War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 (43 page)

A medical Gefreiter with the 125th Infantry Division wrote home about the extent of ‘Jewish-Bolshevist cruelty which one would hardly deem possible’:

‘Yesterday we went through a huge city and by a prison. It stank of corpses even from a long distance away. The smell was hardly bearable as we approached it. Inside lay 8,000 civilian prisoners, not even all shot, but beaten and murdered – a bloodbath which the Bolsheviks set up shortly before withdrawing.’
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The soldiers were much influenced by what they had seen. It impacted upon both morale and morals. ‘If the Soviets have already murdered countless thousands of their own unprotected citizens and Ukrainians,’ wrote one NCO, ‘bestially mutilating and killing them – what will they then do to Germans?’ His own prescient opinion was, ‘if these beasts, our enemy, ever come to Germany there will be a bloodbath the like of which the world has never seen.’
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The publicity surrounding the Lvov atrocity, reported in German newsreels and newspapers, accentuated the suspicions and unease already aroused within the public at home. Their concerns were transmitted to their menfolk serving at the front, magnifying the isolation and pessimism beginning to emerge at dubious personal prospects should the campaign become even more protracted. A Düsseldorf housewife confessed to her husband:

‘We get some indication from the Wochenschau [
newsreels
] what it seems to be like in the East, and believe you me those clips have produced such dread that we prefer to close our eyes while a few scenes roll by. And the reality – what’s it like for you? I don’t think we will ever be able to imagine.’
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Classified SS Secret Service observations confirm the Ukrainian murders at Lvov ‘produced a deep impression of disgust’ during the second week of July. ‘It was often asked what fate must our own soldiers expect if they become prisoners, and what are we doing on our side with the Bolsheviks “who already are no longer human?”’
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Tens of thousands of prisoners were shown on the newsreels to cinema audiences in the Reich as commentaries gloated over victories. Of every 100 PoWs shown, only three would survive.

The first problem on being taken prisoner was to survive the engagement. The intensity of fighting often precluded this. The consequences of failure in tank-infantry engagements, for example, were normally fatal. German anti-tank NCO Kurt Meissner described what normally occurred:

‘All the crews were killed as they baled out and no prisoners were taken. That was war. There were times when such things happened. If we felt we could not collect or care for prisoners then they were killed in action. But I do not mean that they were killed after being taken prisoner – never!’
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The two biggest encirclement battles had netted 328,000 prisoners at Bialystok and Minsk during the first weeks of the advance and then another 310,000 were taken at Smolensk. General von Waldau, Chef des
Luftwaffen-Führungsstabes,
calculated that just short of 800,000 prisoners had been taken by the end of July. This was to rise to 3.3 million by December.
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Perhaps two million Soviet PoWs are estimated to have perished in the first few months alone.
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Artillery Leutnant Siegfried Knappe was astonished at the phenomenal numbers giving up:

‘We had started taking prisoners from the first day of the invasion. The infantry brought them in by the thousands, by the tens of thousands and even by the hundreds of thousands.’
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Coping with such masses produced a pressure of its own. The 12th Infantry Division, for example, captured 3,159 PoWs between 31 August and 8 October 1941, which in numerical terms constituted about one quarter of its own effective strength of 12,000–13,000 men. The 18th Panzer Division, spearheading advances with Army Group Centre, took 5,500 Red Army prisoners during the first five weeks of the campaign, while its strength was reduced from 17,000 to 11,000 by August.
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Few soldiers were, therefore, available to guard prisoners totalling about the equivalent of 40% of the division’s own formed strength. Panzer units ahead of the infantry had to maintain the advance, hold down encircled pockets and secure masses of prisoners with ever-dwindling tank and infantry numbers.

The sheer scale of the problem can be measured against German infantry division strengths. By the end of July the Germans had to administer 49 enemy division equivalents in terms of medical care, transport and rations in addition to their existing order of battle. One single German division required 70 logistic tons per day of supplies, of which one third constituted rations.
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There were insufficient logistic resources available to maintain the advance and even less for PoWs. Little thought, apart from grim ideological intent, was given to the sudden and unexpected influx of prisoners. Artillery Leutnant Hubert Becker declared after the war:

‘It is always a problem because no war manual says what you do with 90,000 prisoners. How do I shelter and feed them? What should one do? Suddenly there were 90,000 men who gave up coming to us in a never ending column.’
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Schütze Benno Zeiser, with a special duty Company, witnessed the outcome of officially sponsored neglect:

‘A broad earth-brown crocodile slowly shuffling down the road towards us. From it came a subdued hum, like that from a bee-hive. Prisoners of War, Russians, six deep. We couldn’t see the end of the column. As they drew near the terrible stench which met us made us quite sick; it was like the biting stench of the lion house and the filthy odour of the monkey house at the same time.’
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It was a problem that could not be ignored. Even if one German soldier was allocated to secure 50 men each, 18 battalions or six regiments were needed to administer the 800,000 PoWs taken by the end of July alone, a figure that would increase to three million by the end of the year. The requirement is not just to guard the prisoners; they have to be medically treated, fed and transported. Leutnant Knappe correctly surmised control had been lost. ‘I wondered at first,’ he wrote, ‘whether we were prepared to care for so many of them, and as the numbers continued to grow I was sure we were not.’ The resulting appalling conditions were to physically enact the planned ideological intent by default. ‘Our supply line did well just to keep the German Army supplied.’ Commented Knappe, ‘we could not possibly have anticipated so many prisoners.’
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Dehumanisation was the result. ‘Many Germans had closed their hearts to such sights,’ admitted Pionier Leutnant Paul Stresemann. ‘If I had known the rest of it… I think I would have run away.’ Despite the suffering, Stresemann argued, ‘I can say that in all my army service I never saw a single atrocity.’ Circumstances in themselves were creating insufferable conditions. ‘Of course, when so many prisoners are taken as in Russia there is bound to be some chaos in feeding etc, for everything was in a terrible mess.’
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Knappe thought ‘the prisoners seemed apathetic and expressionless. Their simple uniforms created the impression of a huge dull mass.’
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Benno Zeiser recoiled from the horror of this institutionalised disregard:

‘We made haste out of the way of the foul cloud which surrounded them, when what we saw transfixed us where we stood and we forgot our nausea. Were these really human beings, these grey-brown figures, these shadows lurching towards us, stumbling and staggering, moving shapes at their last gasp, creatures which only some last flicker of the will to live enabled to obey the order to march?’
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Soldiers tend not to dwell overly long on upsetting sights, and the German troops were no exception, preoccupied as they were by the need to survive. Leutnant Paul Stresemann claimed, ‘I had no idea that many of the poor devils would end up starving or dead in the west after they had been marched away in vast columns many, many kilometres long.’
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Siegfried Knappe explained, ‘it was a terrible situation, but it was not that they were neglected – it was just not possible to feed them in such numbers and still feed our own troops.’
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He was wrong. The policy was deliberate. It was tenuously excused by pointing out the Soviet Union had not ratified the Geneva Convention Agreement of 1929 relating to prisoners. Germany, however, was bound to the general international law relating to nations, which required humanitarian treatment of PoWs in the absence of a standing agreement. Both the USSR and the Third Reich had ratified the Geneva Agreement covering wounded in 1929 obligating a clear duty to care for the sick and wounded.
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An OKW order on 8 July 1941 covering first aid for PoWs directed ‘Russian medical personnel, doctors and medical supplies are to be used first’ before the German. Wehrmacht transport was not to be made available. OKH insisted on further limitations two weeks later ‘to prevent the Homeland being flooded by Russian wounded’. Only lightly wounded prisoners who could be capable of work after four weeks were allowed to be evacuated. Those remaining were consigned to ‘improvised PoW hospitals’ staffed ‘primarily’ with Russian personnel using ‘only’ Soviet medical supplies. The directives were followed without question. Generaloberst Hoepner, commanding Panzergruppe 4, concurred ‘it was a matter of course that German medics treat Russian wounded after the last German wounded have been handled’. The 18th Panzer Division, part of Generaloberst Guderian’s Panzergruppe 2, ordered ‘in no circumstances’ were Russian wounded prisoners to be treated, accommodated or transported alongside German wounded. They were to be moved in ‘Panje’ wagons (horse-drawn carts).
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Soviet prisoners taken in the pocket battles were not only in a state of shock, many were wounded and injured. At this initial stage and thankful to be alive, they were often so tired and intimidated they did not consider escape. They depended upon sustenance from their captors while at this physical and psychological low point. This was the phenomenon that kept the massive PoW columns together. Leutnant Hubert Becker, a keen amateur movie cameraman, filmed such a concentration of PoWs and described the pictures after the war:

‘They gathered in a valley and had their wounds dressed. Nurses were moving about. The majority were badly wounded and in a bad state, half dead with thirst and resigned to their fate. It was terrible, the lack of water in the dry shimmering heat of the scorching Steppe. Prisoners fought for even a drop of water. Some of their people, retaining a strong sense of discipline, fought them back so that the healthy ones, best able to walk, would not drink all the water. Then those who needed it most could get the few drops available.

‘These people were so numb and happy to have escaped the inferno that they hardly noticed the camera. They didn’t even see me!’

Becker, wryly pondering the fate of this mass of humanity filling his camera lens, admitted ‘what eventually became of these many, many, many soldiers I don’t know, and it is better that one does not know’.
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Some did what they could. One doctor working with the Ninth Army Collection Point (9AGSSt) spoke of ‘islands of humanity in an unbridgeable sea of PoW misery’. Nobody was able to cope. Requests for supplies, rations and medicines were completely ignored. At one camp near Uman in August 1941, some 15,000 to 20,000 Soviet wounded lay under the open sky. Schütze Benno Zeiser, guarding such a camp, gave an indication of what such neglect created:

‘Nearly every day we had men die of exhaustion. The others would take their dead back to camp, to bury them there. They would take turns carrying corpses and never seemed in the least moved by them. The camp graveyard was very large; the number of men under the ground must have been greater than that of those still among the living.’
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Thousands of prisoners perished during the forced marches from the front, the wounded succumbing first. So many were shot around the vicinity of Vyazma, later in the campaign, that the commander of the rear area was uneasy about its impact on enemy propaganda.
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Sixteenth Army instructed its formations on 31 July not to transport PoWs in empty trains returning from the front for fear of ‘contaminating and soiling’ the wagons. The 18th Panzer Division warned its units on 17 August 1941 against allowing prisoners to infect vehicles with lice.
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Schütze Zeiser claimed:

‘We gave them whatever we could spare. There were strict orders never to give prisoners any food, but it was to hell with all that. We were pretty short ourselves. What we did give them was like a drop of water on a hot stove.’
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Conditions by early November 1941 could be described as catastrophic. Korück 582, a rear area security unit supporting Ninth Army, took over Army PoW Collection Centre 7 at Rzhev from its forward formation at the end of the month. Each single-storey accommodation block, measuring 12m by 24m, sheltered 450 prisoners. Disease was endemic because there were only two latrines for 11,000 prisoners. These had consumed all vegetation within the barbed-wire perimeter long before. Prisoners were subsisting on bark, leaves, grass and nettles until eventually isolated cases of cannibalism were reported. Watchdogs received 50 times the ration of a single Russian prisoner.
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Inevitably typhus broke out in the autumn of 1941. The Health Department of the White Russian
(Weissruthenien)
General Commissariat recommended all infected prisoners be shot. This was rejected by the responsible Wehrmacht authorities ‘on the grounds of the amount of work it would entail’.
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