the captain went through the houses, helping himself to a box gramophone – ‘I’ve been looking for one of them for ages’ – and making off with a bolt of cloth. Hermann Gieschen worried that this crass contrast with the promise on the posters cast their leadership in a poor light, but he was still proud of their mission and assumed that they would go on being welcomed
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On the eve of the invasion General Gotthard Heinrici, a devout Lutheran in command of the 43rd Army Corps, made his own sense of the orders from on high authorising the execution of ‘Jewish Commissars’, by reasoning that the front would be protected by a ‘preventive terror’ waged in the rear. It was here, behind the lines, that the real orgy of mass killing
When the 221st Security Division occupied Białystok on the morning of 27 June 1941, the streets were silent and deserted. After drinking heavily, the 500 men in the 309th Police Battalion fired indiscriminately through windows, before driving hundreds of Jewish men into the synagogue and setting it alight in an act of arson which destroyed much of the city centre.
In fact, Hitler’s unorthodox – and unexpected – directive led to some of the Germans’ most decisive victories in the war.
Three days later, as Moldenhauer’s unit advanced further into Ukraine, he was welcomed into one of the cleanest houses he had yet seen, where he was given milk and shared the family’s meal of baked potatoes, cabbage and meat. After he returned from duty at 8 p.m., his hostess welcomed him back with more milk and pork fat; in return, he produced a bottle of vodka. For the next two hours, while the entire family sat around the large table, he took a good look at the living room, to describe it later to his wife, its table lit by a petroleum lamp, the gilded icons glinting in their glass cases
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What we’re doing is a great sacrifice, but we’re doing it gladly, because if this war were waged in the Fatherland, well, then it’d have been much worse . . . If these beasts had come to Germany, then it’d have been a much greater misfortune for us. We just have to put up with it and perhaps the victorious end is closer than we think.
The Jews of Kiev were taken to Babi Yar, a ravine just 4 kilometres outside the city, where the SS Sonderkommando 4a and two police battalions shot 33,771 Jews over the next two days.
The Germans are celebrating. They all walk full and content, all have lights on their Christmas trees. But we all move about like shadows, there is total famine. People are buying food by the cup and boil a watery soup, which they eat without bread, because bread is given out only two times per week, 200 grams. And this diet is the best-case scenario. Those who have things exchange them in the countryside, but those who have nothing swell up from hunger, they are already dying. Many people have typhus.
On 2 May 1941, seven weeks before the invasion started, the plan was formally adopted, officials assuming that ‘umpteen million people will doubtless starve, if what we need is taken out of the country’. By the time Ukraine was in German hands in the autumn, the Gauleiter of Thuringia and Reich Plenipotentiary for Labour Mobilisation, Fritz Sauckel, had been told repeatedly that ‘at least ten to twenty million of these people’ would starve to death in the coming winter. Backe’s own estimates were that 20–30 million ‘Slavs’ would die. The ‘Hunger Plan’ became a central element of German
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Professor Wilhelm Ziegelmayer, the expert on nutrition advising the Wehrmacht High Command, noted in his diary on 10 September 1941 that ‘We will not burden ourselves with future demands for the surrender of Leningrad. It must be destroyed by a scientifically based method.
What are we to do with a city of 3.2 million, which would just be a burden on our provisioning purse?’ He had ended with one of Hitler’s favourite expressions when justifying murderous conclusions: ‘There is no room for sentimentality here.
By mid-September, however, the German High Command worried about the danger of epidemics spreading from the city to their own lines and about the psychological strain on German infantrymen who might have to ‘shoot at women and children trying to escape’ from the city. To make sure this did not happen, Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb, the commander of Army Group North, ordered the artillery to mow down any civilians breaking out of the city while they were still too far away to upset German infantrymen on the front line.
During the week from 21 September, the decision was confirmed and reiterated that Leningrad was to be ‘razed to the ground. If this creates a situation which produces calls for surrender, they will be refused. In this war, we are not interested in preserving even a part of the population of this large city.
the future region of ‘Ingermanland’ on the Soviet Baltic coast would be a sparsely populated, agricultural area of German and Finnish settlement, with a population which had fallen from 3.2 million to just 200,000. The missing 3 million people in this plan for the post-war future were the Leningraders.
Many Red Army prisoners had had to hold out their military caps as substitute mess tins, catching perhaps half of the thin soup they were served.
A gentle, religious studies teacher and anti-Nazi from Magdeburg, Konrad Jarausch was more curious than hostile to his Russian prisoners. Equipped with a Russian primer, he began learning the language, finding an educated prisoner to teach
Like Hans Albring, Jarausch was simultaneously moved by Russian culture and certain that he was dealing with people who were ‘half children’. Seeing how terribly they had suffered under the Bolshevik tyranny, he felt it was his duty to spread the Gospel amongst them.
But the 2nd Panzer Army and its constituent parts, such as the 24th Panzer Corps and the 4th Panzer Division, were not the same units as had taken Orel without interrupting their line of march. Fritz Farnbacher saw his first snow on the night of 6–7 October. It turned to rain and the unsealed roads, baked hard by the summer, turned into a quagmire – ‘a liquid, bottomless swamp, black pastry mixed by thousands and thousands of boots, wheels, caterpillars’, as the Soviet journalist Vasily Grossman described it.
The speed of the German advance became self-defeating. As the supply lines grew longer, the quartermaster-generals were confronted with impossible choices.
They had captured so few undamaged Soviet broad-gauge wagons and locomotives that they had to invest more heavily than they had expected in converting lines to standard-gauge rails, a slow business which grew in scale with the German advance.
As the temperature dropped at the end of autumn, the Wehrmacht recovered some mobility over the frozen ground.
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 . . .
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.
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 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
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
They clung to the comforting belief that the Red Army remained on the point of collapse despite all the mounting evidence to the contrary.
Compared to the 40–50 kilometres a day they had covered during the advance, they were now down to a mere 6.5 kilometres.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
During the final, difficult weeks of the retreat from Moscow, the 4th Panzer Division’s chief doctor noted with approval how the men had learned to be ‘hard on themselves’. The word was now acquiring something of the meaning Hitler gave it in closed briefing sessions, when he used ‘hard’ as a metaphor for genocidal measures. Hinting at the process of self-brutalisation, ‘hard’ and ‘harsh’ increasingly complemented the sacralising language of heroic self-sacrifice used in both official and private
Existential fear now turned Nazi propaganda about Jewish-Bolshevism, treacherous civilians and dangerous partisans into common sense. However nagging the lingering scruples of individuals, who recognised with distaste how ‘hard’, ‘harsh’, ‘brutal’ and ‘coarse’ they themselves had become, the collective self-transformation of the eastern front was
Scanning the faces of the troops they met returning from the front to see what awaited him, Brandhuber saw only ‘drained, over-tired and distrustful and miserable’ men. At halts, they spoke of their winter retreat and of the enormous amounts of equipment they had had to
Anton Brandhuber was both an experienced soldier and the most unmilitary of men. He explained his motives to the Swiss military officers who interrogated him with a laconic brevity worthy of the good soldier Schweik: ‘It just seemed too stupid to
He had nothing to add to the explanation he had given the Swiss military for his desertion fifty-nine years before, telling the young German historian who came to interview him in almost identical terms: ‘I didn’t fancy it any
Perhaps because so few men attempted to do so, the military police patrols who stopped Brandhuber at Brest and Warsaw were inclined to believe that he had been accidentally separated from his
During the war several hundred other German deserters managed to cross the Swiss border, where, like Brandhuber, they were interrogated and interned by the Swiss military.
What is most extraordinary about the winter crisis, however, is what did not happen. The ill-clad, frostbitten, demoralised men held their lines. Morale might be at rock bottom, but very few men followed Anton Brandhuber’s example.
