Cruel World (55 page)

This apparently precautionary deportation of ethnic Germans was only the beginning of Stalin’s campaigns against minority groups of which he was suspicious and whose cultures he was determined to obliterate. Later on, in even more brutal circumstances, the Crimean Tatars, the Chechens, the Kalmyks, and many other groups would suffer the same fate.

It did not take long for the early euphoria of the young German soldiers involved in the rapid conquest of the USSR to dissipate. Even though their progress was extraordinary, there was little feeling of glory. This was not France. The impoverished and filthy conditions to which much of the Russian populace had been reduced in many places confirmed the
Untermensch
propaganda with which German soldiers had been indoctrinated, but many were also shocked by the sight of the starved POWs, hanging bodies of “partisans,” and piles of Jewish corpses. This unease was not limited to the naive. Even Himmler, in charge of the whole program, was visibly undone by the one mass execution he is known to have witnessed in Russia. Afterward he tried to reassure the death squad by telling them that the responsibility was his alone, and that in nature man was permitted to defend himself against “vermin.” The Reichsführer SS was not upset enough to cancel the program, however: that same day he asked an assistant to look into “more humane” methods for the executions, a request that would lead eventually to the development of the mass gas chambers.
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Added to the horrors of atrocities, for younger recruits, was the shock of the first battlefield deaths of their friends and other realities of war. Within weeks of the invasion, less experienced replacement troops, far more than had been foreseen, were being sent to Russia, not in glorious tank formations but in the ubiquitous cattle cars to remote stations from which they marched, sometimes for weeks, to join their units. Along the way they had little rest or water, and could not keep clean. Once they were with their formations, after every tough engagement more unconquered Russia stretched before them.
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The desolation of the country was daunting, and it was increased by the loss of population, which, in vast areas near the front lines, had been killed, conscripted into labor gangs, or expelled, leaving mainly children and old people behind. In these zones, any “refugee” found “wandering” about was suspected of being an “agent.” Soldiers were told to be especially careful of children aged eleven to fourteen, who were likely to be partisan couriers, and of women, who were probably not only spies but provocateurs who would lure soldiers
into racial pollution.
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All these dangerous individuals could be, and were, shot without any interrogation.

In September, the journalist Alexander Werth, visiting such an area near Smolensk, which had temporarily been retaken by the Red Army, was struck by the “tragic pathos of the whole scene … where every village and every town had been destroyed, and the few surviving civilians were now living in cellars or dugouts.” The town of Dorogubuzh had been bombed for hours in broad daylight, though no military formations were present, and its population reduced from 10,000 to 100 women and children, who were being fed by the Russian soldiers. At one headquarters a colonel had “adopted as ‘son of the regiment’ ” a pathetic little fourteen-year-old boy, whose father and mother had both been killed in the bombing of a nearby village. Another officer, desperately worried about his own wife and daughter in German-occupied Kharkov, told Werth that he “could not imagine the hatred the Germans have stirred up among our people.”
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It was not always easy, however, to tell exactly who had been responsible for such scenes. An anonymous Baltic doctor, working on epidemic prevention for the Germans in Russia, wrote a secret and revealing letter to the International Red Cross in Geneva.
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In it he begged the organization to do everything in its power “so that this great cry of distress—one of the greatest that there has ever been—will be heard.” The situation, he wrote, was “infinitely worse” than “what you saw in Poland.” Soviet troops were destroying everything in their retreat, “without bothering about what happens to the civilians who remain … in most cases more than ¾ of them … composed of women, children and old people,” already undernourished due to shortages caused by the Russo-Finnish War and Stalin’s induced famines. Food supplies were diminishing rapidly. The terrible conditions, he predicted, would inevitably lead to epidemics, which the Germans, when they captured such areas, terrified lest their armies be contaminated, would “take the necessary steps to prevent”: “The orders which we have been given in this matter are really frightful: if infected persons cannot be cared for, or isolated, they are to be destroyed. Which means that, as there are neither sufficient medical supplies, nor the means of intervening in time when necessary, thousands and thousands of human beings will be annihilated.” In closing he wrote:

There was nothing the Red Cross could do. Instructed to live off the land, the German troops, like locusts, devoured cattle and requisitioned crops so voraciously that the predicted problem of hunger exploded almost immediately among the remaining population. This was of little concern to the Nazi leaders, who had all made clear in public statements at one time or another that the starvation of Slavs was not their concern, and, indeed, was desirable. In early September 1941, the German government had publicly announced that under the Hague Convention it not only was not responsible for feeding the Russians, but was “entitled to lay claim to the resources and stocks of the occupied country for the use of its own forces.” Blame for the “consequences” was attributed to the USSR’s own scorched-earth policy and the British blockade, and the Nazis at the same time piously stated that they would not block Allied aid shipments to civilians.
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Within the German command there had been little planning for the future—the war was supposed to be over within weeks and most of the German troops expected to be home for Christmas. But by November there was no end in sight. Along the overextended front many units were receiving only sporadic deliveries of rations that often had to be retrieved from food kitchens miles away. By now, precious little was left on the land. There were other problems too. Cold weather had set in, but no winter uniforms had been distributed, leading the troops to strip warm clothes from Russian corpses and requisition them from civilians and the hapless Soviet POWs. One Luftwaffe pilot complained that, from the air, he could not tell his own forces from the enemy.
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By December 1941, a full year before Stalingrad, much of the German Army was already living as the Russians were, and, like eighteen-year-old Ernst Kern, his unit of mountain troops reduced to nine from its original hundred, surviving on what the
Untermenschen
could provide in a remote and frozen village in the Ukraine, a hundred miles north of Rostov:

There would be no Christmas at home this year, and certainly not next, for Kern or the thousands of others fighting in the East.

Far to the north, in besieged Leningrad, cut off since early September from the outer world, and under constant bombardment, for 3.5 million citizens and soldiers, among them some 400,000 children, hunger was by now the greatest enemy. By mid-September the German lines were so close that the defenders, who were of all ages, could take trolleys to the front, in the process passing by “familiar streets that each remembered like a dream—here was the fence around our childhood home, here stood the great rustling maple.… I went to the front through the days of my childhood, along the streets where I ran to school.”
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Unbelievably, the hastily dug defenses held. On September 17, major German units had been withdrawn in order to augment the forces struggling toward Moscow, while the remaining Germans dug in to wear down Leningrad. During the coming winter, they calculated, “ceaseless bombardment” along with “terror and hunger would do their work.” In the spring all who remained alive would be taken prisoner or “sent to the depths of Russia.” The city itself, including the port area much desired by the German Navy, would be razed and the sections north of the Neva would be given to Finland.

By October 1, the total rations of meat, fat, pasta, and pastry for all children sixteen and under had been reduced to a total of about five and one-half pounds a month, plus a daily bread ration of one-third of a loaf. Even this meager amount could not always be provided, and would be cut several more times before the end of the year. By late October, people were beginning to die of starvation. To make things worse, winter came early, and by November the city was covered with snow. Few had fuel for more than the most minimal heat, and the aerial bombardment was virtually continuous. By the end of December, more than 133,000 bombs and shells had rained down on the city, the shells fired from six gigantic German artillery emplacements.
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In November the death rate began a rapid rise. People ate glue, lipstick, pets, even paper. Diarrhea and scurvy flourished. In a phenomenon
that would be observed in many war areas, men and teenagers died fastest and newborns were especially vulnerable. Fighting water and electricity cutoffs, lack of fuel, and the decimation of their staff, the Leningrad Pediatric Institute struggled to invent new baby formulas from available foods and, increasing its patient load sixteen-fold, fed 7,000 to 8,000 children a day, many of whom weighed only one-third their normal weight. In the process they also observed a “catastrophic drop” in the length and weight of newborns. The Institute was bombed again and again; during one attack, doctors “calmly performed the delivery” of a boy suitably named Viktor. In the spring of 1942 the undaunted staff planted every inch of the Institute’s gardens with vegetables and fruit. The director, Dr. Yulia Mendeleva, using her Communist Party connections to the utmost, later claimed that she had even persuaded high-ranking friends in Moscow to send 1,000 milk cows to Leningrad. How they got there, and if they survived the siege, is not explained.
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Not everyone was so high-minded. The situation brought out the lowest as well as the highest aspects of human nature. Corruption, theft, and black market activity were common. Party members ate better, as did workers in the food industry. Two thousand people were arrested for cannibalism.
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Conversely, soldiers at the front often generously shared their larger rations with civilians, and many parents doomed themselves by giving portions of their food to their children. Teachers at a day-care center noticed children saving portions of their tiny food rations in jars, not to eat later as they first supposed, but to take home to their parents.
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But soon many inhabitants were in terrible condition. A submarine captain, granted leave to see his family, found this dreadful scene:

By November 9, only a week’s worth of food remained in the city and the rations were cut again. The day before, the Nazis had captured a vital rail line that had carried a thin stream of food to Lake Ladoga, from where it was taken to the city by boats. In Munich Hitler exulted: “No one can
free it. No one can break the ring. Leningrad is doomed to die of famine.”
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He was wrong. Extra food was parachuted in by the Red Army. The railroad was retaken within the month, and by late November, Lake Ladoga had frozen solidly enough to allow the establishment of the famous “Road of Life” across its icy expanse. Via this precarious route over half a million more Leningraders, many of them children, would be evacuated, and food would begin to arrive in tiny increments, not enough to save many, but at least enough to allow the authorities, on Christmas Day, to increase the tiny bread ration for children from 125 to 200 grams, or from five to about seven ounces.
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But before that time and despite the Christmas distribution, in family after family, starvation took one person after another. Six-year-old Mikhail Ostrovsky began the siege with two grandparents, both parents, and four beloved, childless aunts. By late January only Mikhail and the aunts were still alive. Unable to feed him, they put him in a kindergarten that received food from the authorities. To augment the minimal rations, the headmistress, Nina Ivanova, would load her charges and a big can on sleds and pull them to the front, where she begged the soldiers to give her vodka. This she diluted and fed to her children three times a day to give them a few more calories.