The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  But most Germans were already in bad shape when they were captured and many wouldn’t survive their subsequent ordeals. Like many other Soviet soldiers, Rzhevskaya encountered captured Germans who looked almost comic in their desperation to protect themselves from the frigid winter weather, wearing any clothes they could seize from the local population, which consisted mostly of women, since the men had gone off to fight.

  Rzhevskaya recalled one POW in particular, right after he was seized. “The German was frozen and had icicles all over his face and on his clothes. He was bundled up in a woman’s thick linen shawl and his military hat was perched on top of the shawl. The shawl was big enough to cover his whole body. He was also wearing straw boots—the kind Germans forced locals to make for them.” His bizarre appearance offered him a modicum of protection at first, causing the Russians to smile instead of venting their anger at him. He realized this and lifted his hands to show they were covered with wool socks instead of mittens, adding to the comic effect.

  But, as Rzhevskaya noted, the mood changed when the prisoner was led into a hut for his interrogation. “Since it was hot in the hut, the icicles started to melt from his face and he felt he was losing his funny-looking camouflage,” she said. “He looked confused and started touching his face as if he were trying to catch his melting armor.”

  The sightings of “winter Fritz,” those Germans who were reduced to taking any kind of clothing from the locals to try to keep warm, became a staple of many recollections of Soviet veterans. Albert Tsessarsky, the medical orderly who was sent with his home guard platoon to block the German advance on Moscow near Mozhaisk, recalled what he saw when his unit joined in the counteroffensive on December 6. After crossing the frozen Moscow River, the Soviet soldiers came across the German corpses left behind by their retreating comrades. One dead German had a bra wrapped around his head, evidently to try to protect his ears from freezing. The others were wrapped in anything else they had found to fight the cold, and they were wearing only light leather boots. “I must say at that moment I felt such joy, such satisfaction that they got what they deserved,” Tsessarsky said. Later, he added, those emotions would pass and he only recalled the “awful” sight of these men who had gone “blindly to their deaths.”

  In the early stages of the fighting, the Germans who were captured had exuded defiance. Zoya Zarubina, another young woman who acted as a translator during interrogations of POWs, recalled her initial “feeling of shock to see the enemy sitting across the table—the arrogance they had.” But later, she’d see them increasingly as “sick, frightened, a phantom of the army that had invaded.” Some were still firmly convinced that Hitler would prevail, but many of them were simply terrified by everything that was happening to them, worn down by months of combat and an unforgiving climate.

  For their Red Army counterparts, there was always the added dimension of terror imposed by a regime that wouldn’t accept the possibility of surrender. Yevgeny Anufriyev, who had been studying architecture until the outbreak of the war, was assigned to an NKVD platoon of eighty men that was supposed to attack Germans trying to hold on to their positions during the Soviet counteroffensive. Outfitted in white camouflage overcoats and operating on skis, they moved quickly—but soon learned that they weren’t as prepared for combat as they thought. “Men shouldn’t fight on skis in a village,” he pointed out. “There are gardens and gates, and your feet can get tied up in your skis.” During one of their early attacks, their machine guns proved almost useless. “Men had to pay with their own blood for the mistakes of the top brass,” he said. “We weren’t warned that lubrication in guns could freeze in the winter. Our machine guns didn’t work properly because they froze.”

  The ensuing battle cost the lives of many of the men in the platoon. But even as they tried to extricate themselves from a barrage of enemy fire, no one considered giving up. “We weren’t allowed to surrender,” Anufriyev declared. By then, most soldiers knew all too well what the consequences would be from their own side, even if they survived German captivity. Huddled in a shed and discovering he had only three bullets left, Anufriyev took his handgun and pointed it at his head, ready to pull the trigger. At that moment, another soldier, who was carrying their badly wounded platoon leader, shouted to him, “Help me!” Somehow the two of them managed to carry their leader and dodge bullets long enough to find more soldiers and escape from the village. The appeal for help saved both the officer and Anufriyev.

  The heroism of the ski patrols was later celebrated in articles in the Soviet press, which reported that despite their extraordinarily high death rates, none of the men surrendered. Anufriyev attested to the accuracy of those accounts. “We were ready to kill ourselves rather than be captured,” he said. But it was a mixture of courage and fear that produced such fierce determination. Stalin was always willing to pull the trigger if his own men balked.

  Hitler was no less intent on making his men stand and fight, triggering an open confrontation with his most famous tank commander, Heinz Guderian, and other top generals who dared to question his decisions. Faced with the Soviet counteroffensive that was launched on December 6, the German dictator began exhibiting the erratic behavior and refusal to acknowledge the realities on the ground that would ultimately lead to his undoing. With the benefit of hindsight, the battle for Moscow provided the first clear demonstration of his failures as a military leader.

  While Hitler reluctantly issued the order to halt offensive operations on December 8, he consistently refused to accept the advice of those commanding the troops near Moscow about how they could best defend themselves and preserve their strength during the harsh winter. If the Germans were going to have a chance to resume their drive to seize the Soviet capital in the spring, they had to minimize their losses. But like Stalin, Hitler viewed any consideration of the human toll of his policies as a sign of weakness, despite the mounting signs that the Soviet leader could sacrifice far more men than his German counterpart.

  Guderian had set up his forward headquarters at Yasnaya Polyana, the Tolstoy estate south of Moscow. Describing his visit there on December 2, he would later claim that “no stick of furniture was burned, no book or manuscript touched.” That didn’t jibe with what Soviet troops found when they took back the estate two weeks later or with what local inhabitants subsequently recounted. Before the Germans fled, they had warmed themselves by building fires right in the house—according to some reports, using manuscripts from Tolstoy’s library as fuel. And right next to the famed writer’s grave, they had buried about seventy of their dead, leaving the garden and park in disarray. A large wooden marker declared that they had fallen “for Greater Germany.”

  Maria Shchegoleva, the sister of the Tolstoy Museum’s curator, told the French journalist Eve Curie, who visited the estate in January, that the Germans had tried to burn down the main buildings as they left. After setting fires in Tolstoy’s house, the schoolhouse, and the remaining buildings, they told the Russians that they shouldn’t attempt to enter them since they were all mined. “We paid no attention to this, and as soon as the Nazis had left we started fighting the fires with two extinguishers that the Germans had not found and that could still be used—and with water painfully brought up from the well, which was covered with ice and two feet of snow,” Shchegoleva said. Thanks to those efforts, the damage wasn’t all that devastating. By the end of May 1942, the Russians were able to reopen the museum honoring Tolstoy’s life and work.

  But Eve Curie noted bitterly that she learned of something more chilling that happened during the German occupation: the bodies of two Russians had remained hanging for four days in the main square of the village. “There could not be a graver offense to the memory of Leo Tolstoy,” she wrote.

  It’s conceivable that most of the desecration took place after Guderian’s visit to Yasnaya Polyana, but in any case, honoring Tolstoy’s memory was hardly the German general’s primary concern. He knew his troops were literally freezing—on December
4, for example, he recorded that the temperature was minus 32 degrees Fahrenheit—and frostbite was taking an increasingly heavy toll. “The enemy, the size of the country and the foulness of the weather were all underestimated, and we are suffering for that now,” he wrote to his wife.

  Even before Hitler issued his order to suspend offensive operations, Guderian had concluded that Moscow couldn’t be taken that winter. Although other panzer units attacking from the northwest had come within twenty miles of the Kremlin, he noted, they “were forced to abandon their attacks because they lacked the necessary strength to seize the great prize that now lay so near.” Guderian was convinced that the only way to preserve German strength was for his troops to withdraw to positions further back from the front lines, where possible to areas that the troops had dug in and fortified before the ground had frozen. “But this was exactly what Hitler refused to allow,” he complained.

  Guderian’s immediate superiors were sympathetic to his appeals, since they recognized their weaknesses even before Zhukov launched his counteroffensive. “The fighting of the past 14 days has shown that the notion that the enemy in front of the army group has ‘collapsed’ was a fantasy,” Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, the commander of Army Group Center, wrote in his diary on December 1. “Halting at the gates of Moscow, where the road and rail net of almost all of Eastern Russia converge, is tantamount to heavy defensive fighting against a numerically far superior foe. The forces of the army group are not equal to this, even for a limited time.”

  Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, the commander-in-chief of the army, authorized Guderian to start some limited withdrawals, which Guderian quickly acted upon. But Hitler was intent on delivering the message that these were the exceptions rather than the rule. He reached Guderian by phone on the night of December 16. Although the connection was patchy, he got his main points across: the general was supposed to hold his current positions and no further withdrawals would be tolerated. As army chief of staff General Franz Halder noted in his war diary, Hitler reiterated those instructions to his command team at midnight along with a contemptuous dismissal of those who were arguing for a broader pullback. “General withdrawal is out of the question,” Halder recorded. “Enemy has made substantial penetration only in a few places. The idea to prepare rear positions is just driveling nonsense.”

  Field Marshal Erich von Manstein drew a direct parallel between the German leader’s behavior when he began suffering his first setbacks and that of his Soviet counterpart at the beginning of the conflict. “Hitler’s reaction when the first crisis occurred in front of Moscow was to adopt Stalin’s precept of hanging on doggedly to every single position,” he wrote after the war. “It was a policy that had brought the Soviet leaders so close to the abyss in 1941.”

  By the time Guderian was summoned to Hitler’s headquarters on December 20, the German leader had dismissed Brauchitsch, the commander-in-chief of the army who had agreed to some of Guderian’s redeployment plans, and assumed direct command of the army himself. If there were any doubts left that Hitler believed in his superior abilities and held his generals in contempt, that decision completely dispelled them. “This little matter of operational command is something anyone can do,” he told Halder. “The task of the commander-in-chief of the army is to train the army in National Socialist ways. I know of no general who could do that as I want it done, so I have decided to take over the command of the army myself.”

  Hitler also had gotten rid of Bock, the commander of Army Group Center, who had argued in vain against his orders to hold on to the forward positions on the approaches to Moscow. Guderian knew that those moves didn’t augur well for his face-to-face meeting with Hitler, although he still hoped that the German leader retained some of his previous positive feelings about him.

  Guderian was quickly disabused of that notion when he entered the dimly lit room where Hitler and his entourage awaited him. “As Hitler came forward to greet me, I saw to my surprise, for the first time, a hard unfriendly expression in his eyes,” he wrote later. The panzer general who had once entranced the Führer with his bold plans and brilliant performance was now entering hostile territory.

  Asked for a summary of his army’s movements, Guderian signaled his intention to continue the withdrawal to safer positions that Brauchitsch had authorized.

  “No, I forbid that!” Hitler shouted.

  Guderian explained that the only way to prevent needless losses of his men was to continue with the redeployment he had already started. But Hitler had already made up his mind and insisted that his troops “must dig into the ground where they are and hold every square yard of land!”

  “Digging into the ground is no longer feasible in most places, since it is frozen to a depth of five feet and our wretched entrenching tools won’t go through it,” Guderian responded.

  “In that case they must blast craters with heavy howitzers. We had to do that in the First World War in Flanders.”

  “In Flanders there was never such cold as we are now experiencing. And apart from that I need my ammunition to fire at the Russians,” Guderian argued. And once again, he warned of the likely consequences of an inflexible strategy. “If such tactics are adopted we shall, during the course of the coming winter, sacrifice the lives of our officers, our noncommissioned officers and of the men suitable to replace them, and this sacrifice will have been not only useless but irreparable.”

  “Do you think Frederick the Great’s grenadiers were anxious to die?” Hitler retorted. “They wanted to live, too, but the king was right in asking them to sacrifice themselves.”

  When Guderian reminded him that most of his troops were in summer uniforms, Hitler refused to believe it. “This is not true,” he insisted. “The Quartermaster-General informed me that the winter clothing had been issued.” Guderian pointed out that even if warm clothes had been issued, they hadn’t reached the troops. He added that he had discovered that a large shipment of clothing had been long stuck in the train station in Warsaw and there was no prospect that it would be sent in time to help the troops that winter.

  Although Hitler was convinced that Guderian was exaggerating the hardships on the front lines, he had a more fundamental criticism of the general he had once extolled. “You have been too deeply impressed by the suffering of the soldiers,” he told him. “You feel too much pity for them.”

  As the German leader saw it, there could be no more damning indictment than that, and this exchange sealed Guderian’s fate. Dismissed from his post and transferred to the reserves, the legendary panzer general offered his farewell message to his men on December 26. “I know that you will continue to fight as bravely as ever and that despite the hardships of winter and the numerical superiority of the enemy you will conquer,” he declared. But by all indications, Guderian no longer believed his own words.

  With the Soviet counteroffensive under way, the Kremlin was quick to proclaim victory. On December 13, Pravda ran a triumphant story with the headline: COLLAPSE OF GERMAN COMMANDERS’ PLANS TO SURROUND AND SEIZE MOSCOW. GERMAN TROOPS DEFEATED NEAR MOSCOW. In the first four days of the Soviet counteroffensive, from December 6 to 10, the newspaper claimed, the Red Army had retaken more than four hundred towns and the Germans had suffered about thirty thousand casualties. It also reported the capture of 386 tanks, 4,317 vehicles, 101 mortars, and 515 machine guns and the destruction of another 271 tanks, 565 vehicles, 119 mortars, and 131 machine guns along with other weaponry. “This information is incomplete, but now we don’t have the opportunity to tally all our trophies because of our ongoing offensive,” it added. As usual, it was incomplete in another way as well. The report offered no hints about the scale of Soviet casualties and losses.

  After a rundown on the progress of various units responsible for those actions, the article quoted a German information bulletin from early in December in order to discredit it. “German commanders will consider Moscow as the main target even if Stalin shifts the center of military action to another area,�
� the bulletin declared. “Some German commanders report that the German attack on Moscow is so successful that with good field glasses, they can see what is happening inside the city.” Pravda mocked those claims, concluding that the city had been saved and the Germans had lost.

  The evidence to buttress that assertion could be found on the approaches to Moscow, where Soviet forces were pushing the Germans back, despite Hitler’s orders to his troops to hold their positions. Vasily Grossman, the war correspondent for Krasnaya Zvezda, wrote in his diary, “Everything is very different to how it was in the summer. There are lots of broken German vehicles on the roads and in the steppe, lots of abandoned guns, hundreds of German corpses, helmets and weapons are lying everywhere. We are advancing!”

  Lieutenant Richard Wernicke, who participated in the air strikes on Moscow in his Ju-87 Stuka dive-bomber, recalled the grim reports he began to hear from his fellow fliers who took part in raids south of the capital. They spoke of the “unforgettable sight” of hundreds of German tanks burning on the ground. It was particularly striking because the fliers could see that their own crews had set these tanks alight after they had run out of fuel or the engines had conked out. Since the soldiers had to retreat, they were forced to resort to such measures to prevent the tanks from falling into Soviet hands.

  On the ground, Kurt Gruman, the infantry lieutenant who kept a diary as his regiment tried to fight its way to Moscow, noted that this was true for anything the Germans had brought with them. “Everything that we cannot take with us and that must not fall into Bolshevik hands must be destroyed,” he wrote on December 15. The next day, he complained, “Morale and discipline during this withdrawal have been subject to heavy blows. How much valuable property has been lost in vain! They did not even bother destroying it all. I fear those munitions will come down on our head.”