And at the top, in Berlin, at the very top, nobody wants to admit it. Whom the gods wish to destroy they first make blind. Every day we experience this anew. But for reasons of prestige nobody dares to take a determined step backwards. They don’t want to admit that their army is already completely surrounded before Moscow. They refuse to recognize that the Russians can do such a thing. And in complete blindness they are keeling over into the abyss. And they will end in 4 weeks by losing their army before Moscow and later on by losing the whole war.309
Heinrici railed against his superiors, who refused to order a retreat ‘for fear of offending the top leadership’.310
This was the beginning of a long-lived legend, repeated by many of Hitler’s surviving generals after the war, according to which if only they had been left by Hitler to get on with it, they could have achieved victory. Professional generalship was what won wars; the interference of an amateur like Hitler, however gifted he might be, could only bring ruin in the end. The truth, however, was very different. The generals’ blind insistence on attack through the autumn and early winter of 1941, their failure to prepare defensive positions for overwintering, their naive optimism in the face of what they knew to be a determined and well-equipped enemy, their studious refusal to draw the consequences from the increasing tiredness of their troops, the growing difficulties of supply and the failure of much of their equipment in the bitter cold of the Russian winter brought them to a situation by December where they were paralysed by despair and indecision. Hitler’s stabilization of the situation only increased his contempt for them. ‘Once more a dramatic scene with the Leader,’ recorded Halder in his diary on 3 January 1942, ‘in which he casts doubt on the generals’ ability to screw up their courage to take tough decisions.’311 Hitler was now determined not to allow the generals any more freedom of action. Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, in command of Army Group North, found himself under fire from Hitler when he visited him on 12 January 1942 to ask permission to withdraw from some positions he thought were indefensible, in order to avoid further losses. Hitler, backed by Halder, thought this would weaken the Army Group’s northern flank and make the coming summer campaign more difficult. When he failed to get his way, he tendered his resignation, which was accepted on 16 January 1942. His replacement, General Georg von K̈chler, was told firmly by Halder that he would be expected to obey the orders emanating from Hitler’s headquarters.312
Disobedience to Hitler’s orders now carried with it severe consequences. General Heinz Guderian met Hitler on 20 December 1941 to plead for permission to retreat. Hitler told him he would have to get the troops to dig in and fight. But, Guderian objected, the ground was frozen solid five feet down. Then the troops would have to sacrifice themselves, Hitler countered. He was backed by Kluge and Halder, both of whom disliked the arrogant, wilful tank commander, as Bock had also done, and saw in the contretemps an opportunity to get rid of him. Disobeying Kluge’s express command, Guderian carried out a major withdrawal operation, telling his commander: ‘I will lead my army in these unusual circumstances in such a manner that I can answer for it to my conscience. ’ Kluge thought he should answer to his superior officers, and told Hitler that either Guderian would have to go, or he would. On 26 December 1941 Guderian was dismissed. The lack of solidarity shown by the leading generals with one another fatally undermined any attempt they might have made to take a stand against Hitler’s rigid insistence on resistance at any price.313 The tank commander General Erich Hoepner noted perceptively: ‘ “Fanatical will” alone won’t do it. The will is there. The strength is lacking.’314 Faced with the encirclement of the Twentieth Army Corps, Hoepner requested permission to withdraw and to retreat to a more defensible line. The new commander of Army Group Centre, Field Marshal G̈nther von Kluge, told him he was referring the matter to Hitler and ordered him to prepare for an immediate retreat. Thinking this meant Hitler would give his approval and not wanting to court disaster by delaying any further, Hoepner began the retreat anyway, moving his troops out on the afternoon of 8 January 1942. Appalled, and terrified at what Hitler might think, Kluge reported his action immediately to the Leader, who dismissed Hoepner from the army without a pension the same evening.315
With these changes, and others lower down the chain of command, Hitler had succeeded in establishing a complete dominance over the top army commanders. From now on they would do his will. Their much-vaunted professionalism had failed before Moscow. Military operations would now be directed by Hitler himself. With this victory over the generals, he could now afford to relax his rigid insistence on holding the line. By the middle of January 1942 Field Marshal Kluge had won Hitler’s approval for a series of adjustments of the front including a number of local retreats to its ‘winter position’. Fighting continued as the Red Army mounted continual assaults on the narrow German communication line with the rear. General Heinrici gained a considerable reputation as a defensive tactician as he held it until the Russian attacks ran out of steam; it was to return to haunt him at the end of the war, when Hitler would put him in charge of the defence of Berlin.316 Nevertheless, the scale of the disaster before Moscow was clear to all. Zhukov had pushed the Germans back to the point from which they had launched Operation Typhoon two months before. For the German army, this was, as General Franz Halder put it, ‘the greatest crisis in two world wars’.317 The losses inflicted on the German armed forces were enormous. In 1939, only 19,000 had been killed; and in all the campaigns of 1940, German losses had totalled no more than 83,000 - serious enough, indeed, but not irreplaceable. In 1941, however, 357,000 German troops were reported killed or missing in action, over 300,000 of them on the Eastern Front. These were huge losses that could not easily be replaced. Only Stalin’s decision to attack all along the front instead of pushing home the advantage by concentrating his forces in an all-out assault against the retreating German Army Group Centre prevented the disaster from being even worse.318
For all their advances since 22 June 1941, the Germans had everywhere failed to achieve their objectives. The overweening optimism of the first weeks of Operation Barbarossa had given way to an increasing sense of crisis, reflected in Hitler’s repeated dismissals of his leading generals. German military forces had for the first time been shown to be vulnerable. After Moscow, Hitler was still optimistic about the chances of victory. But he now knew it would take longer than he had originally envisaged.319 The invasion of the Soviet Union had changed the face of the war irrevocably. A series of easy victories in the west had been followed by an increasingly grim struggle in the east. What happened on the Soviet Front dwarfed anything seen in France, Denmark, Norway or the Low Countries. From 22 June 1941 onwards, at least two-thirds of the German armed forces were always engaged on the Eastern Front. More people fought and died on and behind the Eastern Front than in all the other theatres of war in 1939- 45 put together, including the Far East. The sheer scale of the struggle was extraordinary. So too was its bitterness and its ideological fanaticism, on both sides. It was in the end on the Eastern Front, more than any other, that the fortunes of war were decided.320
3
‘THE FINAL SOLUTION’
‘NO PITY, NOTHING’
I
As he entered Kovno (Kaunas) in Lithuania on 27 June 1941, Lieutenant-Colonel Lothar von Bischoffshausen, a regular army officer, noticed a laughing and cheering crowd of men, women and children gathered in the forecourt of a petrol station by the side of the road. Curious, he stopped to see what was going on. Bischoffshausen, a much-decorated career soldier and former Free Corps fighter, born in 1897, was no humanitarian liberal, but as he approached the crowd, even he was shocked by what he saw:
On the concrete forecourt of the petrol station a blond man of medium height, aged about twenty-five, stood leaning on a wooden club, resting. The club was as thick as his arm and came up to his chest. At his feet lay about fifteen to twenty dead or dying people. Water flowed continuously from a hose washing blood away int
o the drainage gully. Just a few steps behind this man some twenty men, guarded by armed civilians, stood waiting for their cruel execution in silent submission. In response to a cursory wave the next man stepped forward silently and was then beaten to death with the wooden club in the most bestial manner, each blow accompanied by enthusiastic shouts from the audience.1
Some of the women, he noted, were lifting up their children so that they could see better. Later on, Bischoffshausen was told by army staff officers that the murders were a spontaneous action by local people ‘in retaliation against the collaborators and traitors of the recently ended Russian occupation’. In fact, as other eyewitnesses reported, the victims were all Jews. A German photographer managed to take pictures of the event. Waving his army pass, he warded off an SS man’s attempt to confiscate the film, thus preserving a record of these events for posterity.
Bischoffshausen reported the massacre to his superiors. Although he discovered that members of the SS Security Service had been in the area since 24 June 1941, and it was not hard to guess that they had been instrumental in inciting the massacre, the general commanding the German army in the area said this was an internal matter for the Lithuanians and refused to intervene.2
What he had witnessed was no chance, localized or spontaneous act of violence. As soon as the German forces had entered the Soviet Union and the various territories it controlled, followed by the four SS Security Service Task Forces and subordinate Task Units including a number of police battalions, they had begun to carry out the orders Heydrich had given them to kill civilian resisters, Communist Party officials and Jews, along with all Jewish prisoners of war, in order, as they thought, to eliminate any possibility of resistance or subversion from ‘Jewish Bolsheviks’. Initially, the killings were, if possible, to be done by local people, who the Nazis expected to rise up against their Communist and Jewish oppressors, as they saw them.3 In a report written in mid-October 1941, the head of Task Force A, Walther Stahlecker, noted Heydrich’s instruction to set in motion what he called ‘self-cleansing efforts’ by the local population, or in other words anti-Jewish pogroms that were to appear as spontaneous actions by patriotic Lithuanians. It was important ‘to create as firmly grounded and provable for posterity the fact that the liberated population took the toughest measures against the Bolshevik and Jewish enemy on its own initiative, without any direction from the German end being recognizable’. ‘It was initially surprisingly difficult to set a fairly large-scale pogrom in motion there,’ he reported, but in the end a local anti-Bolshevik partisan leader managed ‘without any German orders or incitement being discernible’ to kill more than 1,500 Jews on the night of 25/26 June and a further 2,300 the following night, also burning down sixty Jewish houses and a number of synagogues. ‘The armed forces units,’ he added, ‘were briefed and showed full understanding for the action.’4
Pogroms of this kind took place in many areas in the first few days of German occupation. Antisemitism in the Baltic states had been fuelled by the experience of Soviet occupation since the spring of 1940, under which native elites and nationalists had been persecuted, arrested, deported or killed. Stalin had encouraged the Russian and Jewish minorities to help build the new Soviet states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, and two-thirds of the Central Committee of the Latvian Communist Party were either Russian or Jewish in origin, though like all Communists, of course, they rej ected their previous ethnic and religious identities in favour of secular Bolshevik internationalism. For their part, the Nazis regarded the Baltic peoples not as subhuman Slavs but as potentially assimilable to the German master race. Yet only a tiny minority of extreme nationalists in these countries vented the hatred of Communism they had accumulated over the period of Soviet occupation on the local Jewish population.5 Task Force A, for example, had to get auxiliary police rather than local civilians to kill 400 Jews in Riga. It is more than likely that in practice the same procedure had to be followed in other areas such as Mitau, where the local Jewish population of 1,550 was, it was reported, ‘disposed of by the population without any exceptions’. Finally, in Estonia, the Jewish population was so tiny - a mere 4,500 people - that such actions were not possible at all, and most of the Jews managed to flee to safety.6 By the time German troops reached Estonia, SS Security Task Forces and other units in Latvia and Lithuania had in any case gone over to killing Jewish men themselves. In the Lithuanian border town of Garsden (Gargzdai), where the German troops had encountered fierce resistance from the Red Army, security was left to a unit of German border police from Memel, who arrested between 600 and 700 Jews. Acting under the orders of the Gestapo chief in Tilsit, Hans-Joachim Böhme, they marched 200 Jewish men and one Jewish woman (the wife of a Soviet political commissar) to a nearby field, where they forced them to dig their own graves and then, on the afternoon of 24 June 1941, shot them all. One of the victims was a boy of twelve. Now known as the Tilsit Task Unit, Böhme’s group then moved eastwards, killing over 3,000 civilians by 18 July 1941.7
On 30 June 1941 the group was visited by Himmler and Heydrich, who gave its actions their approval. Böhme and his men were clearly carrying out their wishes. German forces treated all Jewish men as Communists, partisans, saboteurs, looters, dangerous members of the intelligentsia, or merely ‘suspicious elements’, and acted accordingly. Antisemitism also led regular German troops to shoot captured Jewish soldiers rather than send them into captivity behind the front. ‘Up here in what was Lithuania,’ wrote the ordinary soldier Albert Neuhaus from Münster, born in 1909 and therefore a little older than the average soldier, on 25 June 1941, ‘things are pretty much Jewified, and in this case no quarter is given.’8 The mixture of ideologically preconceived antisemitism and military or security rationalization, as well as the involvement of a variety of different agencies in the massacres, was evident in a letter written to his parents by a regular German soldier on 6 July 1941 from Tarnopol in eastern Galicia. After describing the discovery of the mutilated bodies of German soldiers taken prisoner by Red Army troops, the soldier went on:
We and the SS were merciful yesterday, for every Jew we caught was shot right away. It’s different today, for we again found the mutilated bodies of 60 comrades. Now the Jews had to carry the corpses out of the cellar, stretch them out neatly, and then they were shown the atrocities. Then after inspecting the victims they were beaten to death with truncheons and spades. Up to now we have sent about 1,000 Jews into the hereafter, but that’s too few for what they’ve done.9
The Jews of course had no demonstrable connection with the atrocities at all. Nevertheless, altogether some 5,000 of the town’s Jewish population were massacred, including a small number of women and children.10
In late June and through the first weeks of July, the Task Forces set about killing ever-increasing numbers of Jewish men in the occupied territories in the east, encouraged by frequent visits of Himmler and Heydrich to their areas of operation. The SS leaders began to provide the Task Forces with quotas to fill. In Vilna (Vilnius), at least 5,000 and probably as many as 10,000 Jews were killed by the end of July. Most of them were taken out to pits previously dug by the Red Army for a tank base, made to bind their shirts over their heads so they could not see, then machine-gunned in groups of twelve. Three SS Security Service units in Riga, assisted by local auxiliary police, had killed another 2,000 Jews in a wood outside the town by the middle of July, while thousands more Jews were shot in a similar way in other centres of population. As the grisly business proceeded, the gestures towards legal formalities that had often accompanied the early mass shootings, including the conventional rituals of the firing-squad, were quickly abandoned.11 Already on 27 June 1941, men from a variety of units under the overall command of the army’s 221st Security Division had driven more than 500 Jews into a synagogue in Bialystok and burned them alive, while army units blew up the surrounding buildings to stop the fire spreading. Other Jewish men were arrested in the streets. Their beards were set on fire and they were force
d to dance before being shot. At least 2,000 Jews were killed in all. Shortly afterwards, a German police battalion entered what was left of the Jewish quarter and took out twenty truckloads of loot. Himmler and Heydrich arrived in Bialystok early in July 1941 and are said to have complained that despite these killings not enough was being done to combat the Jewish menace. Almost immediately, over 1,000 Jewish men of military age were arrested, taken out of the city and also shot.12
The Task Force reported that it aimed to ‘liquidate’ the entire ‘Jewish-Bolshevist leadership cadre’ in the area, but in practice it rounded up and killed virtually the whole adult male Jewish population without distinction of occupation or educational attainment.13 The German invasion of 1941 had initially come as a surprise to the Jews as well as to Stalin, and most Jews had not fled, unless they had some connection with the Communist Party. Many of them had relatively positive memories of the German occupation in the First World War, and they had been alienated by the Soviet suppression of Jewish institutions, the Communist expropriation of their businesses, and the anti-religious campaigns that had forced them to abandon their traditional dress and stop celebrating the Sabbath.14 One German soldier reported that his unit had been welcomed in eastern Poland not only by villagers offering them milk, butter and eggs but also by Jews, who, he remarked, ‘haven’t yet realized that their hour has come’.15 But this situation soon changed. News of the massacres spread quickly, and the Jewish population began to flee en masse as the German forces approached. The speed of the German army’s advance was such that they were often overtaken, and so were then unable to escape the SS Task Forces following hard behind.16 Nevertheless, a report filed by Task Unit 6 of Task Force C on 12 September 1941 noted that 90 or even 100 per cent of the Jewish population in many Ukrainian towns had already fled. ‘The expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews,’ it added, ‘ - from what we hear, in the most cases across the Urals - has cost nothing and constitutes a considerable contribution to the solution of the Jewish question in Europe.’17
The Third Reich at War Page 27
