The German War (32 page)

The Germans are celebrating. They all walk full and content, all have lights on their Christmas trees. But we all move about like shadows, there is total famine. People are buying food by the cup and boil a watery soup, which they eat without bread, because bread is given out only two times per week, 200 grams. And this diet is the best-case scenario. Those who have things exchange them in the countryside, but those who have nothing swell up from hunger, they are already dying. Many people have typhus.

The German blockade fulfilled the terms of the ‘Hunger Plan’ devised by the State Secretary at the Ministry for Food and Agriculture, Herbert Backe, back in December 1940 when planning for the Soviet campaign had begun. In order to feed the Wehrmacht and the home front, he envisaged a division of Soviet territory into ‘forested’ north and ‘agricultural’ south, and into town and countryside. The northern ‘forested area’ and all the cities would be left to starve, so that the enormous surpluses produced by the southern, rich ‘black lands’ of Ukraine would feed the Reich. On 2 May 1941, seven weeks before the invasion started, the plan was formally adopted, officials assuming that ‘umpteen million people will doubtless starve, if what we need is taken out of the country’. By the time Ukraine was in German hands in the autumn, the Gauleiter of Thuringia and Reich Plenipotentiary for Labour Mobilisation, Fritz Sauckel, had been told repeatedly that ‘at least ten to twenty million of these people’ would starve to death in the coming winter. Backe’s own estimates were that 20–30 million ‘Slavs’ would die. The ‘Hunger Plan’ became a central element of German military planning for Barbarossa.
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Blockading Kiev fulfilled a second objective: Hitler’s desire to ‘wipe’ the major Soviet cities ‘off the face of the earth’. The Führer had ordered the Wehrmacht at the start of the Ukrainian operation ‘to destroy the city by incendiary bombs and gunfire as soon as the supply positions allow’ or, in Halder’s laconic note of 18 August, ‘Reduce to rubble’. The Luftwaffe, entrusted with part of that task, did not have enough bombs, a missed opportunity which Hitler would recall bitterly a year later as another of Göring’s failures. Halder had already noted that Leningrad and Moscow were not to be permitted to capitulate either.
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In the north, the German advance was even swifter than in the south, leaving Leningrad, the cradle of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union’s second city, highly exposed. On 30 August, the last rail link to Leningrad was cut at Mga. On 8 September, the Schlisselburg fortress fell. Built where the river Neva flows out of Lake Ladoga, it was the key to the city’s communications and industrial power supplies. Leningrad was now completely encircled by land, and the only route in or out of the city lay across Lake Ladoga itself. That same day, the Luftwaffe began massed raids on Leningrad’s food depots. Professor Wilhelm Ziegelmayer, the expert on nutrition advising the Wehrmacht High Command, noted in his diary on 10 September 1941 that ‘We will not burden ourselves with future demands for the surrender of Leningrad. It must be destroyed by a scientifically based method.’ At this time, the Quartermaster’s department of the 18th Army asked for guidance about whether they were expected to use military supplies to feed the city – if it surrendered. The answer from the Quartermaster-General of the Wehrmacht, Eduard Wagner, was a categorical no: ‘Every train bringing provisions from the homeland cuts foodstuffs there. It is better that our relatives have something to eat and that the Russians starve.’ Wagner had already written to his wife that ‘the next thing will have to be to leave the people in [St] Petersburg to stew. What are we to do with a city of 3.2 million, which would just be a burden on our provisioning purse?’ He had ended with one of Hitler’s favourite expressions when justifying murderous conclusions: ‘There is no room for sentimentality here.’

As Goebbels began to prepare ‘an effective excuse’ which he could use to influence international opinion once the ‘cruel fate of the city’ became evident, he was delighted that the Bolsheviks were insisting on defending Leningrad to the ‘last man’. By mid-September, however, the German High Command worried about the danger of epidemics spreading from the city to their own lines and about the psychological strain on German infantrymen who might have to ‘shoot at women and children trying to escape’ from the city. To make sure this did not happen, Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb, the commander of Army Group North, ordered the artillery to mow down any civilians breaking out of the city while they were still too far away to upset German infantrymen on the front line.
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During the week from 21 September, the decision was confirmed and reiterated that Leningrad was to be ‘razed to the ground. If this creates a situation which produces calls for surrender, they will be refused. In this war, we are not interested in preserving even a part of the population of this large city.’ Capitalising on this ruthlessness, the Reich Security Main Office set about drafting its own ‘General Plan for the East’ in which it predicted that the future region of ‘Ingermanland’ on the Soviet Baltic coast would be a sparsely populated, agricultural area of German and Finnish settlement, with a population which had fallen from 3.2 million to just 200,000. The missing 3 million people in this plan for the post-war future were the Leningraders. The original authors of the ‘Hunger Plan’, Herbert Backe and his colleague Hans-Joachim Riecke, would publish their rationales too so that German professionals could acclimatise themselves to the times.
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By the end of September 1941, a 250-gram bread ration was introduced for dependants in the city. The Luftwaffe had bombed Leningrad twenty-three times and the artillery had fired over 5,000 shells in its daily barrages. German artillerymen were starting to joke that they were ‘feeding the city’ by reducing the number of civilian mouths. By mid-November, Army Group North’s war diary noted the first successful attempt by artillery to prevent civilians from approaching their lines, although German generals continued to worry that ‘false’ compassion might get the better of their men. Commanders began to ask for the first time about the consequences of genocidal warfare on their soldiers. If they proved capable of shooting down unarmed civilians, would it lead to a ‘loss of inner balance’? Would their troops ‘no longer be scared of committing such acts even after the war was over’? Where, they were asking, would the brutalisation end?
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Even before the encirclement of the Red Army in Ukraine was complete and Leningrad fully under siege, Halder, Brauchitsch and Hitler turned their attention back to Moscow. Astounded by their easy victory in Ukraine, they could not imagine that the Red Army still possessed major forces. Halder as much as Hitler stoked expectations, proposing that Army Group South could reach Stalingrad and the Maikop oilfields before winter, and that Army Group Centre could reach Moscow with reduced air support and fewer panzers. Like Leningrad, the capital was to be encircled and cut off. At one point, Hitler imagined that Moscow could simply be made to disappear, preferably under cleansing flood waters.
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On 2 October 1941, the troops heard a second proclamation from the Führer, announcing that Moscow was the final goal of the campaign. Despite his anxiety that the war might last into the winter, Wilhelm Moldenhauer was thrilled when he heard the broadcast of Hitler’s solemn call to arms for the decisive battle against Bolshevism. The public moment was also an intimate one, as he imagined his wife listening to the proclamation on the radio ‘and that with each word, maybe your thoughts were also with me’. Fritz Farnbacher and the 4th Panzer Division had started out already, the freezing fog chilling them to the bone but concealing their movements. On the first day, they covered 130 kilometres and, four days later, on the afternoon of 3 October, they reached Orel. As they advanced over open terrain towards the city, the motorised infantry manoeuvred their light vehicles around the tanks, using them as cover against the Soviet aeroplanes they could see taking off from the airfield nearby. They had seen nothing of the Luftwaffe for days. The infantrymen had to jump off their vehicles and take cover under the tanks over thirty times before they reached the outskirts of Orel. When the first tanks entered the streets, the trams were still running. One tram driver even rang his bell, taking the tank for one of their own. As it swung its gun turret towards the tram, the street emptied.
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Just as at Smolensk and in Ukraine, the German tanks led the encirclement. From Orel, the 2nd Panzer Group swiftly completed the encirclement of Bryansk. To the west, the 3rd and 4th Panzer Groups had closed Vyaz’ma in a double pincer grip. By 7 October, virtually the whole of the remaining Soviet forces on the western front were trapped in this double pocket, leaving the road to Moscow open for the Germans. At Führer headquarters, Jodl saw it as the most decisive day of the campaign and compared it to the swift Prussian victory over Austria in 1866. Two days later, Hitler’s personal spokesman, Otto Dietrich, called a special press conference to tell the world that nothing but ‘empty space’ now stood between the German armies and Moscow. Goebbels was dismayed, both by the premature triumphalism and his own inability to control Dietrich. But he did not rein the press in. ‘The great hour has struck!’ and ‘The military end of the Bolsheviks’, the
Völkischer Beobachter
proclaimed. Bookshops displayed Russian grammars for future occupation officials and cinemas advertised a forthcoming documentary,
The Germans Enter Moscow
.
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It was not just hyperbole. There were now a mere 90,000 Red Army men defending the capital against the advance of the million-strong forces of Army Group Centre. The magnitude of the German victory was even greater than in Ukraine: the Wehrmacht captured 673,000 prisoners and 1,300 tanks. Taking the two victories together, within a period of five weeks, 1,447,000 Red Army soldiers had surrendered to the Germans. The German General Staff and the High Command had given no thought to what to do with so many prisoners, even though their whole plan of campaign depended on the rapid collapse of the Red Army. Hitler and his closest advisors had no interest in them at all, except – possibly – as a labour supply, but in the autumn of 1941 such ideas were not a priority. The problem was simply left to the department for prisoners of war and the rear service areas to solve with whatever resources they could find.
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In the aftermath of the Vyaz’ma and Bryansk battles, the 2nd Army’s 580th Rear Army Area Command set up feeding centres and shipped its prisoners back, by ‘deploying all usable trucks and carts, assigning peasant leaders and prisoners of war’ to the task. At the beginning of October, it moved forward its 203rd transit camp for prisoners – a ‘Dulag’ in the contracted military terminology – to Kritchev, where a sawmill and cement factory were converted into barracks for 10,000 prisoners. Instead, 20,000 arrived in a single night, while another 11,000 were marched further back to the rear. By 19 October, the camp held over 30,000 Red Army soldiers. Most of them were simply left out in the open, until entrenching spades could be borrowed from neighbouring German units to dig holes in the ground which could be covered with branches and soil. Although the camp was next to the railway line and had access to water, supplying it ranked very low on the list of military priorities.

The officer in charge of the kitchens was a well-meaning veteran of the First World War. Too old for front-line service, Konrad Jarausch eloquently described the unfolding disaster in his letters home. The cooking was done in old fuel drums and there were few utensils. Many Red Army prisoners had had to hold out their military caps as substitute mess tins, catching perhaps half of the thin soup they were served. At its peak after the Bryansk battle, Konrad Jarausch had to feed 16,000–18,000 men a day in his subsection of Dulag 203. There were five Germans to run the administration and kitchen as well as eight guards, he explained to his friend, Werner Hass, ‘And so you can imagine that there had to be beatings and shootings . . . just to create order in the surroundings of the kitchen’. As departures for the huge camps further west started to outstrip new arrivals, numbers dropped to 6,000 and Jarausch wrote with a sense of relief to his wife, ‘I haven’t had to play the policeman quite so much and didn’t need to beat anyone down to the ground with the rubber truncheon or to have anyone shot down. Nonetheless there was enough that was appalling.’ Despite the obstacles, he and the other older officers who ‘still have some old-fashioned humanity’ managed to distribute food twice a day – despite the resistance of the camp inspectorate.
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Jarausch gathered a group of prisoner functionaries around him who ran the kitchens and benefited from their privileged access to food. Jarausch distributed cigarettes to them, and in return these prisoners of war looked after him, providing him with soup thickened with milk or cream twice a day and up to four eggs, even when these became rare. He knew that he was also profiting from the foraging expeditions of his more ‘ruthless’ comrades, who requisitioned food from local villages. But there was no danger from partisan raids, because, he assured his wife, ‘it’s quiet. The SS is making a terribly clean sweep.’ A gentle, religious studies teacher and anti-Nazi from Magdeburg, Konrad Jarausch was more curious than hostile to his Russian prisoners. Equipped with a Russian primer, he began learning the language, finding an educated prisoner to teach him.
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In early November, an SS
Einsatzkommando
arrived to comb the camp for Jewish prisoners of war and civilians. Some were shot in the cellar of the cement factory. Jarausch only hinted at such events in his letters home. When his Russian teacher turned out to be a ‘half-Jew’, he did not tell his wife, Charlotte, what happened to the man, but he had explained that he had seen ‘Jews barefoot in the snow’ and that ‘some hard things, which I could not prevent, have left very bitter impressions. On that, by word of mouth.’ Two days later, he wrote more enthusiastically, this time about his new teacher, a Muscovite and, like Jarausch himself, a schoolmaster in his forties. As the man read a Turgenev story aloud, Jarausch felt ‘as if I were touching the soul of this country, the way it perceives and knows itself’. Like Hans Albring, Jarausch was simultaneously moved by Russian culture and certain that he was dealing with people who were ‘half children’. Seeing how terribly they had suffered under the Bolshevik tyranny, he felt it was his duty to spread the Gospel amongst them. Writing to fellow members of the Martin Luther Association, Jarausch explained, ‘I would like to believe that the Russian people which clung so loyally to its Christ, still has much to say to us Christians in the coming years, once the spell [of Bolshevism] has been broken.’
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