Jaroslaw Hawrych, similarly emotionally distraught, recalled finding her brother-in-law among ‘hundreds, thousands’ of corpses laid out by rows in the courtyard.
‘I wouldn’t have recognised him, he was half naked. There were signs of wounds on his body, and his face was swollen all black and blue. He was shot through the head and his hands were tied with a piece of rope. The only way I recognised him was when I saw the sock. He had a sock on his foot, one sock coloured in stripes. I recognised my mother’s knitting.’(26)
A medical Gefreiter with the 125th Infantry Division wrote home about the extent of ‘Jewish-Bolshevist cruelty which one would hardly deem possible’:
‘Yesterday we went through a huge city and by a prison. It stank of corpses even from a long distance away. The smell was hardly bearable as we approached it. Inside lay 8,000 civilian prisoners, not even all shot, but beaten and murdered – a bloodbath which the Bolsheviks set up shortly before withdrawing.’(27)
The soldiers were much influenced by what they had seen. It impacted upon both morale and morals. ‘If the Soviets have already murdered countless thousands of their own unprotected citizens and Ukrainians,’ wrote one NCO, ‘bestially mutilating and killing them – what will they then do to Germans?’ His own prescient opinion was, ‘if these beasts, our enemy, ever come to Germany there will be a bloodbath the like of which the world has never seen.’(28)
The publicity surrounding the Lvov atrocity, reported in German newsreels and newspapers, accentuated the suspicions and unease already aroused within the public at home. Their concerns were transmitted to their menfolk serving at the front, magnifying the isolation and pessimism beginning to emerge at dubious personal prospects should the campaign become even more protracted. A Düsseldorf housewife confessed to her husband:
‘We get some indication from the Wochenschau [newsreels] what it seems to be like in the East, and believe you me those clips have produced such dread that we prefer to close our eyes while a few scenes roll by. And the reality – what’s it like for you? I don’t think we will ever be able to imagine.’(29)
Classified SS Secret Service observations confirm the Ukrainian murders at Lvov ‘produced a deep impression of disgust’ during the second week of July. ‘It was often asked what fate must our own soldiers expect if they become prisoners, and what are we doing on our side with the Bolsheviks “who already are no longer human?”’(30)
‘Kein Kindergarten Krieg’. Prisoners and partisans
Tens of thousands of prisoners were shown on the newsreels to cinema audiences in the Reich as commentaries gloated over victories. Of every 100 PoWs shown, only three would survive.
The first problem on being taken prisoner was to survive the engagement. The intensity of fighting often precluded this. The consequences of failure in tank-infantry engagements, for example, were normally fatal. German anti-tank NCO Kurt Meissner described what normally occurred:
‘All the crews were killed as they baled out and no prisoners were taken. That was war. There were times when such things happened. If we felt we could not collect or care for prisoners then they were killed in action. But I do not mean that they were killed after being taken prisoner – never!’(1)
The two biggest encirclement battles had netted 328,000 prisoners at Bialystok and Minsk during the first weeks of the advance and then another 310,000 were taken at Smolensk. General von Waldau, Chef des Luftwaffen-Führungsstabes, calculated that just short of 800,000 prisoners had been taken by the end of July. This was to rise to 3.3 million by December.(2) Perhaps two million Soviet PoWs are estimated to have perished in the first few months alone.(3) Artillery Leutnant Siegfried Knappe was astonished at the phenomenal numbers giving up:
‘We had started taking prisoners from the first day of the invasion. The infantry brought them in by the thousands, by the tens of thousands and even by the hundreds of thousands.’(4)
Coping with such masses produced a pressure of its own. The 12th Infantry Division, for example, captured 3,159 PoWs between 31 August and 8 October 1941, which in numerical terms constituted about one quarter of its own effective strength of 12,000–13,000 men. The 18th Panzer Division, spearheading advances with Army Group Centre, took 5,500 Red Army prisoners during the first five weeks of the campaign, while its strength was reduced from 17,000 to 11,000 by August.(5) Few soldiers were, therefore, available to guard prisoners totalling about the equivalent of 40% of the division’s own formed strength. Panzer units ahead of the infantry had to maintain the advance, hold down encircled pockets and secure masses of prisoners with ever-dwindling tank and infantry numbers.
The sheer scale of the problem can be measured against German infantry division strengths. By the end of July the Germans had to administer 49 enemy division equivalents in terms of medical care, transport and rations in addition to their existing order of battle. One single German division required 70 logistic tons per day of supplies, of which one third constituted rations.(6) There were insufficient logistic resources available to maintain the advance and even less for PoWs. Little thought, apart from grim ideological intent, was given to the sudden and unexpected influx of prisoners. Artillery Leutnant Hubert Becker declared after the war:
‘It is always a problem because no war manual says what you do with 90,000 prisoners. How do I shelter and feed them? What should one do? Suddenly there were 90,000 men who gave up coming to us in a never ending column.’(7)
Schütze Benno Zeiser, with a special duty Company, witnessed the outcome of officially sponsored neglect:
‘A broad earth-brown crocodile slowly shuffling down the road towards us. From it came a subdued hum, like that from a bee-hive. Prisoners of War, Russians, six deep. We couldn’t see the end of the column. As they drew near the terrible stench which met us made us quite sick; it was like the biting stench of the lion house and the filthy odour of the monkey house at the same time.’(8)
It was a problem that could not be ignored. Even if one German soldier was allocated to secure 50 men each, 18 battalions or six regiments were needed to administer the 800,000 PoWs taken by the end of July alone, a figure that would increase to three million by the end of the year. The requirement is not just to guard the prisoners; they have to be medically treated, fed and transported. Leutnant Knappe correctly surmised control had been lost. ‘I wondered at first,’ he wrote, ‘whether we were prepared to care for so many of them, and as the numbers continued to grow I was sure we were not.’ The resulting appalling conditions were to physically enact the planned ideological intent by default. ‘Our supply line did well just to keep the German Army supplied.’ Commented Knappe, ‘we could not possibly have anticipated so many prisoners.’(9)