War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 (20 page)

The war had hit the Reich holiday industry. The
Münchener Neuesten Nachrichten
(Munich’s Latest News) commented in an article on 1941 tourism that large numbers of Swiss hotels were faced with closure because 60% of their customers had previously been foreign tourists.
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War kept people at home in Germany. Soldiers on leave preferred to spend their precious final furlough at home with their families. Hotels were overfilled, but not with holiday-makers. Most were commandeered by the state for military hospitals, convalescent homes for the wounded or for children evacuated to the country to avoid British bombers as part of the
Kinderlandverschickung
programme. Actress Heidi Kabel, commenting on the growing frequency of air raids, which had grown more menacing since 1940, expressed her concern.

‘My husband and I worked in the theatre. We had a son and often took him with us. It was serious but not as bad as later in Hamburg, but we were worried. We always took him and he slept in a wardrobe. It was always OK.’
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Local threats are often perceived to be more significant than epic impersonal events shaping history. One infantry Oberleutnant, despite optimism that the coming campaign would be short, was concerned more for his wife’s vulnerability to air raids, than of impending combat. ‘These things unsettle me less,’ he wrote home, ‘than the fact you poor women and children have to stay in cellars night after night.’ Euskirchen, his home town, ‘is revisited time after time,’ yet, he asks his wife, ‘you don’t write about casualties?’
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She doubtless preferred not to worry him.

Although the government wished to promote an air of normality, there was scepticism in the Reich over the announced invasion. ‘It was a very serious moment,’ recalled Charlotte von der Schulenburg. ‘War had always a deep horror for me’, and with a husband at the front it was ‘an extremely worrying event’.
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Gefreiter Erich Kuby’s wife, Edith, writing to her husband on the day the news broke, similarly expressed concern:

‘This is the first actual war letter! My God, right at the end [of leave] you had already thought of this possibility, and now you are in the middle of it! Hopefully your luck will hold and nothing bad will happen.’

The new campaign appeared more sinister than those which had preceded it. ‘The Russian wastes,’ Edith wrote, ‘will bring a different type of war from that in France, because a “forward point” is hardly discernible.’ She despairingly finished her letter saying, ‘all the time it occurs to me how awful war is, and you are now in it.’
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The significance of these unfolding events was not lost on children. On her way to fetch the Sunday morning milk with her uncle, grandfather and father, 12-year-old Marianne Roberts heard the radio news that German troops had crossed the Russian frontier. The implications were immediately apparent. Marianne’s uncle Mattes, Pionier Gefreiter, who had already fought in the Polish and French campaigns, broke the complete silence that had ensued. ‘Now we have lost the war,’ he simply announced. Marianne said:

‘Not a word was passed. Everyone kept their silence. From this day onwards I knew there would be no Final Victory’.
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Her uncle departed for Russia immediately and was killed shortly after near Smolensk. Within three years her father was dead also. Four days after the outbreak of the Russian war, the classified
SS Secret Report on the Home Political Situation
stated:

‘The reports on the war that have recently come in unanimously confirm that the initial nervousness and dismay especially noticeable around women lasted only a few hours and as a consequence of a comprehensive information campaign has given way to a generally calm and optimistic attitude.’
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Leutnant Helmut Ritgen, a Panzer regiment adjutant, regarded himself as a mathematician. So optimistic was he of the outcome of the approaching campaign that he began to calculate potential leave dates. The importance revolved around his future marriage.

‘I tried to compute the length of our campaign by the duration of the past campaign in Poland and France in relation to the strength of the opposing forces, distances and other factors. My conclusion was that the war would be over at the end of July. I set my wedding day for 2 August.’

He omitted a crucial factor from his equation – the Russians. Optimism there most certainly was. The same secret SS report continued:

‘The population’s mood had changed to the extent that today Russia is generally considered an inferior military foe. That a military victory over Russia will soon be forthcoming is common knowledge to every citizen in this war to a greater extent than in any other previous campaign. The optimism of most of the population is so great that bets have already been made, not on the outcome of the war, but on the date it will end. In this context the most popular time limit for the duration of the war is six weeks!’

Helmut Ritgen’s fiancée was to wait two more years for her wedding. Marga Merz’s experience was different. Her fiancé was conscripted, like her two brothers, into the army in 1940. But the wedding never took place. He was killed within days of the opening of the Russian campaign. She was totally overwhelmed.

‘I was howling and blowing my nose throughout the year. Clearly when you think you have built up your life, truly started to live and have someone – and then something else comes along…’

The remainder of her war years passed ‘like a terrible dream’.
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Similar tragedies were to occur ten-fold in Russia.

Sixteen-year-old Ina Konstantinova lived near Kastin, north-east of Moscow. She confided to her diary on the first day of war that ‘only yesterday everything was so peaceful, so quiet, and today… my God!’ Her thoughts were echoed by Yitskhok Rudashevski from Vilna on the Lithuanian-Russian border, who remembered how a cheerful conversation was interrupted by the sudden howling of an air-raid siren. The siren was so inappropriate,’ he said, ‘to the peaceful, joyous summer which spread out around us.’ The first air raids began that same beautiful summer evening:

‘It is war. People have been running around bewildered. Everything has changed so much… It has become clear to us all: the Hitlerites have attacked our land. They have forced a war upon us. And so we shall retaliate, and strike until we shall smash the aggressor on his home soil.’
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The outbreak of war profoundly shocked ordinary Russian people. At noon on 22 June in Moscow public address systems broadcast an announcement by Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov from every street corner describing the German invasion. Contemporary Russian newsreels captured these anxious crowds gazing with concern at metal loudspeakers as if they might offer something of more substance than the metallic voice rasp of the same shocking news that had been delivered to the Reich hours before:

‘At four o’clock this morning, without declaration of war, and without any claims being made on the Soviet Union, German troops attacked our country, attacked our frontier in many places, and bombed Zhitomir, Kiev, Sebastopol, Kaunas and some other places from the air. There are over 200 dead or wounded. Similar air and artillery attacks have also been made from Romanian and Finnish territory.’

Crowds listened restlessly, hands in pockets, thoughtfully pinching noses or abstractedly raising fingers to mouths as shocked minds came to terms with the import of the speech.

‘This unheard-of attack on our country is an unparalleled act of perfidy in the history of civilised nations. This attack has been made despite the fact that there was a non-aggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany, a pact the terms of which were scrupulously observed by the Soviet Union.’

Some individuals stared straight ahead, while others looked about to assess the impact the depressing speech was having on their fellows. Tense faces, pursed lips and shifting glances, manifested the sense of foreboding increasingly apparent to grim-faced audiences straining to catch every word.

Ina Konstantinova declared, ‘I can’t describe my state of mind as I was listening to this speech! I became so agitated that my heart seemed to jump out.’ She, like countless others, was caught up in a patriotic fervour. ‘The country is mobilising; should I continue as before? No! I ought to make myself useful to my Homeland.’ She wrote fervently in her diary, ‘we must win!’
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Lew Kopelew, a Ukrainian studying in Moscow, was initially euphoric. A committed socialist, he admitted later:

‘I was so stupid, I was pleased, because in my view the announcement seemed to presage a “holy war” in which “the German proletariat” would join us, and Hitler would immediately collapse.’
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His reasoning was based on the fact the German Communist Party in 1933 had been the largest voluntary communist organisation in the world.

Others expressed emotion in terms of pain. Jewgenlij Dolmatowski, later to become a Soviet Second Lieutenant, said, ‘I tell you, seriously, it caused real anguish, a feeling at the pit of the stomach’. From that moment on he was inspired to serve his country. Kopelew was similarly convinced. ‘My Homeland must be defended, and eventually Fascism come to a reckoning,’ he concluded. As a fluent German speaker he suspected he might be considered suitable for recruitment for parachute missions deep into Nazi Germany. ‘Stupid idea, eh?’ he ruefully admitted to his interviewer.
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These impacts, however, were the very emotions to which Molotov’s speech sought to appeal. ‘The whole responsibility for this act of robbery’ the speech continued, ‘must fall on the Nazi rulers’. There was a characteristic socialist input which gave some credence to Kopelew’s opinion:

‘This war has not been inflicted upon us by the German people nor by the German workers, peasants and intellectuals, of whose suffering we are fully aware, but by Germany’s bloodthirsty rulers who have already enslaved the French, the Czechs, the Poles, the Serbs, and the peoples of Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Greece and other countries.’

There was scant comprehension, this early, the pitiless ideological methods the German armies would employ to prosecute the war. The attack was nevertheless clearly an aggression, a transgression of civilised behaviour. It must be stopped.

‘The government calls upon you, men and women citizens of the Soviet Union, to rally even more closely round the glorious Bolshevik Party, around the Soviet Government and our great leader, comrade Stalin. Our cause is good. The enemy will be smashed. Victory will be ours.’
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With that the crackling speakers became silent. They later broadcast martial music. The declaration left people shocked and in some respects humiliated. There had been the Non-Aggression Pact. No demands had been made on the Soviet Union, the Germans had simply attacked. Maria Mironowa, a Russian actress, gravely recalled the impact of the surprise announcements:

‘Suddenly the streets were flowing with people. Uncertainties were at the forefront. Nobody knew what to do next. I didn’t know whether I ought to go to the theatre, carry on, or not go in. There were only a few people in the audience, practically nobody. In spite of all this no one comprehended how awful the war was going to be.’
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Sir John Russell at the British Embassy in Moscow declared, ‘the shock was all the greater when it did come.’ It was like a work of fiction.

‘I had been out that particular night somewhere and I came home rather late and turned the radio on, and I got onto I think it was Rhykov or Kiev or somewhere like that. Accounts were going on of bombings and attacks and things which I thought was like an Orson Welles programme, like when he bombed New York [
as part of an H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds interpretation
] you remember? Then when we checked around we found it was real.’
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Elena Skrjabin, listening to Molotov’s radio broadcast with her mother in Leningrad, suspected the effect of the transmission was not quite that intended. ‘War! Germany was already bombing cities in the Soviet Union’. She felt Molotov ‘faltered’ and the speech ‘was harshly delivered as if he was out of breath.’ The atmosphere conveyed suggested something dreadful threatened. People caught their breaths with a start as the news was announced. On the streets she saw:

‘The city was in panic. People fell upon the shops, standing in queues, exchanging a few words, buying everything they could get their hands on. They wandered up and down the streets lost in thought. Many entered banks to withdraw their deposits. I formed part of this wave attempting to take roubles from my savings account, but I came too late, the cashier was empty.’

A palpable feeling of crisis reigned. ‘Throughout the entire day,’ Skrjabin felt, ‘the atmosphere was tense and unsettled.’
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A day before, journalist Konstantin Simonov had been summoned to the Party Broadcasting Committee and instructed to write two anti-Fascist songs. ‘With that I decided that the war, which we all basically expected to happen, was very close.’ He worked throughout the morning of 22 June until disturbed by a telephone call at 14.00 hours. The first thing he heard on lifting the receiver was, ‘It’s war.’ Instructions followed to join the Soviet Third Army in the central sector near Grodno. He was to join a Front newspaper organisation. Unbeknown to him, it already lay within the shadow of the German advance. Uniforms were then issued. During the hectic fitting process he recalled, ‘we were all very lively, perhaps too lively and certainly nervous’.
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