Casualty reports reflected this drain on the junior leadership. The 6th Company of the IInd Battalion Schützen Regiment 114 reported being led by its sole surviving officer, an artillery observer, on 2 December. That day, nine men died and three were officers, as also one of 10 wounded. Total battalion losses had been 11 dead and 24 wounded.
While 7th Panzer Division clung to its tenuous bridgehead across the Moscow–Volga canal, on its right the 6th Panzer Division pushed on ahead. Gefreiter vom Bruch, advancing with Schützen Regiment 4, watched the explosions of bombs dropped from high-altitude Soviet bombers on the hilly wooded areas on the German side of the canal in bright freezing sunlight. As they entered the village of Goncharowo, he asked a little girl standing amid the ruins how far it was to the canal, Panzergruppe 3’s objective. ‘11km to the canal and 12 to Yakhroma,’ she said. ‘And Moscow?’ enquired the corporal. ‘60km,’ was the reply.(13) Fighting began again in earnest as they penetrated the village of Bornissowo. Arctic temperatures were producing weapon malfunctions, which impeded operations with depressing regularity. Metal becomes brittle with intense cold and this, combined with the rapid increases of temperature by working parts during firing, caused breakages. Machine guns, in particular, needed substantially more spare parts. Belt-fed weapons had their feed pans regularly snarled up with snow, or fired intermittently due to the difficulty of controlling the gas flow to produce rapid rates of fire. Repeated reference is made in the 6th Panzer Infantry Regiment war diaries to heavy casualties caused by machine guns seizing up. Weapon stoppages and casualties among junior leaders attempting to remedy them were endemic across the front. Karl Rupp, commanding a PzKpfwII with Panzergruppe 4, recalled that, apart from the distraction of constantly turning over his tank engine to keep it working:
‘One night the riflemen noted with horror that, on top of everything else, our machine guns had frozen up. If the Russians had attacked, they could have finished us without the least problem.’(14)
The Panzer spearheads continued falteringly to reach out thin fingers towards Moscow. On 2 December the 6th Panzer Division experienced ‘a light parachute-drop scare’ to its rear. Russian bombers were resupplying partisans but there were also parachute infantry insertions. German vehicles were shot at on the Klusowo road bridge in the division rear as the lead elements reached Kulowo. The 1st Panzer Division took Bely-Rast on 3 December with a tank/infantry attack. They were 32km from the Kremlin.(15)
The unfortunate Russian population was caught between German spearheads and Red Army resistance. They were exposed to the same −40°C temperatures described by Josef Deck with Artillery Regiment 71.
‘Bread had to be chopped with hatchets to make it smaller. First aid packs set as hard as wood, petrol froze, optical instruments failed and the skin from hands remained frozen to rifles. The wounded froze to death within minutes in the snow. Only a few people these days had the fortune to thaw out a Russian body to get his clothes.’(16)
Non-combatants caught in the path of the Army Group Centre advance suffered enormous privations. The Landser, insufficiently supplied, fell upon the populace like a horde of ravaging locusts. Valentina Judelewa Ragowskaja remembers the Panzers clattering into Klin on 23 November. The family hid in the cellar, ‘dreadfully frightened’, until German soldiers stamped on their cellar lid with jackboots. ‘A soldier came down the cellar steps with a stick grenade in his hand – “Out!” he cried, “all Russians out!” They demanded “bread and sugar Mother!” making smacking noises with their lips. Two loaves of bread and a pair of turnips had been saved for the children. They were handed over.’ One loaf was devoured before their eyes, the other tossed up out of the cellar to others. ‘I went up and saw about 300 soldiers outside.’ They were making fires with furniture gathered up from the houses to keep warm. Water and meat was then demanded. Ragowskaja’s two hens were snatched up, their necks broken and flung on the fire, complete with feathers. ‘Once the feathers were burned off, they stuffed themselves with chicken meat, as simple as that!’ When she complained to the German commander she was haughtily informed, ‘German soldiers do not take foreign property!’ Total catastrophe ensued when the Germans slaughtered their one cow. ‘It was our only cow and a young one at that, she produced a lot of milk,’ said Ragowskaja. ‘I cried and threw myself on the carcass of my dead cow.’
Forty years after the conclusion of the war, journalist Paul Kohl travelled the Army Group Centre route to Moscow during an academic pilgrimage to research Russian eyewitness accounts of the invasion and occupation. Cold War still reigned in Europe. Although it was difficult to avoid the ‘Great Patriotic War’ rhetoric, and it was a long time after the event, there was little doubt, despite exaggeration, that this had been an emotionally searing experience for those he met. Perceptions, like propaganda, can have the same impact as the truth. Inhabitants living in the communities on the approaches to Moscow suffered dreadfully. ‘The way they treated us!’, exclaimed Vera Josefowna Makarenko, from Klin, ‘they hardly regarded us as human beings!’ Her house was burned to the ground and her husband hanged. ‘Right on the first day,’ she wept. ‘Five days he hung there, and they did not allow us to take him down… When they came, they took everything,’ she said. There was nothing to eat or drink and it was forbidden to fetch water. Their bucket was shot full of holes to make the point. All their felt boots were stolen, despite it being the middle of winter. ‘Our legs were frozen,’ complained Makarenko.
‘If only this war had not happened we would have had an excellent life. But the war destroyed all that, everything, it ruined us.’
Her young niece was taken away for questioning. ‘Your father,’ they asked, ‘where is your father? Is he defending the homeland at the front? Or is he a partisan?’ The little girl’s finger was cut off during the interrogation.(17)
Istra – 30km from Moscow – was captured by the 4th SS Regiment ‘Der Führer’, alongside infantry and tanks from the 10th Panzer Division. Fighting raged against elements of the 78th Siberian and Manchurian units between 23 and 26 November through Istra cathedral, situated west of the river, and around a surrounding complex of six large ecclesiastical building ringed by a stout 5m-high wall. The ‘Der Führer’ companies were reduced to 25-man companies in the process.(18) Sixteen-year-old Ludmilla Romanowna Kotsawa described the impact on its hapless inhabitants. ‘Many had already fled into the woods,’ she said, ‘and they stayed in holes dug in the ground in ice and snow with temperatures at −20°C for days and nights.’ Her music teacher, Michailow, was held up by soldiers in the street and robbed of her coat. ‘You bandits!’ she screamed at them. Kotsawa watched as ‘one of them cold-bloodedly shot her in the mouth’. Istra typified what could happen to a town in this theatre of operations. It remained occupied for only two weeks before it was back again. Only 25 children were found in its cellars from a former population of 7,000. ‘Istra was a beautiful green town,’ Kotsawa wistfully remembered, but the population had been driven out. During December and January its ruins were infested with wolves. A rebirth did not occur until the re-establishment of its school in 1943.(19)
Josef Deck recalled the surreal scene by night, observing the approaches to Moscow from the forward positions of Artillery Regiment 74.
‘As far as one could see the horizon stood out in flames. The Russians, using linked incendiary mines, were beginning to create a cleared “dead” security zone. Engineers over there were emulating an earlier self-inflicted solution that had been applied to Moscow in 1812 when Napoleon and his Grand Army saw only a blazing city on their line of advance.’(20)