Atrocities continued unabated. Ludwig Frhr von Heyl, a reconnaissance patrol commander, assessed that the campaign was certainly no gentleman’s war’; it was in fact more like a punitive’ expedition. ‘What was the point of it all?’ he asked.
‘Human life appeared cheaper than shovels. One did not kill people it was “the enemy”, something impersonal. What was also particularly shocking was how little worth the Russians appeared to ascribe to life.’(19)
Both sides were guilty of this. Gefreiter Vetter’s unit was surrounded by Russians on the second day of Christmas, in temperatures of −35°C. Nevertheless, 3,000 Russian PoWs were taken out of their prison camp at nearby Kaluga and driven toward Roslavl. Vetter observed:
‘Many, weak with hunger, fell onto the road and were shot. After the road was empty again of prisoners one saw countless dead lying by the sides. A number of the prisoners were seen carrying bits of human bodies [an arm, or foot etc] in their pockets [to eat]. If one fell the others would immediately fall on him to strip him of clothing and take anything to eat. They all appeared starved and in terrible condition and had an animal look about them.’(20)
Soviet prisoners were transported to the rear by rail, in open goods wagons, even after the retreat had started. Exposed to cold, rain and snow, up to 20% perished before they reached their destination. One-fifth of 5,000 Russian PoWs transported over 200km from Bobruisk to Minsk between 20 and 21 November froze to death. Obergefreiter Franz Wesskallnies, with 161st Infantry Division, saw Soviet prisoners arriving at Ebenrode in East Prussia in mixed open and enclosed goods wagons in temperatures of −18°C. The cars were so overfilled the prisoners could not lie down, and had to sit there [in the open] for six days with no food.’ They were so hungry and thirsty that they subsisted on snow and grease scraped from the wagon wheels. ‘Several lorries,’ Wesskallnies said, were required to take away the bodies’ of Red Army men found in every compartment. When they arrived at the camp there was no accommodation ready. Prisoners were obliged to dig holes inside the perimeter to gain protection against the elements.(21)
German soldiers caught up in the retreat reaped the whirlwind of these excesses. Quarter on the Eastern Front was rarely given or, for that matter, anticipated. At the end of December the port town of Feodosia on the Crimean Peninsula was overrun by a surprise Russian amphibious assault. The resident German 46th Division hurriedly evacuated, abandoning 160 severely wounded cases in the Feodosia hospitals. When the town was recaptured in February 1942, the ice-blackened corpses of these wounded littered the beach alongside the hospital by the Black Sea. They had been thrown out of second floor windows onto the sand and hosed down with water so they froze to death in the sub-arctic temperatures.(22)
During the early morning hours of 27 December Amadeo Casanova, a member of the Spanish ‘Blue Division’, was defending a position with German troops north of Novgorod. One of the Spanish companies was attacked and encircled by the Russians. A rapid counter-attack was mounted to extract them, and during this fighting a Spanish lieutenant and four soldiers were wounded and had to be left behind. ‘Shortly after,’ Casanova testified, we found them dead. In all cases the Russians had nailed their heads to the ground with pickaxes.’(23)
There was dread throughout the retreat at the prospect of capture by the Russians. Eye gougings, genital mutilations and arbitrary shootings continued. ‘Fear of what would happen if captured by the Soviets,’ remarked one regimental history, was what kept the German soldier on his legs’; adding, ‘no small number shot themselves when in doubt.’(24) It was another nagging fear eroding morale and gnawing at nerves, magnifying further the desperate situation the troops felt themselves to be in. On 20 December Oberarzt Hans-Georg Suck’s battalion, retreating with Guderian’s Second Panzer Army, had fallen back to Plawsk, south of Tula. Lights had not been allowed within the column, which was being pursued by Soviet ski troops. As they moved through an unknown village the Panje wagons being used for the wounded and ammunition began to skid and slide over an uneven part of the road. Such an expanse of sheet ice was unusual in a village main street and merited investigation. Suck shone his pocket lamp on the surface of the road and recoiled in horror. A naked corpse stared back at him through the shimmering ice. ‘We found several naked bodies lined up next to each other’ under the ice, he said. There was no time to investigate the scene minutely because the enemy was in hot pursuit and closing. They realised they were German ‘because there were pieces of German uniform scattered by the roadside’. The soldiers were much depressed and alarmed by this gruesome discovery in temperatures of −42°C to −48°C. ‘Our comrades,’ he surmised, must have had to undress in the road, were made to lie down in the street, and then covered with water so as to construct a stretch of road!’(25)
Fear and comradeship kept German units intact. Leutnant Haape, retreating with Infantry Regiment, 18 said:
‘We had our cowards in the earlier fighting but they had been weeded out, for it was better to be one man short than to have a man who might start in a panic… At some time or another we had all been ready to run in blind fear, but the natural impulse was to stick it out with everyone else.’(26)
Leutnant Erich Mende concurred, stating, ‘only one thing steadied the nerves, and that to a lesser or greater degree sustained you, and that was a sense of comradeship.’ Everything else was otherwise subsumed in the ‘awful automation of war’. He said:
‘You knew you had a friend to your right and another to the left. If you were hit, they would help. If he was hit, you would go to him. And when someone shot at you, you fired back. One didn’t think about it, that one killed or was killed. The motto was: “you or me.” Either one killed or was killed in turn.’(27)
More than simply a will to survive was required to weld the German front together. As the army group fell back, a vitriolic debate raged between the operational army groups staffs and the strategic (OKH and OKW) level staffs to identify a way out of the crisis. By the third week in December, deep Soviet penetrations on both flanks of Army Group Centre were threatening to develop into a double envelopment of the entire German Central Front. There was a stark choice: retreat or fight. The former was the course currently being conducted and favoured by German field commanders, a prompt and extensive withdrawal to a suitable defence line. This had been identified as roughly the line between Kursk, Orel and Gzhatsk. The risk, and this was occurring in some sectors, was that enemy units thrusting between retreating German columns might inflict a sudden moral collapse. At the very best, considerable matériel would be lost and lines of abandoned guns and vehicles testified to this fact.
To stand and fight was, in the eyes of field commanders, a suicidal option. Success in this scenario was achievable only if German defensive endurance was superior to Soviet offensive capability. The present weakness of German fighting units seemed to preclude that. Moreover, such a course of action would result in the overrunning of units, and their loss would forfeit any opportunity of husbanding resources for a spring offensive in the central sector. Field commanders and the staff preferred the risk of a winter retreat to the certainty of annihilation if they stood their ground in the face of the Russian assault. Adolf Hitler provided a characteristic solution to this dilemma in a Teletype to Army Group Centre on 18 December.