War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 (55 page)

‘One did what one practised a hundred times. Take cover! You give fire support – I will move! Jump up – go! Orders were to be followed above all else. The natural survival mechanisms to hesitate were turned off by this automatic process.’
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Patriotism continued and was rationalised as ‘duty’. It did, however, became tempered with a more realistic appraisal of what should constitute ‘sacrifice’.

Another motivation was so called
Halsschmerzen.
This so-called ‘sore-throat’ affliction was suffered by heroes who aspired to the Knight’s Cross, Germany’s highest order for bravery, worn at the throat. Its holder, whether officer or soldier, was entitled to a salute by all ranks. The medal was implicit recognition: ‘I have proved myself.’ Knight’s Cross holders were less inclined to avoid tight situations because collective peer pressure anticipated results. Nazi propaganda extolled the concept of a ‘nation of heroes’. The resulting by-product was a crop of veterans who mastered their lethal craft. One former soldier described them as:

‘Those soldiers who were called “excellent chaps or fellows”. They were men who recognised their calling and carried out the tank- and bunker-busting required of them. They led the assault teams or long-range patrols, being hauled in or volunteered freely when the situation was especially precarious. Their names were known throughout their units.’

Killing was their expertise, and as such they were bizarrely appreciated in the same vein that football or racing-car heroes are feted in peacetime. Veteran A. Stöhr remarked, ‘they were not particularly unique because every other man also risked being killed himself all the time’. War also changed men. Veterans remarked that the scale alternated between sensible types, who overcame their fear, to insensitive psychopaths, who, because they lacked imagination, knew no fear. Alongside doubters fought fanatic ‘Hitlerites’, to whom everything was the same. Stöhr recalled a Feldwebel whose bride was killed before his eyes during an allied bombing raid. From that moment on he became a ‘hero’, whose reckless courage won him the right to wear a string of tank victory badges on his sleeve, proof he had destroyed seven tanks single-handed in combat. At his throat hung the Knight’s Cross, ‘a hero,’ Stöhr remarked, ‘because his own life had become unimportant’.
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Hardship at the front was a physically cumulative and psychologically wearing process. Fewer surviving soldiers meant more to do – notably sentry and other security duties – for those remaining. There is also universal comment in
Feldpost letters
and diaries from soldiers about the filth, dust, mud and lice and other discomforts on the Russian front. Obergefreiter Erich Kuby wrote typically in his diary on 19 August, ‘I slept miserably in a soaking bed and developed a headache. Since 22 June I have spent every single night in the open.’
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Fresh food, which had been reasonably plentiful in the summer, became increasingly difficult to commandeer in the autumn. Haphazard marching routines punctuated by unexpected periods of sustained or intense fighting meant soldiers ate poorly, and when they could. Incessant hard marches with poor food produced intestinal complaints and diarrhoea, which by the fourth consecutive month of the campaign was draining physical reserves. Natural body resistance was on the decline, colds and fever commonplace, further raising the susceptibility to disease. The prospect of enduring a Russian winter in the open became both depressing and alarming to soldiers at the front and their concerned relatives at home.

A ‘Leibstandarte-SS’ medical report surveying supplies reaching combat troops revealed their nutritional value was on average ‘more than a quarter below what they should have received’. In particular, ‘the supply of fat is always remarkably low’, as also the intake of vitamin C. Summer foraging had compensated for the shortfall but, by late autumn and winter, opportunities to supplement this meagre diet fell away. This eventually ‘led to considerable numbers of men being taken out of service due to illness’. Harsh conditions and insufficient resupply reduced core body resistance to face the approaching winter. The ‘Leibstandarte’ doctor wrote:

‘Aside from a reduction in body weight, one is further aware of an increased susceptibility to disease and a tendency for these to last longer with more pronounced effect. The cause, as with the generally noticeable prolongation of wound healing times with a tendency to develop complications, can be ascribed to reduced body resistance caused by insufficient nutrition.’
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Casualties and harsh physical demands were starting to erode the moral component of the
Ostheer’s
fighting power. A sociological transformation was to occur during the coming winter. The supremely committed idealistic army that had crossed the demarcation line in eastern Poland on 22 June was undergoing change. Many of its commanders, including junior officers and NCOs, had been veterans of World War 1. The youngest were in their early 40s, serving both with the
Kampftruppen
(combat arms) and staffs. They were less able to endure the drawn-out hardships of a campaign which was totally unlike France, where they had been able to purloin comfortable billets at will. Cumulative physical and psychological pressure alongside the attrition of incessant combat, with still no prospect of victory four months into the offensive, exacted a toll. Atrocities were removing much of the idealistic gloss from soldiers who originally considered they were participating in a ‘crusade against Bolshevism’. Leutnant Peter Bamm referred to the original volunteers of 1914 as ‘a fellowship apart’, adding, ‘they greeted each other with an old-fashioned and traditional courtesy.’

‘These old soldiers, who as beardless striplings had been the heroes of Verdun and the Somme, now that they were adult men and not easily ruffled attempted to preserve chivalrous traditions in this war too. The younger soldiers were less sceptical and thus more courageous; but theirs was the courage not of probity but of fanaticism.’

Hauptmann Klaus von Bismarck described his own Infantry Regiment 4 as ‘conservative’, claiming ‘there were no Nazis with us in Kolberg’ (their original garrison town). But later, ‘I noticed from about 1941 onwards, how far the leadership at the top had already been successful in infecting the army [with Nazism] – ever more’. Leutnant Bamm described the development as a ‘rot that during the course of the years had slowly infected the army like a creeping thrombosis’. As the 1914–18 generation of soldiers were killed or succumbed to nervous and physical exhaustion, they were replaced by less competently trained but less compromising and younger men. These men had either been educated under National Socialism, or owed their recent advancement to it. Von Bismarck pointed out:

‘There were many reactivated officers in my own regiment who had “muddled through” during the Weimar period. That means once proud officers who had lived many years beneath their socially expected standing. Then all of a sudden they had been elevated again by the “Führer”. These people were the willing instruments of Nazi politics.’
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Traditional reservist commanders, such as Leutnant Haape’s battalion commander in Infantry Regiment 18, a World War 1 veteran, were beginning to feel the strain of incessant combat. Haape noticed how easily he fell asleep on occupying quarters as the weather grew colder. ‘It had become noticeable,’ he observed, ‘that the strains and stresses of these days were beginning to affect him more than the rest of us, and his responsibilities seemed to weigh more heavily on him by the day.’
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An important strata of collective experience in the
Ostheer
was becoming worn out.

Heavy casualties produced a spiral of mutual concerns that applied both to soldiers at the front and to their relatives and loved ones at home. Rumours of heavy casualties prompted the despatch of emotional letters to the front which could be equally devastating to the soldiers receiving them. ‘My dearest and good Helmut,’ wrote one wife on 21 September:

‘I am already totally unsettled having had no post from you since 31 August. Perhaps something will arrive in the morning because nothing was there on Sunday today… It’s really difficult to stay calm. I think I ought to write to your Hauptmann again, that I want to have a child, because I was born to be a mother. A man offered to get me out of my embarrassment from compassion. But you do not have to worry my dear “Papa”, I could never go behind your back. I would never be able to face you again… I have to make do with only a quarter of a gram of butter the whole week… I have no peace of mind. People at work have already noticed I hardly ever smile.”
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Black barrack-room humour was often the only antidote to emotional pressures such as these. Soldier Hanns-Karl Kubiak described the plight of his friend, Obergefreiter Gerhard Scholz, when he discovered during an unexpected home leave that his wife ‘had not precisely followed the marriage vows’ as anticipated. The sardonic response of his comrades to the divorce that followed was to poke fun at the propaganda theme requiring men to defend their homes and families. Scholz obviously ‘no longer needed to fight for his wife at home’.
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Concerns for families left at home, beginning to endure the threat of Allied night-time bombing, created further nervous tension at the front. Berlin housewife Ingeborg Tafel wrote to her husband on 15 September:

‘There have been four air raid warnings already since you departed. We can reckon on the “Tommies” [
British air raids
] coming today, because the sky is brilliantly clear.’

Three weeks later she told her husband about the emotional effect of her young brother’s death.

‘A letter finally arrived from Gerhard today. So shocked was he at the news of the death of his little brother that he cried shamelessly like a kid. He crawled into his tent while shells were whistling over him feeling totally empty and apathetic. He beseeched his mother to look after herself because she was all that was left to him in the world making life worth living.

— Darling, let everything go well with you and return safely to us all.’
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Todesanzeigen
(death notices) produced rashes of black crosses across newspaper pages announcing the
Heldentod
(heroes’ death) of those ‘fallen for the Führer and Fatherland’. There was depression in the Reich. Secret SS home front reports recalled Hitler’s Sportpalast speech of the previous year which hinted the war should be over in 1940–41. ‘Now one is faced with a further year of war with new fronts and a further expansion of the conflict,’ the report read. The general tenor was: ‘who would have thought the war would have lasted so long?’ and, ‘it has already lasted two years’. Yet another anniversary of the beginning of the war (1 September) had passed, ‘and still no end in sight’.
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Actress Heidi Kabel recalled the impact of the casualty notices published in the press:

‘Terrible, friends and then colleagues went missing and nothing was ever heard of them again… There was no patriotic “gung-ho” hurrah feelings like in World War 1 over how the war was going. It never happened like that.’
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Observations of home front morale assessed ‘the population is beginning to take the view that the war in the east will not end as quickly as was anticipated following early successes’. Rumours fuelled by numerous
Feldpost
letters quoted high casualties among certain identified units. ‘Death notices in the newspapers,’ read one report, ‘in particular a number of publicly known personalities who have died, exacerbate the extensive public concern over German losses in the east.’ The 1st SS Division ‘Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler’ had reportedly ‘lost 60% of its strength’; another rumour claimed ‘officer casualties in all units were way beyond all expectations’. In one town it was alleged 23 men had perished from a community of only 3,000. SS Home Front reports observed, ‘the population is becoming increasingly convinced from front reports that Soviet resistance appears not to be decreasing and that clearly the enemy has further huge reserves of matériel available.’
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The handling of death notices attracted intense criticism, as revealed by one lengthy SS Home Front survey. It criticised an insensitive and inefficient bureaucratic system responsible for gross errors. Probate wills were being returned stamped ‘Fallen for Greater Germany’, before families had even been officially informed by the Wehrmacht Army Office. Suffering was, in any case, unavoidable. Hildegard Gratz in Angerburg recalled ‘the first “black letter” for our family’ came with the advent of the Russian war. Her brother-in-law had perished on the very first day of the campaign.

‘Suddenly everything changed. The radio carried on broadcasting news of victories. But the daily papers carried endless columns of death notices.’
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Such inconsistencies were not lost on the population. Rumours intensified as black stories abounded. A wake organised at St Ingbert on the basis of a witness report sent by letter from a comrade who had witnessed the ‘death’ was cancelled after a hospital notification that the ‘deceased’ had survived. Some ‘killed in action’ letters of condolence were thoughtlessly composed, graphically describing the wounds that led to death and sometimes even the duration and extent of suffering. ‘Two particularly crass cases were reported from Düsseldorf,’ noted the SS Home Front survey. A death notice inserted through a letter box with normal mail when there was no answer resulted in a housewife discovering her husband had died as she sorted through routine correspondence while her children were present. Another unfortunate mother was handed her tragic news at the tram stop, with her children, while the unsuspecting postman continued on his round. She screamed and fainted in the street. The SS report recommended numerous humane changes to procedure.
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