‘Then people were again driven forward and they had to get in and lie on top of the dead. At that moment a young girl – she must have been about 12 years old – cried out in a clear piteous shrill voice. “Let me live, I’m still only a child!” The child was grabbed, thrown into the ditch, and shot.’(8)
The official attitude to brutality was permissive. Common decency in such circumstances was a matter of personal inclination. Right and wrong were clouded by ideological imperatives that were administratively applied. The impact of the Commissar Order, for example, became apparent through the conduct of numerous units shortly after the campaign began. Bruno Schneider from 8/IR167 was told by his company commander, Oberleutnant Prinz:
‘Red Army prisoners of war are to be taken only in exceptional circumstances, in other words when there is no other choice. In general captured Soviet soldiers are to be shot and this applies even to women serving in Red Army units.’
Schneider said, ‘the majority of soldiers from my unit did not follow this bloody order as closely as was required.’(9) Individual inclinations were applied with variable results. Martin Hirsch, a 28-year-old NCO from 3rd Panzer Division, was castigated by a soldier from another unit while bandaging a badly wounded Russian during fighting around Brest-Litovsk. ‘What are you doing here?’ he was asked. ‘I told him I was bandaging a soldier’ but ‘he said it was not my job to look after these Untermenschen [sub-humans]’. Hirsch chose to ignore him. ‘He told me he would report me, but I never heard anything more from him.’ His view was that he was ‘quite a callous Nazi, and I was pleased that I never caught sight of him again’.(10)
In the German Sixth Army with Army Group South the Commissar Order had been passed down to battalion level. Killings after the advance began were common enough to be unremarkable. Twenty-four hours into the campaign, Panzergruppe 1 reported to the IC (Intelligence officer) of Sixth Army that both XXXXVIIIth and IIIrd Corps had each taken one political commissar prisoner ‘and handled them appropriately’. According to a 62nd Infantry Division report, nine alleged civilian irregulars and one political commissar, captured in woods north of Sztun, ‘had been dealt with appropriately as per the ordered directive’. Further shootings followed: 298th Infantry Division despatched a commissar on 1 July and 62nd Division shot five, and nine more the next day. The XXXXIVth Corps killed another with one further committing suicide after capture. Commissar executions in Sixth Army became routine: 122 had been ‘despatched’ during partisan operations in LIst Corps’ area by the end of the battle of Kiev. Shootings of 30 or so individuals were occurring throughout the advances.(11)
Soldiers became accustomed to the killings, which altered values, transitioning to a form of group insanity. Combat soldiers, however, rarely kill for uniquely political or ideological convictions. Operation reports by the Einsatzgruppen and other official documents provide factual data and are designed to impress those elements in the higher commands who did possess ideological conviction. Whether they were representative of the Wehrmacht as a whole is debatable. The truth lies in between and is not as clear-cut as academics, quoting solely from documents, might suggest. Helmut Schmidt, a Flak officer, declared in an emotive interview after the war that not all soldiers were completely aware of what was happening. ‘Other people had different experiences from those generally quoted in many documents,’ he stated.(12)
No one is disputing the written official evidence or that atrocities occurred, but whether such experiences were universally shared at all times and at every sector of the front is not so certain. This alternative view shared by Schmidt (who was there) suggests soldiers were too young for political and ideological reflection. They were completely engrossed in the mind-numbing activity of surviving combat while enduring considerable physical hardship. Only much later did the extent of the crimes committed become hideously apparent. As such, they were unsuspecting ‘victims’ themselves of the totalitarian nature of the society to which they belonged. Soldier Roland Kiemig claims the truth dawned only after he had been captured by the Russians himself.
‘As a prisoner of war the Russians called me “Fascist”. I heard of the extent of German crimes for the first time in the camp, not only in Russia but also in the concentration camps. We had not known about that. We didn’t believe it at first and thought it was a little over-exaggerated. They typically referred to us as the “Fascist hordes”. But when they presented credible evidence, one did start thinking.’(13)
There was no time to think in action. In the ranks they became the victim of the common bonding required of soldiers to face adversity, and of a form of National Socialist ‘peer pressure’. Both pressures were sufficient to stifle individual predilections and often conscience. As Kiemig further explained:
‘You mustn’t forget I’m 66 now, I was 17 or 18 then, a different person. I wasn’t strong enough then. It was a kind of machine from which there was no escape – for anybody.
‘What could I have done then? I could have done – what? What way out was there then? It was your duty to serve. If you didn’t like it, then you were punished, and I did not want that.’(14)
Rudi Maschke, serving with the Pomeranian 6th Infantry Regiment, was even more emphatic. ‘Not following these orders,’ he stated, referring to the Commissar Directive, ‘would have cost us our lives ourselves.’(15) Kiemig said, ‘you could get locked up and charged with a military offence’. National Socialism demanded unambiguous conformity. It preached, moreover, that only the strong should survive in a fundamentally competitive society. ‘If you were a “softie”,’ said Kiemig, ‘you would be treated very badly, ridiculed even, and I didn’t want that either.’ The only recourse was to conform.
‘I wanted to stay in between. You might say that wasn’t a crime. But if some people say that most Germans were innocent, I would say they were accomplices. As a soldier I was an “accomplice”.’(16)
What made soldiers accomplices?
The pressures on the German soldier
Fear for the German soldier was the same as for all fighting men through the ages: would he survive the next battle sound in body and mind? There was no shortage of time to dwell on the dubious prospect during the long journey to the front. This might last weeks as the advance progressed deep into Russia. Hospital trains offered the first disenchanting glimpse of what lay ahead, passing the troops as they moved forward on their painstaking journey to the rear. German soldier Benno Zeiser, a driver in a transport unit, started with a naïve view. During training, he and his fellows had been served a diet of victory proclamations on the radio, which led him to believe arrogantly that:
‘Any fool knows you have to have losses, you can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs, but we were going to fight on to victory. Besides, if any of us did stop a bullet, it would be a hero’s death. So hurrah, over the top, come on, charge, hurrah!’
His first glimpse of a hospital train returning from the front quickly dispelled his ‘hurrah’ patriotism. ‘The orderlies began bringing in chaps with limbs missing, uniforms all blood, a mass of bandages, the linen soaked red on legs, arms, heads, trunks, and bloodless agony – distorted faces with sunken eyes.’ One of the soldiers on the train told them what to expect: