War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 (79 page)

The stamina of the
Ostheer
was tested to breaking point, an experience many would have difficulty coming to terms with mentally in later life. ‘Our division was in reality decimated in Russia,’ declared a distressed Walter Neustifter, perhaps up to 80% of its strength.’

‘My comrades – [
a heavy weapons
] company was 220 men strong with mortars, heavy mortars, heavy machine guns and two light infantry [
heavy-calibre
] guns. It must have been during an attack when we had two infantry guns in support. They received a direct artillery strike and the complete crew was wiped out – totally. Ten men were cut down. This didn’t just happen once [
visibly upset],
it must have happened a hundred times until there was nothing left.’
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Killing the enemy engendered a spectrum of emotions unique and peculiar to each man. German soldier Benno Zeiser, newly arrived at the shifting front, described his feelings:

‘I got the leading man in my sights and clenched the bucking machine gun hard. If anybody got a dose of my stuff he was not going to get up again. You actually had the feeling you could hear the bullets go plonk into a man’s body, yet you didn’t really feel you were killing, or destroying human lives. On the contrary, you got a regular kick sometimes out of that sensation of the sploshing impact of the bullet. I must say I had always thought killing was much more difficult.’
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The majority of soldiers suppressed their feelings automatically, adjusting to whatever was required of them. Artillery observer Helmut Pabst, fighting near Rzhev at the end of January, saw that counter-attacks have all failed’. Night after night the infantry had gone into the attack despite enduring days in the open. They knew full well,’ he said, ‘the effort was hopeless.’ One night a platoon of Pioniers, an officer and 42 men, mounted an attack. The officer came back ashen-faced with 15 men.’ Eleven had been killed, and nine seriously and seven lightly wounded. Six days later the same officer, shot through the arm, fought his way out of Russian encirclement with only two of his original 15 men. Pabst bleakly observed, no more prisoners are being taken in the front line.’
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The health of the soldiers deteriorated to an alarming degree. An assessment by the senior medical officer with 167th Infantry Division highlighted concerns at the beginning of January 1942.

‘Something like 80% of the fighting troops are undergoing medical treatment especially for stomach and bowel, catarrh, frostbite, skin diseases and fever. The level of health and overall condition is extremely bad, lowering the body’s resistance in coping with illness and wounds. Death is often resulting from slight wounds with blood loss. Total physical and psychological collapse threatens not only the NCOs and men but the majority of officers as well.’
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The front was held by such men. Conditions in the fighting line itself were almost untenable. Gefreiter Rehfeldt recalled:

‘The lice drove us practically insane. Our underwear was black with them, crawling not only inside our clothes but even onto our coats outside. This revolting feeling accompanied by itching could drive the most composed people to distraction. We have already scratched ourselves bloody – and the whole body, especially legs, looks scabby and lacerated. Frost injuries have developed into deep septic and bloody holes on both legs… When we have to go out to relieve a sentry post, I have to stagger along 40 minutes before the others… In the evenings, following the relief, I get in half an hour after them, wheezing from the pain… Taking off boots is only achievable at the second attempt accompanied with unbelievable effort and pain. Life is a total misery.’

Two weeks later Rehfeldt complained he had been three days without rations and‘practically everyone has the shits on an empty stomach’. They felt as‘weak and miserable as dogs,’ and above all there was ‘the unbelievable cold!’ His frostbitten feet were becoming more swollen and septic with the passing of each day. ‘Nothing heals in this cold,’ he despairingly wrote.
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Leadership combined with draconian measures kept men in the line. Unteroffizier Pabst commented on near-hopeless counterattacks mounted near Rzhev on 28 January. ‘The front line dug-outs,’ which had been lost, will be reoccupied,’ he wrote; and ‘any man leaving his post will be court-martialled and shot.’ The mood in their shelter was extremely sombre’. Pabst, however, admired his company commander, Leutnant von Hindenburg – ’from an old family’ – who kept them together.

‘Strain has drawn rings under his eyes. In moments when he thinks he is not being watched, a great tiredness overtakes him and he grows quite numb. But as soon as he takes the receiver in his hand, his quiet, low voice is clear and firm. He talks to his platoon commanders with such convincing warmth and confidence that they go away reassured.’
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Comradeship mattered to the exclusion of all else. It sustained both sides. Leadership qualities were the cement binding it together. Discipline and mutual suffering bonded men together in an inexplicable, intangible way. Oberleutnant Beck-Broichsitter held a 4km-wide sector with 200 men from the ‘Grossdeutschland’ Regiment. (It was normally a task for two battalions numbering 1,400 men.) His men had been required to march the whole night and occupy hastily dug and inadequately prepared positions against Russian attacks. While crossing a stream, moving up, some of his men had broken through the ice and had been soaked in waist-deep water. They had then to stand around outside for ten hours in frozen trousers … Exhaustion,’ the company commander wrote, was hindering his leadership.’ When checking his perimeter a few days later Beck-Broichsitter stumbled across an amazing scene. One of his grenadiers was manning a single foxhole surrounded by 24 dead Russians sprawled all around. He had shot them all with his rifle.

‘He had remained completely alone at his post during a snowstorm. His relief had not turned up and despite dysentery and frost-bitten toes he stayed there a day and night and then another day in the same position.’

‘I promoted him to Gefreiter,’ said the impressed company commander. Another of his NCOs ‘had three children and also dysentery and frostbite.’ Exercising compassion, the officer suggested he might wish to serve a period with the logistics element to the rear. ‘No, no,’ responded the soldier. ‘Somebody else will only have to do it – I’ll stay here.’ The position was held for 20 days following a punishing routine, according to the company commander, of ‘one hour’s sentry and three hours’ rest in an overcrowded lice-ridden area, during which most had to prepare new positions’. His battalion commander consistently asked him whether he could hang on, posing the eternal leadership dilemma.

‘I wanted to help my company and should have said “no” and hope we would be relieved, but nobody wanted to admit it. So I said “yes” – and not only that – but that the soldiers’ morale and resolve were firm.’
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It made him feel guilty.

If leadership alone did not suffice then the ultimate price was exacted from flagging men. Oberleutnant Sonntag, a battalion commander with the 296th Infantry Division, felt duty-bound to report on Oberfeldwebel Gierz, a senior NCO, to his regimental commander. Gierz appeared incapable of keeping his men in the line. Accused of cowardice, the hapless sergeant and his men were driven back into their position. The battalion commander despaired what to do next because, as he said, he was convinced, ‘the next time the enemy came, they would run again’. He agonised over the decision. ‘It wounds my heart,’ he later wrote, when one has to consider it is German soldiers we are dealing with.’ The inevitable happened. ‘I am ashamed to report, Herr Oberst-leutnant,’ he wrote, explaining, ‘I was obliged to implement draconian measures, and ordered the company to implement the order.’ Gierz was shot.
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Infantry Leutnant Erich Mende appreciated the powerlessness of the individual to make an impact in such circumstances. ‘I had extraordinary casualties,’ he said, defending a railway station south of Kaluga. ‘Of my original 196 men, 160 were dead, wounded or missing by the end of January.’ Reflecting on this experience after the war, he mused, ‘the soldier is a tragic figure’.

‘During war he must shoot at other soldiers and in extremis kill them, without knowing or hating them. He follows orders from people he knows and bitterly dislikes, who do not have to fire at each other. In front of us was the Red Army, defending themselves, while we in the Wehrmacht were ordered to attack them. Deserting to the Red Army was no solution for the soldiers when faced with pressure. But when we retreated, or left our position, then along came military policemen and we were up before a Court Martial.’
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Meanwhile, at home in the Reich, the appeal to collect winter clothes received massive support but created uneasiness. Information was filtering back, but there was no substance to it. Wehrmacht broadcasts and announcements appeared to concentrate on apparently insignificant local actions. Many soldiers imposed a form of self-censorship in their letters, indicating they were alive but deliberately avoiding subjects that might arouse concern. Leutnant Heinrich Haape, fighting for his life, applied a certain circumspection to everything he wrote. ‘When I wrote to Martha,’ (his wife) he admitted, ‘I mentioned little of the fighting, for the people at home had not yet been conditioned to realise what a serious change had come over the situation on the Eastern Front.’
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Sceptics were beginning to guess. SS Secret Service Home Front reports remarked on the contradiction between press and film reports, showing warmly clad troops at the front and the call for winter clothing. It concluded, ‘the appeal is clearly confirmation of the authenticity of the soldiers’ stories on front leave and
Feldpost
letters pointing to the shortage of equipments suited to the Russian cold.’
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Armaments Minister Albert Speer said after the war:

‘We were all quite happy about the success of the German armies in Russia, but the first inkling that something was wrong was when Goebbels made a big “action” in the whole of Germany to collect furs and winter clothes for the German troops. We knew then something had happened which was not foreseen.’
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Hildegard Gratz, working as a relief school-teacher at Angerburg in east Germany, felt uneasy teaching children‘about a hero’s death’when she clearly saw‘sitting in front of me were children whose fathers would never come home’. The children were required to participate in the ‘Winter Relief programme, collecting or knitting warm clothing. These activities aroused ‘anxious, despairing and forbidden thoughts,’ she said.
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Then came the startling news that the Führer had assumed overall command of the army. This ‘elicited the utmost surprise’, commented SS Secret Service observers. ‘Amazement bordering on dismay prevails among much of the population that the change in the Army High Command should occur just when the fighting was at its fiercest on all fronts, and, of all times, just before Christmas.’

There was increasing unease that the war was perhaps not going too well. People said they would rather be told about a withdrawal or failure than be denied a clear picture of what was going on. A certain mistrust over official reports’ resulted, fuelled further by letters and reports from soldiers on leave. Rumours suggested German troops had been driven back 150km from the line originally reached due to the introduction of the excellently equipped Soviet Far Eastern Army. Faith in the Führer remained but ‘it was becoming ever more apparent,’ commented the SS reports, ‘that the war had become a matter of life and death for Germany, and everyone would need to be prepared to offer himself up as a victim if necessary’.
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This development was crystal clear to those engaged in the pitiless struggle at the front. The German soldier had experienced defeat and a retreat and had survived. ‘It was the first time,’ one veteran noted, ‘that our soldiers remarked on the dark shadows of the coming times.’
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Friedebald Kruse wrote back from the front on 23 December that‘yesterdays’ news that Brauchitsch had to go and today the Führer has taken on the High Command of the Army affected me’. It was to him an inauspicious development: ‘the first time that faith in the army had been questioned.’ Many soldiers dismissed the news as a ‘palace revolution’ resulting from military failure.
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Staff officer Bernd Freytag von Lorringhoven, working at Guderian’s headquarters, viewed it from a more sombre perspective.

‘The atmosphere following the defeat practically in front of Moscow was deeply depressing. On the one hand, the war was probably – Ja – virtually lost, and could only be prosecuted beyond with great difficulty. On the other side there developed at that time, a deep bitterness over the measures that Hitler ordered, dismissing these well qualified people.’
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‘Having to retreat from Moscow,’ declared another Eastern Front veteran, ‘meant the Russian people and soldiers must realise it is possible to defeat the German Army’.
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Panzer Major Johann Graf von Kielmansegg agreed. ‘It was the first time in this war,’ he said, ‘that German soldiers had been defeated somewhere en masse.’
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It produced a measured celebration on the Russian side. Actress Maria Mironowa, living in Moscow recalled, ‘the mood during the New Year festivities was bad, it was not celebrated.’ They drank a little to coming victory ‘but we certainly had no idea it lay so far in the distant future’. There had been too much suffering. ‘The war,’ she said, was like a natural catastrophe and had an impact on us like an earthquake.’ But despite all this, Soviet platoon commander Anatolij Tschernjajew recognised, ‘it was an enormous turn around of events, this feeling that an offensive, a victory and finally even a turning point in this war were again possible.’
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