This order also condemned the widespread belief that Russia after all was a huge country and there was plenty of room to retreat, and it stressed the need to reestablish iron discipline in the army, to punish without pity all who displayed cowardice or committed acts of indiscipline. The political directors of the Red Army were given especially great authority. Measures were also taken to strengthen military counterintelligence (SMERSH). Commanders and commissars of retreating units were threatened with demotion and court martial.
By August 19 the fighting had reached the outskirts of Stalingrad. Meanwhile on the Southern Front, after breaking through Soviet defenses in the Tsimlyansk region on July 29, the Germans drove toward the Caucasus. On August 5 they took Stavropol, and on August 11, Krasnodar. They reached the gates of Maikop and occupied Beloreshenskaya, but were unable to break through to Tuapse. Meanwhile, south of Rostov, they reached Mozdok on August 8 and Pyatigorsk the following day. Continuing their offensive, the German vanguard units reached the Greater Caucasus Range and occupied several mountain passes, reaching as far as the pass on Mount Klukhori. On August 21, 1942, the iron cross was waving from the peak of Mount Elbruz. It was not removed by Soviet soldiers until February 17, 1943. Near Grozny, the eastward drive of the Germans was stopped, and they were forced to assume defensive positions. They were also unable to reach Transcaucasia.
Thus, by the fall of 1942 the German armies had penetrated deeper into Russia than any invading army from the west had ever done.
In the Caucasus the Germans were able to create a local government with the assistance of collaborators, including many former emigr6s such as Ali-Khan Kantemir and the Dagestani General Bicherakhov. In Berlin, at the Ministry for the Eastern Countries, a National Committee of the Northern Caucasus was set up. Kantemir was formally in charge, but the Germans actually controlled it. It proclaimed its willingness to collaborate with Germany, having as its objective the separation of the Caucasus from the Soviet Union. The committee recruited Soviet prisoners of war from the Northern Caucasus into the armies of the Reich, mainly the Caucasian Legion. The German government, however, was no less alien to the mountain peoples of the Caucasus than the Soviet government. If the Caucasians had a dream, it was to free themselves of both governments, not replace one with the other.
Armed groups had been active in the mountains since the collectivization of agriculture in the 1930s, and their activities increased as the German offensive approached. Major Soviet units were withdrawn from the front and used against these groups. The bulk of the population, however, remained loyal to the Soviet government.
The German offensive in the summer of 1942 spurred a new wave of evacuations of urban populations. Once again Central Russia and the Volga region were covered with hundreds of thousands of refugees, many of them heading for Central Asia. Trains followed trains, filled with machinery, engines, raw materials, and fuels. Huge amounts of industrial equipment fell to the invaders, but the Soviets managed in spite of everything to save some equipment. New factories arose in the eastern part of the country, in Central Asia and Siberia, but on the whole industrial production decreased during the second half of 1942.
In 1941 and 1942, during the German offensive, many towns and villages were abandoned to their fate by the local authorities, both party and government. In some cases, the Germans would arrive only a few days after the officials' departure. They would find and take factories, stores, agricultural and industrial products, livestock, and fuel. And also important archives, such as those of Smolensk, which afterward came into the hands of the United States and still serve as an invaluable source of knowledge of the history of the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s.
The local authorities never failed, however, to execute political prisoners before the arrival of the Germans. From June 28 on, mass arrests began in the Baltic nations and eastern Poland. NKVD troops arrested and shot people in the cells and yards of the prisons of Lvov, Rovno, and Tallin. In Tartu 192 corpses were thrown into a pit. Prisoners were also killed during evacuation at prisons in Minsk, Smolensk, Kiev, Kharkov, Zaporozhye, Dnepropetrovsk, and Orel. At a molybdenum mining complex near Nalchik, where prison inmates were working, all prisoners were executed by machine gun fire. As the Germans neared the Olginskaya camp, the NKVD released those who had been condemned to less than five years; all the rest (thousands upon thousands) were shot on October 31, 1941.49 These were not isolated incidents: the full history of the executions of prisoners during the Soviet retreat has yet to be written.
THE GERMAN OCCUPATION
In 1941 and 1942 the German armies occupied 1,926,000 square kilometers of Soviet territory: the Baltic states, Byelorussia, the Ukraine, a significant part of Russia, the Crimea, the Caucasus, and Moldavia. These regions were economically the most highly developed in the USSR; before the war their populations had reached 85 million, that is, 40 percent of the total Soviet population.50 This area produced 63 percent of the country's coal, 68 percent of its cast iron, 58 percent of its steel, 60 percent of its aluminum, 38 percent of its grain, and 84 percent of its sugar. This was also one of the principal centers of livestock breeding in the Soviet Union (38 percent of its sheep and 60 percent of its hogs). Moreover, hundreds of military plants and facilities were located in the occupied areas.51
The Nazi leadership had worked out a set policy toward the inhabitants of the USSR well in advance of the invasion. As official German documents make clear, the extermination of a major part of the population was planned for Poland and European Russia. Plan Ost called for the deportation of 31 million people from these territories, with colonization by German settlers over a thirty-year period. The plan called for the starvation of millions of Poles and Russians. Goering, speaking in August 1942 at a conference of
Reich representatives in the occupied eastern territories, cynically declared: "In the past, this was called robbery. ... Still, I'm ready for some robbing, some efficient robbing."52 Alfred Rosenberg, one of the original Nazi theoreticians and later the Reich's minister of the occupied eastern territories, predicted that "very difficult years certainly lie ahead for the Russians."53
The Nazis wanted to destroy all state structures in the occupied territories and enslave the population at the lowest possible cultural level. "Our guiding principle," said Hitler, "is that the existence of these people is justified only by their economic exploitation for our benefit."54
The Soviet-occupied territories were divided into two main Reich commissariats: Ostland and "Ukraina." Ostland comprised Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Byelorussia. "Ukraina" included the regions of Volynia and Podolia (with Rovno as regional center), Zhitomir, Kiev, Nikolaev, Dnepropetrovsk, and Taurida (with Melitopol as the center). These territories were under "civilian" administration. All other occupied territories were under direct military rule as combat zones. In the southwest the region between the Dniestr and the Bug and to the north of Odessa was placed under Romanian rule and called Transniestria. Each major administrative unit was divided into smaller units (Kriegsgebiete, Stadtskomissare, etc.). In rural zones volosts, the prerevolutionary administrative units, were rein- stituted. In the cities nominal authority was exercised by Вiirgermeisters, appointed by the Germans; in the villages they appointed "elders" (starosty). Everywhere, collaborators were recruited to serve in local police bodies; they were feared and hated by the population, who called them Polizei.