War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 (77 page)

‘
‘Dear Parents!

Unfortunately still no chance to write. Only the growing certainty of perhaps actually escaping this “dog’s breakfast”, because I appear to be the last single survivor from the whole company.’

The fighting strength of a company was normally about 176 men. On the day before Christmas Eve, Harald Henry was shot in the stomach during a tank infantry battle north-west of Moscow. The young man who had held a brief doctorate at Berlin University did not survive his wounds.
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Panzer officer Helmut von Harnack, already twice wounded, managed to extricate an infantry battalion under intense Russian pressure with his company of mixed Panzers and self-propelled guns. ‘It was unforgettable,’ he wrote, ‘the battalion commander, out of breath, kept calling out “My best Christmas present ever!”‘ On Christmas Eve von Harnack received the gift of life himself. As he climbed down from his Panzer to check over one of his broken drive wheels ‘my Panzer was rammed by a heavy Russian tank.’ His elation was, however, short-lived. Within a month he was dead.
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The German sentimental view of Christmas lay in cruel juxtaposition to, and starkly emphasised, the reversal of fortunes compared to the more successful previous year. Panzer Leutnant F. W. Christians admitted, ‘Christmas was a particularly emotional experience for us German soldiers in such conditions.’ The Russians, according to artillery soldier Pawel Ossipow, made the most of it also.

‘We know that the Germans would want to celebrate Christmas between 24–25 December. There were indications of this from the Christmas trees and other decorations we found in the villages we liberated. The enemy’s alertness would be correspondingly reduced indulging in such niceties so we tried to pursue them even more quickly during this period. It was, however, particularly tiring for our troops to advance 15km in a day’
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Will Thomas, a German infantry NCO platoon commander, wrote to his wife on the second day of Christmas, cynically describing ‘the best Christmas Day of my life’, during which:

‘The enemy attacked in overwhelming strength the entire day, using tanks, against which we had no defence. The entire position was reduced to soot and ashes and we crawled out from under the rubble. It was icy cold. The entire company was torn to pieces. Leutnant Wufert was killed! There was little rest that night, but in the morning it will start up again…’

The unit was surrounded. Thomas ended his letter with a prescient confirmation of his love, writing even in death we will never be apart’. He was killed the following month.
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Atrocities continued unabated. Ludwig Frhr von Heyl, a reconnaissance patrol commander, assessed that the campaign was certainly no gentleman’s war’; it was in fact more like a punitive’ expedition. ‘What was the point of it all?’ he asked.

‘Human life appeared cheaper than shovels. One did not kill people it was “the enemy”, something impersonal. What was also particularly shocking was how little worth the Russians appeared to ascribe to life.’
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Both sides were guilty of this. Gefreiter Vetter’s unit was surrounded by Russians on the second day of Christmas, in temperatures of −35°C. Nevertheless, 3,000 Russian PoWs were taken out of their prison camp at nearby Kaluga and driven toward Roslavl. Vetter observed:

‘Many, weak with hunger, fell onto the road and were shot. After the road was empty again of prisoners one saw countless dead lying by the sides. A number of the prisoners were seen carrying bits of human bodies [
an arm, or foot etc
] in their pockets [
to eat].
If one fell the others would immediately fall on him to strip him of clothing and take anything to eat. They all appeared starved and in terrible condition and had an animal look about them.’
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Soviet prisoners were transported to the rear by rail, in open goods wagons, even after the retreat had started. Exposed to cold, rain and snow, up to 20% perished before they reached their destination. One-fifth of 5,000 Russian PoWs transported over 200km from Bobruisk to Minsk between 20 and 21 November froze to death. Obergefreiter Franz Wesskallnies, with 161st Infantry Division, saw Soviet prisoners arriving at Ebenrode in East Prussia in mixed open and enclosed goods wagons in temperatures of −18°C. The cars were so overfilled the prisoners could not lie down, and had to sit there [in the open] for six days with no food.’ They were so hungry and thirsty that they subsisted on snow and grease scraped from the wagon wheels. ‘Several lorries,’ Wesskallnies said, were required to take away the bodies’ of Red Army men found in every compartment. When they arrived at the camp there was no accommodation ready. Prisoners were obliged to dig holes inside the perimeter to gain protection against the elements.
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German soldiers caught up in the retreat reaped the whirlwind of these excesses. Quarter on the Eastern Front was rarely given or, for that matter, anticipated. At the end of December the port town of Feodosia on the Crimean Peninsula was overrun by a surprise Russian amphibious assault. The resident German 46th Division hurriedly evacuated, abandoning 160 severely wounded cases in the Feodosia hospitals. When the town was recaptured in February 1942, the ice-blackened corpses of these wounded littered the beach alongside the hospital by the Black Sea. They had been thrown out of second floor windows onto the sand and hosed down with water so they froze to death in the sub-arctic temperatures.
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During the early morning hours of 27 December Amadeo Casanova, a member of the Spanish ‘Blue Division’, was defending a position with German troops north of Novgorod. One of the Spanish companies was attacked and encircled by the Russians. A rapid counter-attack was mounted to extract them, and during this fighting a Spanish lieutenant and four soldiers were wounded and had to be left behind. ‘Shortly after,’ Casanova testified, we found them dead. In all cases the Russians had nailed their heads to the ground with pickaxes.’
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There was dread throughout the retreat at the prospect of capture by the Russians. Eye gougings, genital mutilations and arbitrary shootings continued. ‘Fear of what would happen if captured by the Soviets,’ remarked one regimental history, was what kept the German soldier on his legs’; adding, ‘no small number shot themselves when in doubt.’
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It was another nagging fear eroding morale and gnawing at nerves, magnifying further the desperate situation the troops felt themselves to be in. On 20 December Oberarzt Hans-Georg Suck’s battalion, retreating with Guderian’s Second Panzer Army, had fallen back to Plawsk, south of Tula. Lights had not been allowed within the column, which was being pursued by Soviet ski troops. As they moved through an unknown village the
Panje
wagons being used for the wounded and ammunition began to skid and slide over an uneven part of the road. Such an expanse of sheet ice was unusual in a village main street and merited investigation. Suck shone his pocket lamp on the surface of the road and recoiled in horror. A naked corpse stared back at him through the shimmering ice. ‘We found several naked bodies lined up next to each other’ under the ice, he said. There was no time to investigate the scene minutely because the enemy was in hot pursuit and closing. They realised they were German ‘because there were pieces of German uniform scattered by the roadside’. The soldiers were much depressed and alarmed by this gruesome discovery in temperatures of −42°C to −48°C. ‘Our comrades,’ he surmised, must have had to undress in the road, were made to lie down in the street, and then covered with water so as to construct a stretch of road!’
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Fear and comradeship kept German units intact. Leutnant Haape, retreating with Infantry Regiment, 18 said:

‘We had our cowards in the earlier fighting but they had been weeded out, for it was better to be one man short than to have a man who might start in a panic… At some time or another we had all been ready to run in blind fear, but the natural impulse was to stick it out with everyone else.’
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Leutnant Erich Mende concurred, stating, ‘only one thing steadied the nerves, and that to a lesser or greater degree sustained you, and that was a sense of comradeship.’ Everything else was otherwise subsumed in the ‘awful automation of war’. He said:

‘You knew you had a friend to your right and another to the left. If you were hit, they would help. If he was hit, you would go to him. And when someone shot at you, you fired back. One didn’t think about it, that one killed or was killed. The motto was: “you or me.” Either one killed or was killed in turn.’
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More than simply a will to survive was required to weld the German front together. As the army group fell back, a vitriolic debate raged between the operational army groups staffs and the strategic (OKH and OKW) level staffs to identify a way out of the crisis. By the third week in December, deep Soviet penetrations on both flanks of Army Group Centre were threatening to develop into a double envelopment of the entire German Central Front. There was a stark choice: retreat or fight. The former was the course currently being conducted and favoured by German field commanders, a prompt and extensive withdrawal to a suitable defence line. This had been identified as roughly the line between Kursk, Orel and Gzhatsk. The risk, and this was occurring in some sectors, was that enemy units thrusting between retreating German columns might inflict a sudden moral collapse. At the very best, considerable matériel would be lost and lines of abandoned guns and vehicles testified to this fact.

To stand and fight was, in the eyes of field commanders, a suicidal option. Success in this scenario was achievable only if German defensive endurance was superior to Soviet offensive capability. The present weakness of German fighting units seemed to preclude that. Moreover, such a course of action would result in the overrunning of units, and their loss would forfeit any opportunity of husbanding resources for a spring offensive in the central sector. Field commanders and the staff preferred the risk of a winter retreat to the certainty of annihilation if they stood their ground in the face of the Russian assault. Adolf Hitler provided a characteristic solution to this dilemma in a Teletype to Army Group Centre on 18 December.

‘Commanding Generals, commanders and officers are to personally intervene to compel troops to fanatical resistance without regard to enemy that may break through on their flanks or in the rear.’

The instruction was an uncompromising stand and die’ order. This is the only way,’ the Führer added, ‘to gain the time necessary to bring up the reinforcements from Germany and the West that I have ordered.’ Two days before, Hitler had telephoned von Bock to order Army Group Centre to cease all withdrawals and defend in its present position. German soldiers would take ‘not one single step back’.
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General Günther Blumentritt, the Chief of Staff to Fourth Army, was in conference with his Commander-in-Chief and other corps commanders in mid-December. They were totally engrossed in co-ordinating the move westward of their increasingly vulnerable army. A steadily widening gap had opened between von Kluge’s Fourth and Guderian’s Second Panzer Army. There were no reserves to restore the increasingly dangerous situation on the southern flank, which threatened to cut Fourth Army’s single supply line to the rear. One motorised division was already marching westwards to Yukhnov. The withdrawal of Fourth Army units south of the Moscow-Smolensk highway was being discussed when Blumentritt was summoned to the telephone to speak to his personal friend and counterpart at Army Group Centre, Chief of Staff General von Greiffenberg. ‘You’d better make yourself comfortable where you are,’ he said. A new order has just arrived from Hitler. Fourth Army is not to retreat a single yard.’ Blumentritt was aghast:

‘According to every calculation, it could only mean the destruction of the Fourth Army. Yet this order was obeyed. Units already moving westwards were turned about and brought back to the front. Fourth Army prepared to fight its final battles, only a miracle could save it now.’
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Adolf Hitler had personally assumed the mantle of Commander-in-Chief of the Army. The
Ostheer
would fight where it was and, if necessary, perish.

‘Not one single step back’… the hold order

‘This retreat order has reduced me to dumb resignation,’ admitted an officer in the 198th Infantry Division. ‘I don’t want to think about it any more,’ but he appreciated that, in order to survive, ‘thinking and forethought is more necessary than before’. Obergefreiter Huber from Infantry Regiment 282 recalled unforgettable days battling on the Nara, with long nights, the cold, snowstorms – grey sinister days with artillery impacts and a constant racket among the smoke and crackling explosions of the fearsome “Stalin organs”’. The interminable retreat depressed the infantry officer. He was uneasy.

‘Awful weeks of withdrawing through the thick snow-covered countryside and impenetrable woods stood before us. Short insecure pauses in empty half-destroyed villages, a harassed existence in icy cold with driving snow and long hours of darkness. Will it be possible to rebuild a front? Will substantial combat-ready units ever turn up? Will we be able to hang on?’
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