As the advance continued, so did apprehensions. ‘Orientation in Russia is as difficult as it is in the desert,’ remarked one soldier. ‘Only you do not see the horizon – you are lost.’ Another commented:
‘The immense space was so vast that we had many soldiers who became melancholy.
‘Flat valleys, flat hills – flat valleys, flat hills, endless, endless. There was no limit. We could not see an end and it was so disconsolate.’(10)
‘Where is this endless war driving us?’ asked 33-year-old Günther von Soheven, fighting on the southern front.
‘There is no identifiable objective in terms of space across countryside stretching ever further away. Even more depressing, the enemy is becoming even more numerous, even though we have offered up huge sacrifices’.
Soldiers were becoming homesick. ‘The distances grow immeasurably,’ concluded von Soheven, ‘but our hearts remain close.’(11)
Determination to finish the campaign was, however, matched by an equal Russian stubbornness to fight on. It was not difficult to dehumanise an enemy who chose to resist fanatically within an alien landscape for no logical reason despite apparent defeat. National Socialist propaganda sowed the insidious seed, which fell upon the receptive minds of soldiers already exposed to racist doctrine. Unteroffizier Wilhelm Prüller, a motorised infantryman with the 9th Panzer Division, wrote on 4 July, ‘we have heard the most horrible things about what the Russians are doing to our prisoners’. The 8th Company of his Schütze Regiment 11 was badly mauled in a Russian ambush and lost 80 men. ‘The wounded Kameraden were worked over by the Russians with gun barrels until they were dead.’ Prüller’s anti-Semitic comments depersonalised the enemy. Like many German soldiers, he was surprised to encounter Russian women in uniform. Inside a Russian pocket they came upon ‘women, completely nude and roasted,’ who ‘were lying on and beside a [destroyed Soviet] tank. Awful.’ He indignantly concluded, ‘it’s not people we’re fighting against here, but simply animals.’ American soldiers similarly dehumanised their Japanese foes in the Pacific Theatre, and later the Vietcong in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s; a reaction, therefore, not unique to purely totalitarian societies. Prüller later observed, ‘among the Russian dead there are many Asiatic faces, which look disgusting with their slit eyes’. He was impressed by the strangeness of it all. In a park in Kirovograd the soldiers bathed in a small pond. ‘It’s curious to see the Russian women shamelessly undressing in front of us and wandering around naked,’ he wrote. ‘Some of them look quite appetising, especially their breasts… Most of us would be quite willing to… but then again you see the dirty ones and you want to go and vomit. They’ve no morals here! Revolting!’(12)
Tank gunner Karl Fuchs with the 7th Panzer Division offered a similarly maligned view of Russian prisoners of war to his wife:
‘Hardly ever do you see the face of a person who seems rational and intelligent. They all look emaciated and the wild, half crazy look in their eyes makes them appear like imbeciles. And these scoundrels, led by Jews and criminals, wanted to imprint their stamp on Europe, indeed on the world. Thank God that our Führer, Adolf Hitler, is preventing this from happening.’(13)
German Wochenschau newsreels viewed in July dwelt on portrait shots of Mongol prisoners of war and other Asiatics. The commentary poked fun at ‘a small sample of the particularly horrible types of sub-human Bolsheviks’. These sentiments were reflected in letters sent home from the front. One signaller wrote:
‘We are deep in Russia in the so-called “paradise” which calls upon [German] soldiers to desert. Terrible misery reigns here. People have been unimaginably oppressed for two centuries. We would rather all die than accept the torment and misery these folk have had to put up with.’(14)
Over-confidence upon meeting an allegedly ‘inferior’ foe, based purely on racist criteria, bred a contempt during the early stages of the campaign that was soon punished.
At the end of June 1941 III/IR9 was wood-clearing around a road north-east of the city of Bialystok, near the village of Krynki. A young Panzerjäger Leutnant, despite warnings to the contrary, arrogantly insisted on pushing ahead of the road clearance through woods probably infested with Russian soldiers. The Panzerjäger platoon pressed on and was barely out of sight of the supporting German infantry before the vehicles were heard to stop. Inhuman shrieks of pain soon rent the air, interspersed with shouted commands in Russian. Major Haeften, the infantry company commander, ordered a hasty assault to rescue the ambushed antitank platoon. The lead platoon led by Feldwebel Gottfried Becker encountered a scene of carnage they ‘could only gradually, very slowly, allow to sink in’. They were sickened by what they saw. ‘Here and there a body jerked convulsively or danced around in its own blood.’ The nearer the rescuing troops approached the macabre scene, the greater their appreciation of the atrocities visited upon the wretched Panzerjäger.
‘The majority of the German soldiers had their eyes gouged out, others their throats cut. Some had their bayonets stuck in their chests. Two soldiers had their uniform jackets and shirts ripped apart and their naked stomachs slit open, glistening entrails hung out of the bloody mass. Two more had their genitals cut off and laid on their chests.’
German soldiers ‘stumbled as if in a trance’ onto the road to survey a scene of utter desolation. ‘The swine,’ muttered one soldier while another retched into the road; a third man stood and stared, his body shaking as he silently wept. News swept quickly through the division. The regimental commander had objected to the Commissar Order, but the next political commissar captured was handed without scruple to the military police and shot.(15)
The Russian soldier, previously accorded scant respect, became on object of fear. He responded in kind to the excesses inflicted on him and his people. ‘I was always afraid of the Russians,’ admitted German soldier Erhard Schaumann with Army Group Centre, ‘not only because of that mass of humanity, but because they were so close to nature.’ Russian soldiers were the master of their environment, the forests and swamps, and were particularly adept at night fighting. ‘Whereas we,’ Schaumann said, ‘by virtue of our culture, were unable and hardly suited to react to everything like an animal, close to nature.’(16) Ignorance of the enemy bred fear which, in turn, encouraged inhuman behaviour; as Panzer soldier Hans Becker commented, ‘bestiality breeds bestiality’. He felt, ‘there is no defence for the fantastic atrocities which we inflicted on their race.’(17) Roland Kiemig, another German soldier, conjectured after the war:
‘If I was attacked like the Russians by the German “hordes”, and to them we were simply “Fascist hordes”, which is how we did partly behave, then I would have fought to the last.’(18)
On 1 July 1941, nine days after the start of the campaign, 180 German soldiers belonging to Infantry Regiment 35, Infantry Regiment 119 and artillerymen were captured in a sudden Russian counter-attack on the Klewan–Broniki road in the Ukraine. They belonged to two motorised infantry formations which blundered into a superior Soviet force of one and a half divisions and were overwhelmed. The prisoners, most wounded, were herded into a clover field alongside the road and ordered to undress. Gefreiter Karl Jäger hurriedly began to pull off his tunic having ‘had to hand over all valuable objects, including everything we had in our pockets’. Prisoners were generally compliant in this initial phase of capture, in shock and concerned for their lives. The wounded soldiers had difficulty undressing. Jäger recalled a fellow NCO, Gefreiter Kurz, struggling to undo his belt because of an injured hand. To his horror he saw ‘he was stabbed behind in the neck so that the bayonet came out through his throat’. Shocked, the other soldiers frantically removed their tunic jackets. Another severely wounded soldier was kicked and clubbed around the head with rifle butts. Totally cowed, the German prisoners were shoved north of the road in groups of 12 to 15 men. Many were half-naked and ‘several completely naked,’ recalled Jäger. Oberschütze Wilhelm Metzger said, ‘the Russians… grabbed everything we had, rings, watches, money bags, uniform insignia, and then they took our jackets, shirts, shoes and socks.’ Private Hermann Heiss had his hands roughly tied, like many others, behind his back. They were then forced them down into thick green clover by the Russian soldiers. Heiss described how: