Unteroffizier Wilhelm Prüller with Infantry Regiment 11 was pursuing fleeing Russian columns in vehicles mixed with tanks. German Panzer and motorised companies had become intermingled with the enemy ‘in the intoxication of this fabulous chase’.
‘There ought to be some newsreel men here; there would be incomparable picture material! Tanks and armoured cars, the men sitting on them, encrusted with a thick coating of dirt, heady with the excitement of the attack – haystacks set on fire by our tank cannons, running Russians, hiding, surrendering! It’s a marvellous sight!’
Prisoners were flushed out from beneath haystacks or lying between furrows in the fields. ‘Shy, unbelieving, filled with terror, they came,’ gloated Prüller. Resistance by ‘many a Bolshevik’ was regarded as ‘stupid pig-headedness’. They were shot on the spot.(16)
By the fifth day Russian resistance was visibly collapsing. Col-Gen Michael P. Kirponos, commanding the Kiev troops, perished alongside his staff when his column failed to break through the German ring. Very few Soviet units escaped. Marshals Budenny, Timoshenko and their senior political commissar, Khrushchev, were flown out of the pocket by air. M. A. Burmistrenko, a member of the war council and Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, and the Chief of Staff of the Soviet Army Group, General Pupikov, were killed, as were most members of the General Staff. One single cavalry unit led by Maj-Gen Borisov managed to exfiltrate with 4,000 men.(17) Although masses of Soviet PoWs were rounded up, they did not readily surrender. Gabriel Temkin, serving in a Soviet labour battalion, admitted ‘although officially a taboo in the Soviet press, the PoW issue was a public secret’. The Russian public was aware huge numbers of prisoners had been taken. ‘We were told both how the Nazis were mistreating them, which was indeed a fact, and what the Soviet punishment for letting oneself become a PoW was, which was also true.’
Commanders who surrendered were considered deserters, the consequence was their families could be arrested as forfeit. Likewise, families of Red Army soldiers taken prisoner would be denied government benefits and aid. ‘Falling into the enemy’s hands was considered almost tantamount to treason,’ Temkin explained. Exoneration was achievable only if one was incapacitated by wounds, killed, or later escaped. The capture of Stalin’s own son, Yakov, produced a poignant irony. ‘The Germans,’ Temkin said,’ were dropping leaflets with his photo over cities as well as over railway stations and Red Army groupings.’ Many soldiers had already witnessed the random and apparently officially sponsored shootings and ill-treatment of prisoners. Stalin’s son later died in a concentration camp. Temkin had no illusions. ‘I could not get out of my mind the fear of falling into their hands,’ he confessed. ‘I dreaded it more than being killed.’(18)
Major Jurij Krymov had already resigned himself to the inevitable. He received notification at 02.00 hours that the enemy were 4km from his left flank. There was no room inside the crowded shed with his sleeping soldiers, so he went outside. ‘The whole horizon was illuminated in red with everywhere the damn clatter of machine gun fire.’ It was apparent that ‘even with the best will in the world we are not going to get out of this’. A further depressing report revealed contact had been lost with the neighbouring unit to his left. Beleaguered from all sides, ‘they were being overwhelmed by events’. His commissar, who had supported him throughout, interrupted his melancholic train of thought, passing him two biscuits. ‘I had absolutely no idea where he had got them from,’ he said, ‘but he had not eaten them, he had brought them to me.’ Krymov’s letter to his wife stopped at this point. He was killed three days later.(19)
Leutnant Kurt Meissner was watching yet another despairing Soviet attack on the hard-pressed German ring. ‘This great mass of singing humanity had only been told to break out in our direction,’ he said. He and his men were new to combat and afraid. They had never seen anything like this before.
‘They came on in a shambling, shuffling gait and all the way they were calling out in this low, moaning way, and every so often they would break out into this great mass cry of “Hurraaa! Hurraaa! Hurraaa!”.’
Meissner and his men, covering a vast and flat sector, fired and fired until a wall of corpses built up, behind which still, advancing Russians began to shoot back. Thousands more came on, pushing beyond the bloody barrier and trying to rush the German positions. Meissner’s men quickly fell back and took up new positions to avoid being overrun. Now blocked, the Soviet tide sought to break through in another direction. As they did so, the Germans poured a murderous fire into their flanks. Meissner admitted:
‘I was in a sweat, very hot and frightened. Then a strange thing happened, and this was even more extraordinary: the whole mass of surviving Russians – and there were still thousands of them – simply stopped dead about a kilometre from us as if on order. We wondered what was happening and then saw through our glasses that they were discarding all their equipment. Then they turned about to face us. All the enormous sacrifice they had made had been in vain. They simply sat down on the spot and we received orders to go in and round them up.’(20)
On the fifth day it ended. German soldiers moved warily across to take the surrenders. Meissner recalled, ‘we moved over hundreds of dead, dying and wounded, they had no apparent organisation for dealing with the latter. Russki – Komm!’ was the first order preceding nightmarish forced marches to the rear and PoW camps.
The battle of Kiev spluttered to an end on 24 September 1941. A doctor from the 3rd Panzer Division surveying the battlefield reported:
‘A chaotic scene remained. Hundreds of lorries and troop carriers with tanks in between are strewn across the landscape. Those sitting inside were often caught by the flames as they attempted to dismount, and were burned, hanging from turrets like black mummies. Around the vehicles lay thousands of dead.’(21)
Sergeant Ivan Nikitch Krylov, a demoted Soviet staff captain, witnessed the final days in the pocket.
‘The Germans outnumbered us, their munitions were practically inexhaustible, their equipment without fault and their daring and courage beyond reproach. But German corpses strewed the ground side by side with our own. The battle was merciless on both sides.’(22)
Six Soviet armies – the Fifth, Twenty-first, Twenty-sixth, Twenty-seventh, Thirty-eighth and Fortieth – were either wholly or partially destroyed and 50 Soviet divisions were removed from the Soviet order of battle as a consequence. The German news service announced the pocket contained 665,000 Russian prisoners, 884 tanks and 3,718 guns. Soviet sources record that 44 divisions and six brigades with 12 defended localities participated during the Kiev defensive operation conducted between 7 July and 26 September. A total of 700,544 casualties are admitted, of which the greater part – 616,304 – were irrecoverable losses.(23)
The battle, as Krylov suggested, was not completely one-sided. Feldwebel Max Kuhnert’s unit suffered heavy casualties but, as a colleague pointed out, ‘our losses are nothing like the poor devils of the battalions’. The IInd Battalion and reconnaissance unit on his right flank was much reduced: ‘motorcycles with sidecars were standing or lying on the primitive track and there were bodies everywhere’.(24)
Chaplain Rudolf Gschöpf’s 45th Division had received a comparable mauling to that already received at Brest-Litovsk. Three infantry Regiments lost 86, 151 and 75 men respectively; 40 others died at the division dressing station and 40 more were scattered elsewhere. In total the division lost 40 officers and 1,200 NCOs and men. This represented half a regiment’s complement of officers and a battalion and a half of men. A service was held over the graves, freshly covered in flowers, and the military band played before the division departed the battlefield. Gschöpf commented, ‘it was the last time our music corps were able to play their instruments during this war.’(25) Vehicle shortages had dictated the instruments be sent home to make space for essential stores. The war was losing its heraldry; lethality and objective usefulness were all that was left.