War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 (45 page)

Most soldiers would say that only those who were there truly understand the dilemma. The same men would have been labelled the ‘boys next door’ by their contemporaries. Police Battalion 101, responsible for grim excesses, was manned by unremarkable and ‘ordinary men’.
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After a soldier has killed, it is correspondingly easier the next time. There are criminal types in any cross-section of society that form part of the dark inexplicable make-up of human kind. Soldiers are not excluded. Indeed, condoned violence on the battlefield presents opportunities to those emotionally susceptible to evil and destructive acts. Artillery Obergefreiter Heinz Flohr saw mothers obliged to witness the execution of their own children at Belaja-Zerkow in the summer of 1941. ‘I had to ask myself,’ he said, visibly moved, ‘are these human beings committing such acts?’ Rape was also not always ideologically repulsive. Gefreiter Herbert Büttner stopped a medical Feldwebel molesting a Russian girl, but the same Feldwebel humiliated a group of Jews later by shaving half their beards and hair during a forcible eviction.
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Dehumanising the enemy provided an emotional safeguard of sorts. If the enemy are not people but
Untermenschen
(sub-human), it matters less what happens to them. Soldiers adrift in a sea of violence within a lethal environment were answerable only to their company commanders and those immediately in charge nearby, nobody else. Perhaps it is unrealistic to expect combat troops to make moral choices. Faced with impossible human dilemmas, it is invariably easier to obey orders. Those unable to recognise there was a choice were ideologically and frequently officially absolved of the responsibility.

Dr Paul Linke, an infantry medical officer, had always thought the commissar shooting order a ‘latrine house rumour’ until his battalion commander ordered his close friend, Leutnant Otto Fuchs, to shoot one. Fuchs, a lawyer in civilian life, had his stuttering ethical protest silenced by his superior officer. ‘Leutnant Fuchs, I do not wish to hear another word,’ he said. ‘Get out and carry out the order!’ The quick-thinking doctor offered to accompany his hapless friend in his sad duty, and promptly led him to the corpse of a Soviet soldier he had earlier discovered in a ditch nearby. The Russian commissar was encouraged to change clothes and bury the corpse in his commissar uniform and then allowed to slip back to his own lines. Two pistol shots fired into the earth disguised the act. Linke ‘hoped it was clear to the [commissar] that both of us would be shot should this ruse ever be discovered’. The Russian gratefully disappeared into the night. The young doctor ‘felt the risk to maintain his honour as an officer was worth it – we do not shoot defenceless prisoners,’ he said. Fuchs had to report to his battalion commander and confirm the execution order had been carried out. ‘I’m sorry Fuchs,’ he admitted. ‘I did not want it either. In the final analysis I delegated my responsibility for the order to you.’
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Common decency in the final resort was a matter of personal inclination. Some soldiers actually relished the culture of violence, but for the majority, the main bonding factor was the solidarity of the group with whom they lived. Survival depended upon one’s comrades. Right and wrong was not the issue, rather that there were variations in the degree of wrong.

Leutnant Peter Bamm, another medical officer, with Army Group South, observed that the Jewish massacres after the fall of Nikolaev were not approved by front-line soldiers, who felt that their victories ‘gained in grim and protracted battle’ were being used by the ‘others’ – the SS and SD. ‘But it was not an indignation that sprang from the heart.’ After seven years’ domination by the SS and SD, moral corruption ‘had already made too much progress even among those who would have denied it vigorously’. Protest was nullified by actions directed against families back home, as in the case of the wife of an Oberst in his division. Russian atrocities also had an impact upon the maintenance of emotional integrity. Soldiers would do whatever was required to survive. ‘There was no blazing indignation,’ Leutnant Bamm admitted. ‘The worm was too deep in the wood.’
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There could be no turning back now. Should the enemy ever reach the Reich, there would be the devil to pay.

A degree of ethical disintegration resulted from atrocities which had a negative impact upon the moral component of fighting power within the Ostheer. Ideals, even those directed toward the ideological ends of National Socialism, were compromised. The Christian army that invaded Russia was behaving in the manner of the Teutonic Knights of the 13th century, portrayed in Eisenstein’s film
Alexander Nevesky.
This had an immediate appeal to cinema audiences in an oppressed and threatened Soviet nation. Paradoxically, it diluted fighting power because officially sponsored brutality raised questions of a fundamental and compassionate nature, which led to a questioning of motive. This in turn affected willpower. At the same time the enemy’s moral component was strengthened. These indignities massively increased the resolve to resist. The German soldier began to realise in the absence of guaranteed success, for the first time in this war, that his very survival may be at stake. Conversely the Russian soldier knew he had no recourse but to fight to the bitter end. It was a pitiless prospect.

Unteroffizier Harald Dommerotsky, serving in a Luftwaffe unit near Toropez, was a witness of ‘almost daily executions of partisans, by hanging, by the security service of the SS’. Enormous crowds – predominantly Russians – gathered. ‘It may well be a human characteristic,’ he remarked, ‘this apparent predilection to always be present when one of your own kind is rubbed out.’ It made no difference, he continued, ‘whether it was the enemy or their own people’. Public hangings in Zhitomir often resulted in cheers as lorries drove off leaving victims pathetically hanging in the market place. One witness described how gaily-dressed Ukrainian women would hold up their children to see, while Wehrmacht spectators would bawl ‘slowly, slowly!’ so as to be able to take better photographs.
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In Toropez a huge gallows had been erected. Lorries would drive forward, each with four partisans standing in the back. Nooses would be placed around their necks and the lorries driven off. Dommerotsky remembered the occasion when only three instead of four bodies were left dangling at the end of the ropes. The victim was sprawled on the ground, his rope broken. ‘It made no difference,’ the Luftwaffe NCO remarked, he was hauled up onto the lorry and pushed out again. The same happened again. Undeterred, his executioners repeated the ghastly process and yet again the victim fell onto the ground, still very much alive.

‘My friend standing beside me said: “It’s God’s judgement.” I could not work it out either and only responded: “Now they will probably let him go.”’

They did not. As the lorry drove away for the fourth time the rope snapped taut around the victim’s neck, and he kicked his life away as the exhaust smoke dispersed. ‘There was no wailing,’ Dommerotsky remembered, ‘it was sinisterly quiet.’
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This was
Kein Blumenkrieg
– a war without garlands.
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*
Literally no flowers were thrown – eg at a victory parade.

Cannae at Kiev

On 20 August the Eastern Front presented a fascinating picture. Lead elements of Army Group Centre had occupied Yelnya, southeast of the Minsk–Smolensk–Moscow highway, holding a salient that appeared to point at the Russian capital. Some 600km due south on roughly a straight line, Army Group South had reached the River Dnieper at Kremenchug. This represented the forward wedge of a German front shaped like an isosceles triangle. Its western apex lagged 550km behind the leading eastern elements. Concentrated within the triangle was the entire South-west Soviet Army Group situated south of the Pripet Swamps. Few commanders since Hannibal had ever enjoyed the prospect of achieving an operational double envelopment. Concept here verged on actuality.

On a hot August day in 216BC, an outnumbered Carthaginian force of 40,000 men commanded by Hannibal Barca surrounded eight Roman legions during the battle of Cannae. A feint toward the centre resulted in the double envelopment of the Roman Army of 86,000, twice the size of the Carthaginian force. Seventy thousand Roman legionaries perished, unable to escape. History appeared to be repeating itself more than 2,000 years later. Soviet Marshal Budenny’s South-west Army Group was inside an enormous salient 240km wide that extended from Trubchevsk in the north to Kremenchug on the River Dnieper to the south. Kiev lay at the western extremity of the bulge. The conditions for a Cannae-like battle of encirclement were recognisable at this point, but only to those with a visionary operational view. Marshal Budenny had about a million and a half soldiers in this area, elements of eight armies, located mainly at Uman and Kiev itself.

Hitler’s controversial strategic directive to change the main axis of advance southwards was planned as a double encirclement. A preliminary inner ring was to be created by three manoeuvring German infantry armies. Second Army was to advance south-east from Gomel, Seventeenth would strike north from Kremenchug, while the Sixth Army fixed Russian attention on the centre at Kiev. The outer ring was to be formed by Generaloberst Guderian’s Panzergruppe 2 driving south from Trubchevsk with 500 Panzers to make contact with von Kleist’s 600 tanks of Panzergruppe 1 attacking north from Kremenchug, 200km east of Kiev. It was a carbon copy of Cannae. Carthaginian infantry lured the Roman legions into the heart of their concave formation in the centre, while cavalry, the precursor of the Panzers, smashed the wings and then enveloped the committed Roman infantry from the rear. The aim was not to defeat but annihilate the enemy.

As the German plan unfolded, the Russians appeared paralysed and incapable of decisive action. Nobody saw the awesome trap opening. Instead of withdrawing behind the natural defensive line of the River Dnieper, Marshal Budenny reinforced those very areas, like Uman south of Kiev, which were to be engulfed by the German spearheads even before the main battle commenced. General von Kleist’s Panzers entered Novo Ukrainka on 30 July, cutting the Kiev–Dnepropetrovsk railway line, isolating Uman from the rear. The only route left open to the Soviet Sixth, Twelfth and Eighteenth Armies lay south-eastward along the River Bug to Nikolaev on the Black Sea. The
Kessel
(cauldron) thus formed leaked until closed by the German infantry divisions of Eleventh and Seventeenth Armies marching up from the west and south-west, which relieved the Panzers. Fifteen Soviet infantry and five armoured divisions were trapped and destroyed in a pocket that netted 103,000 PoWs. Its reduction was complete by 8 August. One German artillery battery pounding the encirclement fired more ammunition in four days than it had expended throughout the entire six weeks in France during 1940.
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An idea of the magnitude of distances covered during these tactical envelopments can be gauged from the progress of one of the Panzer spearhead divisions. Ninth Panzer Division, belonging to von Kleist’s Panzergruppe 1, was at the end of the pincer that closed the Uman pocket. Setting off at Belaja-Zerkow, it swung down from the north to link with German infantry from the Ist Gebirgsjäger Corps. Between 24 and 30 July it captured 747 PoWs, destroying two tanks and eight guns en route before grappling with the enemy. By 5 August it had knocked out 33 tanks and 116 guns, taken or destroyed 1,113 trucks and captured 11,000 PoWs during an advance of 185km. A further tactical sweep occurred between 7 and 26 August through a series of Ukrainian industrial and communications centres between Kirovograd and Dnepropetrovsk on the River Dnieper. The distance covered was 490km, greater than the distance from London to Paris and slightly less than from Paris to Amsterdam in the Netherlands. A further 65 guns and over 16,000 PoWs were taken
en route.
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This latest advance opened up the possibility of a Cannae-like pocket. To the west the front was concave in shape, while the sinister spindly fingers of Panzer advances reflected on maps were reaching out to envelop the Soviet flanks. Fingers poised at Roslavl in the north and Kremenchug in the south needed only to close in order to spring a gigantic trap. They were some 600km apart.

The experience of these fast-moving German columns alternated between routine interspersed with sudden isolated skirmishes. Nothing was permitted to interrupt the flow of operations. Food was eaten on the move. Curizio Malaparte, an Italian war correspondent, described how:

‘In this fluid type of warfare there is no time for meals. One eats when one can. Every soldier carries with him his ration of black bread and marmalade and his thermos of tea. Periodically, even during the heat of battle, he will take a slice of bread from his haversack, spread it with marmalade, raise it to his mouth with one hand, while with the other he grips the steering wheel of his lorry or the butt of his machine gun.’
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Fighting varied in intensity. Activity for the most part was clinically observed from a safe distance through binoculars. Incidents spluttered to life here and there, clouding the overall picture. Malaparte described a skirmish between his armoured column and Russian rearguards, which typified the haphazard and indistinguishable nature of such mobile engagements.

A Soviet tank opened fire on the column. ‘I hear distinctly the clatter of its tracks,’ he wrote, but nobody was aware of what was going on. ‘It seems to be sniffing the air, trying to locate an invisible trail leading though the corn.’ Battle was joined, but its progress and outcome was indistinct: