Dehumanisation was the result. ‘Many Germans had closed their hearts to such sights,’ admitted Pionier Leutnant Paul Stresemann. ‘If I had known the rest of it… I think I would have run away.’ Despite the suffering, Stresemann argued, ‘I can say that in all my army service I never saw a single atrocity.’ Circumstances in themselves were creating insufferable conditions. ‘Of course, when so many prisoners are taken as in Russia there is bound to be some chaos in feeding etc, for everything was in a terrible mess.’(10) Knappe thought ‘the prisoners seemed apathetic and expressionless. Their simple uniforms created the impression of a huge dull mass.’(11) Benno Zeiser recoiled from the horror of this institutionalised disregard:
‘We made haste out of the way of the foul cloud which surrounded them, when what we saw transfixed us where we stood and we forgot our nausea. Were these really human beings, these grey-brown figures, these shadows lurching towards us, stumbling and staggering, moving shapes at their last gasp, creatures which only some last flicker of the will to live enabled to obey the order to march?’(12)
Soldiers tend not to dwell overly long on upsetting sights, and the German troops were no exception, preoccupied as they were by the need to survive. Leutnant Paul Stresemann claimed, ‘I had no idea that many of the poor devils would end up starving or dead in the west after they had been marched away in vast columns many, many kilometres long.’(13) Siegfried Knappe explained, ‘it was a terrible situation, but it was not that they were neglected – it was just not possible to feed them in such numbers and still feed our own troops.’(14)
He was wrong. The policy was deliberate. It was tenuously excused by pointing out the Soviet Union had not ratified the Geneva Convention Agreement of 1929 relating to prisoners. Germany, however, was bound to the general international law relating to nations, which required humanitarian treatment of PoWs in the absence of a standing agreement. Both the USSR and the Third Reich had ratified the Geneva Agreement covering wounded in 1929 obligating a clear duty to care for the sick and wounded.(15)
An OKW order on 8 July 1941 covering first aid for PoWs directed ‘Russian medical personnel, doctors and medical supplies are to be used first’ before the German. Wehrmacht transport was not to be made available. OKH insisted on further limitations two weeks later ‘to prevent the Homeland being flooded by Russian wounded’. Only lightly wounded prisoners who could be capable of work after four weeks were allowed to be evacuated. Those remaining were consigned to ‘improvised PoW hospitals’ staffed ‘primarily’ with Russian personnel using ‘only’ Soviet medical supplies. The directives were followed without question. Generaloberst Hoepner, commanding Panzergruppe 4, concurred ‘it was a matter of course that German medics treat Russian wounded after the last German wounded have been handled’. The 18th Panzer Division, part of Generaloberst Guderian’s Panzergruppe 2, ordered ‘in no circumstances’ were Russian wounded prisoners to be treated, accommodated or transported alongside German wounded. They were to be moved in ‘Panje’ wagons (horse-drawn carts).(16)
Soviet prisoners taken in the pocket battles were not only in a state of shock, many were wounded and injured. At this initial stage and thankful to be alive, they were often so tired and intimidated they did not consider escape. They depended upon sustenance from their captors while at this physical and psychological low point. This was the phenomenon that kept the massive PoW columns together. Leutnant Hubert Becker, a keen amateur movie cameraman, filmed such a concentration of PoWs and described the pictures after the war:
‘They gathered in a valley and had their wounds dressed. Nurses were moving about. The majority were badly wounded and in a bad state, half dead with thirst and resigned to their fate. It was terrible, the lack of water in the dry shimmering heat of the scorching Steppe. Prisoners fought for even a drop of water. Some of their people, retaining a strong sense of discipline, fought them back so that the healthy ones, best able to walk, would not drink all the water. Then those who needed it most could get the few drops available.
‘These people were so numb and happy to have escaped the inferno that they hardly noticed the camera. They didn’t even see me!’
Becker, wryly pondering the fate of this mass of humanity filling his camera lens, admitted ‘what eventually became of these many, many, many soldiers I don’t know, and it is better that one does not know’.(17) Some did what they could. One doctor working with the Ninth Army Collection Point (9AGSSt) spoke of ‘islands of humanity in an unbridgeable sea of PoW misery’. Nobody was able to cope. Requests for supplies, rations and medicines were completely ignored. At one camp near Uman in August 1941, some 15,000 to 20,000 Soviet wounded lay under the open sky. Schütze Benno Zeiser, guarding such a camp, gave an indication of what such neglect created:
‘Nearly every day we had men die of exhaustion. The others would take their dead back to camp, to bury them there. They would take turns carrying corpses and never seemed in the least moved by them. The camp graveyard was very large; the number of men under the ground must have been greater than that of those still among the living.’(18)
Thousands of prisoners perished during the forced marches from the front, the wounded succumbing first. So many were shot around the vicinity of Vyazma, later in the campaign, that the commander of the rear area was uneasy about its impact on enemy propaganda.(19) Sixteenth Army instructed its formations on 31 July not to transport PoWs in empty trains returning from the front for fear of ‘contaminating and soiling’ the wagons. The 18th Panzer Division warned its units on 17 August 1941 against allowing prisoners to infect vehicles with lice.(20) Schütze Zeiser claimed:
‘We gave them whatever we could spare. There were strict orders never to give prisoners any food, but it was to hell with all that. We were pretty short ourselves. What we did give them was like a drop of water on a hot stove.’(21)
Conditions by early November 1941 could be described as catastrophic. Korück 582, a rear area security unit supporting Ninth Army, took over Army PoW Collection Centre 7 at Rzhev from its forward formation at the end of the month. Each single-storey accommodation block, measuring 12m by 24m, sheltered 450 prisoners. Disease was endemic because there were only two latrines for 11,000 prisoners. These had consumed all vegetation within the barbed-wire perimeter long before. Prisoners were subsisting on bark, leaves, grass and nettles until eventually isolated cases of cannibalism were reported. Watchdogs received 50 times the ration of a single Russian prisoner.(22) Inevitably typhus broke out in the autumn of 1941. The Health Department of the White Russian (Weissruthenien) General Commissariat recommended all infected prisoners be shot. This was rejected by the responsible Wehrmacht authorities ‘on the grounds of the amount of work it would entail’.(23)
Such treatment was not without moral and morale implications for their captors. It accentuated the ‘dehumanisation’ of the foe which made the execution of such excesses more bearable. Soldier Roland Kiemig explained after the war:
‘We had been told the Russians were sub-human Bolsheviks and they were to be fought. But when we saw the first PoWs we realised that they weren’t sub-human. When we shipped them away and later used them as “Hiwis” [helpers], we realised they were absolutely normal people.’
There may have been doubts about the ‘justness’ of their cause, but they were not widespread. ‘We knew this was no defensive war, forced on us,’ admitted Kiemig, ‘it was an idiotic war of aggression and a glance at the map showed it could not be won.’(24) Pressure manifested itself in other insidious ways. Schütze Benno Zeiser stopped his friend Franzl beating Soviet prisoners. He said: