It had not been like this in France the year before.
Chapter 10
A war without garlands
‘If some people say that most Germans were innocent, I would say they were accomplices. As a soldier I was an “accomplice”.’
‘Better three French campaigns than one Russian’
Fritz Köhler, a 20-year-old veteran of the French campaign, entered the town of Roslavl south-east of Smolensk on 3 August following a successful attack. Oil and petrol supplies had been torched by the Russians prior to leaving. ‘Unfortunately,’ he wrote in his diary that night, ‘there is practically nothing in this city to “liberate”.’ Gazing at the inferno of fire and smoke around him he declared, ‘it was a lot better in France.’(1)
Nine days later, Obergefreiter Erich Kuby, on sentry duty with Army Group North, peered watchfully from ‘foxhole 4’ in a rain-soaked forest. His duty period was two hours by night or three by day before relief. Ahead lay a dead Russian soldier, one of several killed blundering into their position the night before. The body – some 5m away and covered only with a sprinkling of earth – reeked. Kuby resolved to bury him deeper during the next rest period. ‘Better three French campaigns than one Russian’ was the often-repeated catch-phrase voiced by the troops. ‘French beds and the lustrous surroundings were missed.’ The good days were over. ‘The expectation of finding both in Leningrad in the near future,’ reflected Kuby, ‘was replaced by foxhole positions 1, 2, 3 and 4 and so on.’(2)
Kuby and Köhler were articulating a viewpoint fast becoming prevalent among the soldiers on the new Eastern Front. This was ‘Kein Blumenkrieg’ – quite literally ‘a war without garlands’. No glory as there was after the war in France the year before, when victory parades on homecoming were deluged by clouds of flowers tossed by adoring wives and girlfriends while a grateful Reich cheered. Newsreels now mocked ‘so-called “Socialist Workers’ Paradises”’ in the newly occupied areas. Cameras dwelt on rickety filthy balustrades overlooking slum housing for Soviet city workers, while the commentary announced:
‘The mindless uneducated masses are cannon fodder for the Soviets. In just five days German soldiers have been shown a picture of the Soviet paradise which defies all description. This explains why Russia felt the need to cut itself off from the rest of the world!’(3)
Much of the new Ostheer would have preferred that it remained so.
Russia was an unknown. Veterans of the French Blitzkrieg realised there was neither champagne, wine nor booty, nothing to ‘liberate’. The pitiless and total nature of the conflict quickly differentiated it from any other campaign experienced thus far. Any feeling this was a ‘just’ war was diluted by the pressure of excesses dubiously excused by National Socialist Lebensraum rhetoric extolling the survival of the fittest. Contemporary paternal and social democratic societies find it difficult to transfer their experience to the uncompromising ideological framework within which this war was conducted. The army that fell upon Communist Russia believed in Christ: 95% of the German population in 1939 had declared itself Christian, or from a religious order. Of 75.4 million (from 79.4 million) who had professed the faith, 41.9 million were Protestant and 31.4 million Catholic.(4)
Although cynical historians of religious wars would not regard this as auspicious, the Wehrmacht prosecuted the war with soldiers who had Christian caring families at home. Historical experience suggests that periods of protracted conflict are often accompanied by a certain corruption of standards of human decency. This assiduous process is often not immediately apparent to the combat soldier embarking on a campaign. Soon he is exposed to successive emotional experiences that trigger indefinable and often unrecognisable behavioural changes. It can begin by looking for battlefield souvenirs at one end of the spectrum to picking up useful military items such as binoculars and weapons and then even to stealing money and valuables from the dead at the other. This may be explained away by an incontrovertible logic that suggests a corpse has no need of possessions. Looting can in turn deteriorate to rape and organised plunder and later to murder, should the enemy get in the way.
The excesses of SS Einsatzgruppen behind the German front lines are well documented. Four of these special mobile units was formed and trained in the late spring of 1941 specifically to support Operation ‘Barbarossa’. The core of the groups were provided by Heydrich’s Security Police (Gestapo and Kripo) as well as from the intelligence apparatus (Security Service or SD), supplemented by small units of Waffen SS (the military branch of Himmler’s SS). By the middle of July convincing military successes hinted at the likelihood of total victory. Hitler, as a consequence, ordered the intensification of the planned pacification programme due to be conducted behind the rear of the advancing German armies. Security Police battalions were also attached to the Einsatzgruppen. A sociological survey carried out on one of these – Reserve Police Battalion 101 – revealed their unremarkable manning. In fact they were labelled ‘ordinary men’, consisting mainly of prewar police recruits rather than reservists. They came predominantly from the Hamburg area, considered by reputation to be the least Nazi-orientated of German cities. The soldiers were from less privileged backgrounds, 65% working class, while 35% were thought to be lower middle class. By virtue of age, all had been taught before the Nazi period but the majority were party members by 1942. According to their researcher, Christopher R. Browning, they did ‘not seem to have been a very promising group from which to recruit mass murderers on behalf of the Nazi vision of a radical utopia free of Jews’.(5)
War crimes, nevertheless, influenced the nature of fighting on the Russian front. The relevance had been recognised by the commander of the 58th Infantry Division laying siege to Leningrad in October 1941. The German soldier, he warned, was in danger of losing his ‘inner morality’.(6) That this can degrade combat sustainability has been demonstrated by French soldiers in Algeria serving during the past colonial civil war and by American troops in Vietnam. Malaise induced by seemingly pointless, yet officially sponsored, violence reduced the justification of prosecuting the Russian war to German soldiers to one of mere survival. One veteran, Roland Kiemig, claimed after the war:
‘I saw no executions, [but] I heard from people who did. It was no secret. They [the Russians] perished and many of them were killed through hard labour and other methods; that was clear. They weren’t resettled, they were systematically… decimated.’(7)
Another soldier, transport Gefreiter Hans R., gave a sobering description of mass shootings he witnessed during the advance into Russia. Accompanied by his companion Erich, the company commander’s clerk, they saw ‘men and women and children with their hands bound together with wire being driven along the road by SS people’. They decided to investigate. Aged 93, some 40 years later, his description of what happened was delivered in a precise monotone which consciously suppressed the obvious emotion he felt. Outside the village they came across a pit, 3m deep and 2.5m wide. Along its 150m length were hundreds of people, on foot and standing in open-backed lorries. ‘To our horror we realised they were all Jews,’ he said. The victims were tumbled into the ditch and made to lie in rows, alternately head to foot. Once a layer was in place, two SS men moved either side of the ditch with a Russian machine pistol firing automatic bursts into the backs of heads. Single shots rang out afterwards as they strode along the line finishing off the wounded.