War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 (41 page)

‘As a prisoner of war the Russians called me “Fascist”. I heard of the extent of German crimes for the first time in the camp, not only in Russia but also in the concentration camps. We had not known about that. We didn’t believe it at first and thought it was a little over-exaggerated. They typically referred to us as the “Fascist hordes”. But when they presented credible evidence, one did start thinking.’
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There was no time to think in action. In the ranks they became the victim of the common bonding required of soldiers to face adversity, and of a form of National Socialist ‘peer pressure’. Both pressures were sufficient to stifle individual predilections and often conscience. As Kiemig further explained:

‘You mustn’t forget I’m
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now, I was 17 or 18 then, a different person. I wasn’t strong enough then. It was a kind of machine from which there was no escape – for anybody.

‘What could I have done then? I could have done – what? What way out was there then? It was your duty to serve. If you didn’t like it, then you were punished, and I did not want that.’
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Rudi Maschke, serving with the Pomeranian 6th Infantry Regiment, was even more emphatic. ‘Not following these orders,’ he stated, referring to the Commissar Directive, ‘would have cost us our lives ourselves.’
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Kiemig said, ‘you could get locked up and charged with a military offence’. National Socialism demanded unambiguous conformity. It preached, moreover, that only the strong should survive in a fundamentally competitive society. ‘If you were a “softie”,’ said Kiemig, ‘you would be treated very badly, ridiculed even, and I didn’t want that either.’ The only recourse was to conform.

‘I wanted to stay in between. You might say that wasn’t a crime. But if some people say that most Germans were innocent, I would say they were accomplices. As a soldier I was an “accomplice”.’
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What made soldiers accomplices?

Fear for the German soldier was the same as for all fighting men through the ages: would he survive the next battle sound in body and mind? There was no shortage of time to dwell on the dubious prospect during the long journey to the front. This might last weeks as the advance progressed deep into Russia. Hospital trains offered the first disenchanting glimpse of what lay ahead, passing the troops as they moved forward on their painstaking journey to the rear. German soldier Benno Zeiser, a driver in a transport unit, started with a naïve view. During training, he and his fellows had been served a diet of victory proclamations on the radio, which led him to believe arrogantly that:

‘Any fool knows you have to have losses, you can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs, but we were going to fight on to victory. Besides, if any of us did stop a bullet, it would be a hero’s death. So hurrah, over the top, come on, charge, hurrah!’

His first glimpse of a hospital train returning from the front quickly dispelled his ‘hurrah’ patriotism. ‘The orderlies began bringing in chaps with limbs missing, uniforms all blood, a mass of bandages, the linen soaked red on legs, arms, heads, trunks, and bloodless agony – distorted faces with sunken eyes.’ One of the soldiers on the train told them what to expect:

‘According to him it was pretty grim. The Reds were fighting desperately and we had had heavy losses. All the same, the advance was continuing swiftly, but it was at a price which made it clear we could not tell how long it would all be as, apart from anything else, the Russians had more men than we, many more.’
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Psychological pressure builds up as the soldier approaches the front. The first visible sign is often sight of the enemy’s dead. Many young soldiers had never seen a corpse before. Werner Adamczyk, with a 150mm artillery battery near Minsk, became morbidly fascinated at his guns’ handiwork. ‘The repulsive scene caused me to shake; nevertheless, I found the guts to walk around,’ he said. ‘What I saw then was even more cruel.’ War quickly stripped the veneer of propaganda. Foxholes around him were filled with dead Soviet soldiers. ‘I shuddered and turned around to walk back to the truck’ admitting, ‘the reality of death was just too much to take’. He was troubled. What he had witnessed contradicted earlier briefings that suggested the Russian soldier was ‘poorly trained and not very much inclined to heroism’. Indeed:

‘It became clear to me that they must have been willing to fight to the very end. If this was not heroism, what was it? Did the communist commissars force them to fight to the death? It did not look like it. I did not see any dead commissars.’

Before long the German soldier realised the Russian fighting man was infinitely better than his superiors would like him to believe. ‘With this realisation,’ admitted Adamczyk, ‘my dream of going home soon receded.’
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German soldier Benno Zeiser was also taken aback at the sight of his first dead Russian. ‘Only such a very short time before, this must have been a living human being,’ he reflected. ‘I thought I would never get rid of the thought after that.’
Kriegsmaler
(official war artist) Theo Scharf, advancing with the 97th Division with Army Group South, ‘passed a Red Army soldier, seemingly asleep in the roadside ditch, but covered in thick dust, face and all’.
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It was the first of many corpses they would all see. Familiarity bred a form of indifference with the passage of time. Benno Zeiser saw more and more Russian dead. ‘And it was not long before I found myself merely feeling they were lumps of soil which belonged to the earth they lay on and that they might have been there since ages ago.’ It was less upsetting to view them as if they ‘never had been alive at all’.
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Viewing one’s own dead was different, engendering an emotive mixture of bitterness, torment, fear and a feeling of acute loss. Werner Adamczyk recalled burying his first two friends in the battery. ‘That was the end; they were no more. I stood there in anguish’. Both had been blown to pieces in an exploding ammunition truck.

‘I was indeed sorry for the families of these two men. It could have been me. With rising emotions I visualised the reactions of my family and friends, if that had happened to me. For the first time in my life I fully realised what love and affection really meant.’
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Zeiser felt ‘it was worse when you saw the first one in our own field grey… and you stare at him, lying there in the same uniform you wear yourself, and you think that he too has a mother and a father, perhaps sisters, he may even have been from the same parts as yourself.’ Prolonged exposure to the stark realities of combat corrupts the accepted codes of normal behaviour. Dead bodies became unremarkable. Zeiser continued:

‘In time you even get used to that. You just don’t really take it in at all when there are more and more who are dead but they are all in German uniform. So in the end you come to reckon yourself on a level with all those others, Russians or Germans alike, lying dead in their various uniforms; you yourself then turn into just one of the creatures who never really did live, you are just another lump of earth.’

The bizarre tenuously develops into the norm. Violence and death, cruel behaviour and the taking of life became unremarkable behaviour. Killing, on or off the battlefield, lay outside this category. Although ‘normal’ behaviour on or around a battlefield is a paradoxical misnomer, killing human beings – dispensing death – was a searing emotional experience. The impact in psychological terms is unpredictable. Such uncertainties are the only constant in this bizarre and fast-changing environment. Fear is the result.

‘Then one day, you’re right up against it. You are chatting with one of your mates when suddenly he folds up, just settles in a heap, and is stone dead. That is the real horror. You see the others stepping over him, just as anybody steps over a big stone he doesn’t want to catch his heel on, and you see your mate’s death no differently from any of the others that are dead – those whom you’ve already learned to think of as never really having lived, as being just lumps of earth.’

This was the supreme pressure on individual soldiers. Not just dying but worse, becoming a meaningless and soon forgotten official statistic. Zeiser explained:

‘That’s when you get the horrors and after that it is always a nightmare; it never, never stops, the real fear of being wiped out, the fear of merciless nothingness, the fear of thinking any moment you may be one of those who never were living creatures.’
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Fear of becoming a casualty was accentuated by the ‘strangeness’ of the very land the Wehrmacht had invaded. Families at home would have no idea where it was and what it was like, where they died. War correspondent Felix Lützkendorf, serving with an SS unit in the Ukraine, wrote:

‘This land is endless, beneath an endless sky with roads trailing endlessly into an incalculable distance. Each village and town seems just like the one that preceded it. They all have the same women and children standing dumbly by the roadside, the same wells, the same farmsteads … If the column comes off the road and moves on a compass bearing across fields, we look like lost world circumnavigators seeking new coasts beyond these oceans.’
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War developed into a form of pseudo-tourism to many German soldiers, whose previous knowledge of the world had been cycling or walking to the next village or town. One soldier had described his campaign experiences in France in May 1940 in terms of a ‘Strength through Joy’ trip comparable to prewar sponsored Nazi party outings. Another soldier, writing in the assembly area before the start of the Russian campaign, described how his ‘long journey up to the edge of the Russian border’ had ‘enabled him to view half of Europe’ at no effort or expense to himself. Russia, however, offered few attractions. Three weeks into the Russian campaign a Gefreiter complained, ‘It’s not like it was in France here. We had everything we wanted there; here, there is absolutely nothing.’
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Another soldier observed cryptically that they had exchanged their previous ‘Polack’s (Polish) shacks’ for Russian ‘dog kennels’.

‘Yesterday we moved out of our beautiful quarters and are now lying in a cursed lousy shack, with more filth than I have ever seen’.

Physical conditions matched the rigours of campaigning. Soldiers accustomed to well-appointed barracks in Germany became increasingly depressed as the operation dragged on, outpacing the length and discomforts of all previous campaigns. ‘These immense plains, huge woods with a few dog kennels here and there, make a dissolute impression,’ wrote one soldier. It was ‘uninteresting to the eye’, with ‘sad-looking wooden huts, forests and marshes. Everything,’ he said, ‘seemed to lose itself in an endless expanse.’
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As the advance continued, so did apprehensions. ‘Orientation in Russia is as difficult as it is in the desert,’ remarked one soldier. ‘Only you do not see the horizon – you are lost.’ Another commented:

‘The immense space was so vast that we had many soldiers who became melancholy.

‘Flat valleys, flat hills – flat valleys, flat hills, endless, endless. There was no limit. We could not see an end and it was so disconsolate.’
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‘Where is this endless war driving us?’ asked 33-year-old Günther von Soheven, fighting on the southern front.

‘There is no identifiable objective in terms of space across countryside stretching ever further away. Even more depressing, the enemy is becoming even more numerous, even though we have offered up huge sacrifices’.

Soldiers were becoming homesick. ‘The distances grow immeasurably,’ concluded von Soheven, ‘but our hearts remain close.’
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Determination to finish the campaign was, however, matched by an equal Russian stubbornness to fight on. It was not difficult to dehumanise an enemy who chose to resist fanatically within an alien landscape for no logical reason despite apparent defeat. National Socialist propaganda sowed the insidious seed, which fell upon the receptive minds of soldiers already exposed to racist doctrine. Unteroffizier Wilhelm Prüller, a motorised infantryman with the 9th Panzer Division, wrote on 4 July, ‘we have heard the most horrible things about what the Russians are doing to our prisoners’. The 8th Company of his Schütze Regiment 11 was badly mauled in a Russian ambush and lost 80 men. ‘The wounded
Kameraden
were worked over by the Russians with gun barrels until they were dead.’ Prüller’s anti-Semitic comments depersonalised the enemy. Like many German soldiers, he was surprised to encounter Russian women in uniform. Inside a Russian pocket they came upon ‘women, completely nude and roasted,’ who ‘were lying on and beside a [destroyed Soviet] tank. Awful.’ He indignantly concluded, ‘it’s not people we’re fighting against here, but simply animals.’ American soldiers similarly dehumanised their Japanese foes in the Pacific Theatre, and later the Vietcong in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s; a reaction, therefore, not unique to purely totalitarian societies. Prüller later observed, ‘among the Russian dead there are many Asiatic faces, which look disgusting with their slit eyes’. He was impressed by the strangeness of it all. In a park in Kirovograd the soldiers bathed in a small pond. ‘It’s curious to see the Russian women shamelessly undressing in front of us and wandering around naked,’ he wrote. ‘Some of them look quite appetising, especially their breasts … Most of us would be quite willing to… but then again you see the dirty ones and you want to go and vomit. They’ve no morals here! Revolting!’
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