War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 (23 page)

Lehr Regiment 800, originally conceived as a special forces company, had already been employed as such during the previous Polish and French campaigns. Its role was to raid behind enemy lines, occupy and prevent demolitions or destroy key headquarters and objectives such as bridges. Directly subordinate to Admiral Canaris’s Military Intelligence Headquarters, it was founded at Brandenburg in Berlin from the first Bau-Lehr Company. By the time of the Polish campaign the unit was 500-men strong, rising to two battalions which were employed during the Western campaign. They created confusion in enemy rear areas through sabotage, demolitions and raids in direct support of Blitzkrieg combined advances of paratroopers and Panzers. In October 1940 an entire regiment was formed which had within a year expanded to division size.
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Eduard Steinberger from South Tyrol served with the unit and explained:

‘The Brandenburg Division originally consisted of mostly non-Reich Germans – Sudeten Germans who spoke Czech, a few Palestinian Germans and volunteer Ukrainians. There were people from all over who mostly spoke other languages, but all units were under German command.’
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At the outset of the Russian campaign Oberleutnant Herzner commanded the Ukrainian ‘Nightingale’ battalion, recruited mainly from west Ukrainians released from Polish prisoner of war camps after the 1939 campaign. These formed part of the German advance toward Lemberg.
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Oberleutnant Wolfram Knaak, commanding the 8th ‘Branden-burger’ Company observing the Daugavpils bridges, had been wounded during a similar bridge raid near Kedaynyay. He was well aware of the risks involved operating so far forward of the vanguard battle group. ‘When the commanders of the divisions we were assigned saw they’d got a company of Brandenburgers,’ Steinberger remarked, ‘they immediately put us with the advance units who would be the first to make contact with the enemy.’

Knaak split his company into two raiding groups, one each for the railway and road bridges. Steinberger described how these units might be configured for a mission. They could be up to half a company strong, 60–70 soldiers, or more usually platoon sizes of 20–30 men.

‘We always operated in decoy uniforms. We wore all kinds – Russian ones for example – over our Wehrmacht uniforms. We had to be able to swiftly get rid of the cover uniform.’

The penalty, if they did not, was inevitable execution on capture. ‘We generally played a situation by ear,’ Steinberger said. In attempting to seize a bridge:

‘We always drove over in captured Russian trucks, with one of us sitting on top while someone who spoke Russian, a Latvian or Estonian for instance, sat in the cab.’
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During the early morning hours of 26 June Knaak’s group of captured Russian trucks began its tense drive, headlights on, toward both bridges, the spans of which could just be discerned with approaching daylight. The bridges, separated by a bend in the river, were about 1.5km apart. At Varpas, a village over 3km from the river, the parties diverged, each to its allotted objective. Left and straight on was the northern railway bridge, while the road crossing lay in a south-easterly direction to the right. Five Russian armoured cars parked by the road were overtaken by the railway group, which carried on to the main bridge span and judiciously halted, placing itself between these and additional Russian armoured cars on the bridge. During the resulting confusion, as the intention of these newly arrived trucks became clear, enemy gunners in the armoured cars were constrained against engaging the intruders for fear of hitting their own men. They moved off into the town to secure better fire positions. Meanwhile Feldwebel Kruckeberg deftly descended from the trucks to the bridge superstructure and began to cut suspected demolition cables.

Oberleutnant Knaak, having wound his way through unsuspecting civil traffic in the suburb of Griva on the southern riverbank to Daugavpils, drove up in the first of three trucks onto the road bridge. As they approached the western Soviet outpost they noticed the guards chatting to Russian civilians. With the prize tantalisingly within their grasp the action started. The nearest sentries were bayoneted but shots rang out. Now compromised, Knaak’s truck, engine screaming, started to accelerate to the far bank. The remaining lorries in hot pursuit began to close-up behind.

As gunfire began to reverberate around the bridge and suburb of Griva, followed by eerie flashes and the thump of hand-grenades, the lead tanks of Panzer Regiment 10 began to move. They had driven up as close as they dared. Hatches were dropped on order from their commander, Oberstleutnant Fronhöfer, and they began a metallic clattering race through the built-up area of Griva. Civilian traffic scattered.

Oberleutnant Knaak on the road bridge gritted his teeth and urged his driver on. Behind, whining engines and clanking gears indicated he was not alone. A crack followed by the iridescent red-hot slug of an anti-tank projectile spat out from the far Russian bank and slammed into Knaak’s truck, passing straight through, ejecting sparks and splinters of metal. The truck trundled to a halt out of control, Knaak sprawled dead inside the cab. A murderous fire jetted out from houses alongside the riverbank. German Panzers and infantry were, however, already visible on the bridge spans. An artillery shell crashed into the railway bridge producing a secondary detonation from part of the explosive charge. It was repairable, but for the moment tanks could not cross. The ‘Brandenburgers’ were pinned down. Steinberger described the typical dilemma once fighting broke out and decoy uniforms had to be jettisoned.

‘Nobody could tell whether we were friend or foe, and the tanks following on often shot at their own people in the chaos. If a mission succeeded, we usually had very few casualties. But some missions went wrong, if for example, our own people were recognised by the enemy. Then almost everybody was wiped out.’

Leutnant Schmidt commanded the first Panzer platoon to cross the Daugavpils bridge. Soon the remainder of 9/Panzer Regiment 10 was engaged in intense fighting with Russian infantry attempting to scale the river embankment and place grenades on tank tracks to immobilise them. Duelling with anti-tank guns began up and down the streets as further Panzers and German infantry crossed the bridge and began to penetrate the town.

Fighting continued throughout the day and columns of smoke spiralled above the town as desperately mounted Russian counterattacks vainly attempted to wrest control of the bridges back. Air raids conducted by Soviet twin-engined aircraft in a last-ditch effort to destroy the bridges were also unsuccessful. Soviet soldiers were constantly plucked from the bridge superstructures later that day, still attempting to reignite demolition fuses. The 9th Panzer Company destroyed 20 light Russian tanks, 20 artillery pieces and 17 anti-tank guns during its battles around the bridge entry points.

Army Group North had stormed the Dvina and had achieved a bridgehead. The way to Leningrad had been opened.

At home in the Reich there was no news. After the initial invasion announcement the population was given nothing of substance for seven days. Daily OKW reports gave sparse information. There were no names or unit numbers and rivers and towns received no mention at all. Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, played his psychological instrument with adroitness. ‘The public mood is one of depression,’ he recorded in his diary on 23 June. ‘The nation wants peace, but not at the price of defeat, but every new theatre of operations brings worry and concern.’ Well aware of early campaign successes, he wrote on 25 June: ‘We have still issued no details in the High Command Bulletin. The enemy is to be kept in complete ignorance.’ He exploited the period of tension with consummate skill. The press was constrained from publishing big maps of Russia. ‘The huge areas involved may frighten the public,’ he claimed. Similarly he took a firm line against imprudent campaign length predictions widely pronounced by the Foreign Office. ‘If we say four weeks and it turns out to be six, then our greatest victory will be transformed into a defeat in the end.’ The Foreign Ministry appeared to compromise security. ‘I’ve had the Gestapo take steps against one particular loudmouth,’ he admitted.
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Quiet confidence began to replace the initial nervousness. Certainty of a rapid victory over Russia became the accepted view, a reversal of previous campaign experience. Rumours abounded, raising tension to a ‘feverish’ height. Over 100,000 Russian prisoners had allegedly been taken. The SS
Secret Report on the Home Political Situation
reported: ‘Already on Tuesday [the third day of the campaign] one could hear in open conversation that 1,700 aircraft had been destroyed; by Wednesday this number had climbed to over 2,000.’
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The public deduction derived from all this was general suspicion that German troops had in reality penetrated the Russian hinterland far deeper than hitherto reported. Large-scale maps of Russia completely sold out in bookshops. In Dresden it was rumoured German troops were only 100km from Moscow.
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Letters to the front reflected this concern at the news blackout. One wife wrote to her husband, seven days into the invasion: ‘Sunday is upon us again, and you have probably experienced so much already. I didn’t get any post today.’
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A National Socialist mother wrote to her son from Brand on 28 June announcing the lifting of the postal ban, stating, ‘I do not doubt for one instant that there will be a victory over these dogs, whom one cannot refer to as human beings’. Yet beneath the dogma there remained concern for her son at the front:

‘In the morning we will hear through High Command Bulletins how much and where these barbarians have already been beaten. My dear boy! You know I am really concerned now, for you and Jos. Whenever you get a chance, give me a sign of life – a postcard would suffice.’
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Army Group Centre was the strongest in armour of the three army groups and its two Panzergruppen – 3 commanded by Hoth and 2 by Guderian – were committed to a huge encirclement operation. Army Group Centre sought to destroy as many of the Soviet forces as possible facing it in White Russia before they could disengage and escape into the depths of Russia. There, they might choose to stand and fight on the great natural obstacles of the Dvina and Dnieper rivers. The aim was to secure the ‘land-bridge’ between the headwaters of these two rivers – where the Minsk-Smolensk road passes en route to Moscow – as Napoleon did before them. As the massive Panzer thrusts by Army Group Centre gathered momentum, German air reconnaissance reported numerous enemy columns retreating eastward from the Bialystok region.

Simultaneously reports indicated an increase in the tenacity of local Soviet resistance, which Generalfeldmarschall von Bock, the commander of Army Group Centre, assessed might be to cover a withdrawal. The original ‘Barbarossa’ concept visualised Minsk forming the eastern edge of the first encircling movement towards the east. Bock expressed his preference to OKH that his Panzer groups should continue onward to Smolensk, 320km beyond the start line, fearing strong enemy contingents might escape eastwards into the Berezina marshlands, escaping the ring due to close at Minsk.
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OKH ironically faced the parallel dilemma it had experienced during the race to the English Channel after crossing the River Meuse the year before at Sedan in France. At what point, planners conferred, does a deep penetration become compromised by over-exposed flanks? OKH insisted on the junction of the two Panzergruppen near Minsk, in accordance with the original ‘Barbarossa’ plan. Panzergruppe 3 began to turn inward on 24 June. As a result, Soviet troops were pushed southward onto the flanks of Guderian’s Panzergruppe 2. Fourth and Ninth German armies marching up their infantry on foot were ordered to destroy fast-forming Soviet stay-behind elements that could menace the advance of the follow-up forces needed to consolidate the Panzer advances.

By 25 June Army Group Centre was beginning to coalesce around two primary pockets: 12 Soviet divisions were already marooned in the Bialystok and Volkovysk areas; within four days another belt of 15 Soviet divisions was enveloped in the Minsk area. It was becoming apparent from countless local Russian counterattacks that the enemy, almost instinctively, was going to fight for every foot of soil.

In Germany there were still no
Sondermeldungen.
These satisfying fanfares of music on the radio had been a distinctive feature of the preceding French campaign, heralding Wehrmacht victories. Edith Hagener wrote to her husband in the field:

‘
‘My Dearest,

We want to be very brave at this time and draw strength from the many beautiful years we have spent together. After the first perplexing sadness I have come quietly to my senses, because I need also to remain a happy mother to our children and a brave wife for you. Stay healthy my love. May dear God and my enormous love protect you. Your Edith.’
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Goebbels, better informed, enthused to his diary on 23 June:

‘Brest-Litovsk taken. All the day’s objectives reached. No problems so far. We are entitled to be very pleased. The Soviet Regime will crumble like touchwood. [
He continued the following day
] Our new weapons are carrying all before them. The Russians are emerging from their bunkers trembling, unfit for interrogation for a day afterwards… Everything is going to plan and better.’
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This information was unavailable to the general public. The only point they might identify with was Goebbels’ comment on the prevailing weather. ‘I am totally drained by the oppressive heat,’ he complained. ‘These are difficult days for our soldiers.’
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One housewife, fretful at the absence of mail, expressed entirely different emotions: