Catastrophe was becoming more and more unavoidable. German divisions attacking from the north and south had joined forces south of Balakleia. The concentrations of Soviet troops were surrounded and destroyed. Between May 24 and 29, according to German sources, 240,000 Soviet soldiers and officers were taken prisoner.42 Tens of thousands of others lost their lives. The Soviet Informburo, however, announced only that there had been 5,000 killed and 70,000 missing in action. It was thus that the command attempted to hide the slaughter at Kharkov from the people.
During the initial six months of war, the Red Army suffered staggering losses, in terms of soldiers killed and captured, and the figures increased as the Germany army advanced eastward. At the end of June and the beginning of July 1941, the Germans captured 329,000 soldiers at Bialystok and Minsk. At the end of July they captured 310,000 in Smolensk; at the beginning of August, 103,000 at Uman. But it was not until the last ten days of September that the number of casualties reached its all-time high, with 665,000 taken prisoner in the vicinity of Kiev, this being followed in mid-October by the capture of 663,000 near Bryansk and Vyazma.43 At the end of the first seven months of war the total number of Soviet prisoners in German hands had reached 3.9 million.44
A sorry fate awaited them. A month before the attack on the Soviet Union, the high command of the German land forces had issued a directive under which all captured Red Army political commissars were to be executed immediately; it likewise authorized the shooting of Red Army prisoners "without any formalities." German soldiers and officers were not to be held responsible in cases of the murder of Soviet prisoners. Often they were killed as a pastime.
An order from the German army dated October 1941 instructed that prisoners and the civilian population in the occupied regions be left to starve and no supplies be given to them at the expense of the German army. K. Kromiadi, who later became a collaborator of General Vlasov, described the situation of the Soviet prisoners in the fall of 1941 as follows:
The prisoners were half-naked, dirty, exhausted; none had shaved for a long time; worst of all, they were in the throes of utter despair. Nobody cared about them; their government had placed them outside the law. ... And conditions in the camps were unimaginable. Prisoners were dying. The way these people—half-insane from their situation—were treated by the camp administration was revolting. Brutality, including the use of weapons, was a daily occurrence. But most terrible of all was the fact that the feeding of the prisoners was merely a "formality." The people had reached the point of complete exhaustion and were barely able to stand on their feet. ... That winter, 80 percent of them starved to death or froze.45
Given these conditions, the prisoners were ready to do anything to escape from the death camps. Their situation was made even more tragic by the fact that their government had abandoned them. Many of them were labeled traitors to the homeland simply because they had been taken prisoner. Although in November 1941 the Soviet government protested the mistreatment of the prisoners, it rejected the services of the International Red Cross, which had proposed to exchange lists of prisoners of war between Germany and the Soviet Union. Theoretically, this would have given some guarantee of security to the one and the other. The Red Cross also wanted to help provide material aid to the prisoners. The Soviet government consistently rejected such proposals. It is not very likely that the Red Cross would have succeeded in stopping Hitler, who had sanctioned the extermination of Soviet prisoners, but it was no less criminal for the Soviet government to neglect any possibility of saving its citizens' lives.
For the Soviet government these prisoners did not exist. They had already been scratched off the list, erased from official memory. For example, at the Teheran conference in 1943 Stalin confided to Churchill that in the Soviet Union all soldiers wished to become heroes; those who did not had been killed.
All hope lost, they died by the hundreds of thousands. According to official German documents of May 1, 1944, 5,754,000 Soviet soldiers had been captured since June 1941. At least 3,220,000 of them died. As to those who survived, a sad fate awaited them on their return to the Soviet Union, as will be seen later. Beginning in the middle of 1942 the strongest and most skilled were forcibly employed in German industry. In December 1944 over 630,000 Soviet prisoners of war were doing forced labor for the Germans.46
THE DRIVE TO THE VOLGA
The Soviet winter offensive lasted on various fronts until April 1942. Three months later, the Germans launched a new offensive which was very well prepared. Their goal was to smash the Soviet forces in Central Russia. They were hoping to reach the Volga, take the Caucasus, and force a Soviet surrender.
On the German—Soviet front in the summer of 1942, the Germans had an advantage over the Soviets in terms of men (6,200,000 to 5,500,000) and in fighter planes (3,400 to 3,160). The Soviets had more artillery (43,640 guns and mortars and 1,220 katyusha rocket launchers to 43,000 guns and mortars) and tanks (4,065 to 3,230 tanks and motorized howitzers).47
The Soviet high command presumed that the main thrust would be directed at the center of the front. Kursk-Voronezh was the direction thought second most likely to fall under German attack, with the same aim— outflanking Moscow, but from the southeast. In fact, the German high command had decided to make its main thrust to the south.
The offensive began on June 28, 1942, from the area east of Kursk. At the same time, Voronezh was attacked from Volchansk. Five German armies and three from its allies—Italy, Hungary, and Romania—took part in the attack. Their objective was to surround and destroy the Soviet forces of the Bryansk Front, commanded by F. I. Golikov, and later those of the Southwestern and Southern fronts, thereby gaining free access to the Volga and the Caucasus. On July 2 the German armies broke through the Soviet defenses at the junction of the Bryansk and Southwestern fronts, to a depth of eighty kilometers. On July 7 the fighting reached the outskirts of Voronezh. Rokossovsky replaced Golikov at the command of the Bryansk Front, and Vatutin was named commander of the new Voronezh Front. The Soviet command threw its reserves into the battle, but these reinforcements arrived too late. The Germans continued their offensive.
On July 15 the Soviet defenses were breached between the Don and the northern Donets rivers. At that point the German offensive extended along a front 500—600 kilometers long. Soviet troops abandoned Rostov on July 24 and crossed the Don in retreat. By July 27 fighting was taking place in the direction of Stalingrad.
One consequence of the Soviet defeats was a severe erosion of discipline, with an increasing incidence of desertion to the enemy and unauthorized withdrawal. Many units were retreating in disorder, abandoning arms, ammunition, and equipment. The number of self-inflicted wounds was on the rise, especially among soldiers of non-Russian nationality. Cases of indiscipline, cowardice, and panic reached such proportions that the high command was greatly alarmed. Punitive and disciplinary units were strengthened: their orders were to fire at will on all units or soldiers withdrawing without proper orders. On July 28 Stalin issued Order No. 227, which stated the following: "It is time to put an end to retreats. ... Not a single step backwards! ... Each position, each meter of Soviet territory must be stubbornly defended, to the last drop of blood. We must cling to every inch of Soviet soil and defend it to the end!"48