‘The whole thing should be over in three or four weeks, they said, others were more cautious and gave it two or three months. There was even one who said it would take a whole year, but we laughed him right out. “Why, how long did the Poles take us, and how long to settle France, eh?”’(10)
The final evening waiting on the Russo-German demarcation line in Poland is permanently etched in the memories of many who reflected these may be their final hours. Artillery Oberleutnant Siegfried Knappe saw that, ‘a few kilometres away, the village that would be our first objective lay sleeping, bathed in the comfort of soft moonlight’. He likened it to a beautiful painting. ‘The strong scent of pine needles permeated my consciousness as I wandered among the 180 men of my battery, checking things out.’ The prospect of combat clears the senses like a drug, throwing truths into sharp relief.
‘I became more aware of the men as individuals than I had ever been before. Some were timid, others were brash; some were gloomy, others easily amused; some were ambitious, others idlers; some were spendthrifts, others misers. The diverse thoughts that lay behind their helmets as they waited for battle only they could know… One soldier was humming softly to himself in meditation. Some were no doubt full of foreboding, and others were thinking of home and loved ones.’
Knappe was totally confident. ‘The men were strong and sure of themselves.’(11) Veterans had their doubts but emotions were kept tightly under control. Hauptmann Hans von Luck, having survived the French campaign, followed the truism common to all soldiers when faced with the next. ‘Everyone tries to mobilise his mental forces,’ he explained, ‘and is ready to suppress negative experiences and assimilate even the slightest positive ones.’ After all, the French campaign ‘could not have turned out better,’ but ‘the euphoria of the past months had given way to a rather sober view’. His belief was that ‘even the young ones, those schooled in National Socialism, doubted that Russia could be defeated with idealism alone’. The following morning, therefore, they would do what soldiers had done from time immemorial prior to going to battle: ‘we set our minds on the present and were ready to do our “duty”.’(12)
Such duties now focused the mind. Heinrich Eikmeier’s 88mm Flak gun was positioned next to the River Bug in the central sector.
‘During the evening before the war broke out, large numbers of telephone lines were laid to the gun; and in the morning there were many high ranking officers about, many of them unknown, including several generals. We were told our gun would provide the signal to open fire. It was controlled by stopwatch, exactly when the time was determined. When we fired, numerous other guns, both left and right would open up. Then war would break out.’
Eikmeier considered much later: ‘whether we fired the first shot in Army Group Centre – or for the entire Russian campaign – I do not know!’(13)
Leutnant Hans-Jochen Schmidt’s unit occupied its assembly area within a depression at dusk. ‘Every man received 60 rounds of live ammunition,’ he remarked, ‘and the rifles from then on were loaded.’ The soldiers were tense; ‘nobody thought of sleep.’ Troops at this final stage of preparation for battle invariably consider loved ones, lying motionless, awaiting the signal to move up to assault positions. Schmidt’s men received a particularly poignant reminder of home. A radio receiver was broadcasting music.
‘In the Reich one did not know what was going on, and the radio played a lively dance tune which touched us to the core of our souls.’
The reality of their situation refocused their attention once again. ‘The march route had come alive with vehicle after vehicle.’(14)
In Germany the weather had been hot. Berlin slept peacefully although hectic activity continued in the main army headquarters. The civilian population had no idea what was going on. ‘In addition to the already numerous rumours in circulation, new ones crop up daily with more and more detailed information,’ revealed a classified SS Secret Report on the Home Political Situation. It even quoted the rumour of a possible launch date of an offensive against the Soviet Union on 20 May; another tied Hitler’s visit to Danzig with a secret meeting with Molotov ‘on the high seas to settle the conflict between Germany and Russia by diplomatic means as in 1939’. Baltic volunteer battalions were alleged to be forming in Berlin. The rumours, the report claimed, ‘are caused predominantly by letters from soldiers at the Russian front.’(15) There was awareness at home that letters were not reaching husbands and loved ones, but the sinister implication of a pending new campaign was missed. One wife wrote to her husband on 17 June, with a touching optimism still prevalent:
‘Darling, I hope you have got my letter. It is obvious from the way you are writing that you have received no post. Dearest love, that I cannot understand. Immediately I arrived back in Rheydt I wrote to you. That was on 8 June. Hopefully you will get it soon. But Josef you need not be sad, our wonderful time has yet to come. I will stay patient and wait for you.’(16)
Another wife tragically missed her husband’s departure to the east before an anticipated weekend together. She continues in an inconsolable tone, apologising for the mistakes, because she is so devastated:
‘When I telephoned, a female voice said that you had departed that morning at 0830. I thought that my heart would stop, my darling, it is worse than I thought it would be. Tell me whether it was as bad for you and excuse the blots, they are tears!’(17)
Topics concerning everyday life were the primary issues discussed: ‘Tommy’ air raids and clothing and ration cards. Most letters contained universal and understandable fears:
‘My loved one, I’m keeping my fingers crossed, you must and you will come back to your beloved wife and children. Darling, I hope you are not ill, how are your poor feet? My dear, I think of you day and night, because I can imagine how it will be for you if you are on a long march… You fight and must fight on to rescue your wife and children; we can thank you if the bombs fail to strike… I will never forget you, and will always remain true…’(18)
Norbert Schultze, a Berlin composer, returned home at about midday on Saturday, 21 June, after an exhausting series of engagements, only to be summoned back immediately to the radio station by his director. He was tasked, with another colleague, Herms Niel, to participate in a competition ‘to write the German Nation’s signature tune for the Russian campaign’. They had two hours, after which the Propaganda Minister Goebbels, who had written the text, would make his choice. Both composers were shown into a room with a grand piano. Schultze won; Goebbels selected his tune and said ‘and then I would like to request that you participate in producing the concluding piece to our Russian fanfare’. ‘I beg your pardon?’ enquired Schultze. ‘Yes, don’t you know?’ responded Goebbels. Schultze did not. ‘No, I have heard nothing over the last few days. I have been inundated with work and composing.’ The Propaganda Minister played a record: Liszt’s Les Préludes. It had already been played three times on the wireless, but Schultze had never heard it. ‘Put that on the end,’ said Goebbels, ‘it will precede all the radio announcements.’(19) It was the primary signature tune for forthcoming Wochenschau cinema newsreels and became the fanfare preceding important High Command announcements. It was to be the overture informing the German public they were at war with the Soviet Union. An artillery NCO wrote home:
‘And now to the situation. In three hours we will relay fire commands by radio which the batteries will receive to open fire on the Russian positions, that will destroy everything. You will meanwhile be peacefully asleep whilst we of the first wave will start the invasion of enemy territory. In any case, towards morning you, too, will know that the hour has arrived and you will be thinking of me even though this letter will not have arrived. I can imagine the surprise and at the same moment, dread, that will overcome you all. But you need have no worries, because everything is so well prepared here, hardly anything can go wrong.’(20)
All along the frontier with the Soviet Union and occupied areas German troops began to move up to their final assa
ult positions. ‘I was with the leading assault wave,’ announced Helmut Pabst, an artillery NCO with Army Group Centre. His diary reveals snapshots of the final moments. ‘The units moved up to their positions quietly, talking in whispers. There was the creaking of wheels – assault guns.’ Such images remained permanently etched in the memories of survivors for the rest of their lives. Finally the infantry deployed. ‘They came up in dark ghostly columns and moved forward through the cabbage plots and cornfields.’(21) Having reached their final attack positions, they spread out into assault formation. Men lay in the undergrowth listening to the sound of insects and croaking frogs along the River Bug, straining their ears to hear sounds from the opposite bank. Some were breathless, tense, waiting for the release of the opening salvo.
Rearwards, by the airstrip at Maringlen in occupied Poland, Dominik Strug, the Polish labourer, recalled, ‘it was two o’clock at night when the engines started to turn over.’ The air base was humming with activity, subdued lights showed here and there and the smell of high octane became apparent as clouds of exhaust began to disperse on the breeze. He went on, ‘We didn’t have a clue what was going on. Later we learned the Germans had started a war against the Russians.’ Spectre-like black shapes lumbered into the air, gathered and began to move purposefully toward their objectives. Strug, gazing into the distance, attempted to discern some pattern to this activity. They flew eastward. ‘Everything went towards Brest [-Litovsk], Brest, Brest… ’(22)
Chapter 2
‘Ordinary men’ – The German soldier on the eve of ‘Barbarossa’
‘This drill – Ach! inhuman at times – was designed to break our pride, to make those young soldiers as malleable as possible so that they would follow any order later on.’
German soldier
‘Endless pressure to participate’
Every conscript army is a reflection of the society from which it is drawn. The Wehrmacht in 1941 was not totally the image of the Nazi totalitarian state: it had, after all, only recently developed from the Weimar Reichswehr. It was, however, in transition. The process had begun in 1933. Progress could be measured in parallel with the economic and military achievements of the Third Reich. Blitzkrieg in Poland, the Low Countries and France had brought with it heady success. The German Wochenschau newsreel showing Hitler’s triumphant return from France showed him at the height of his power. Shadows thrown up by the steam-driven express train, Nazi salutes from solitary farmers en route juxtaposed against the sheer size of hysterical crowds greeting his return in Berlin have a true Wagnerian character. Children dressed in Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) uniforms wave gleefully from lampposts. Adoring breathless women are held back by SS crowd-controllers. Goering, standing with Hitler on the Reich Chancellery balcony, is visibly and emotionally impressed by the roaring crowd whose cheering dominates the soundtrack.
The Wehrmacht’s morale, bathing in this adoration, was at its height. Wochenschau pictures of the French victory parade in Berlin, with close-ups of admiring women, and the pathos of a solitary high-heeled shoe left in the road as the crowd is pushed back from flower-bedecked troops, say it all. The troops were jubilantly received. Organisations and private people ‘render thanks to our deserving soldiers’, the newsreels opined. The wounded and those on leave received a torrent of presents and invitations. These were the good times. Schütze Benno Zeiser remembered on joining the army in May 1941:
‘Those were the days of fanfare parades, and “special announcements” of one “glorious victory” after another, and it was “the thing” to volunteer. It had become a kind of super holiday. At the same time we felt very proud of ourselves and very important.’(1)
Success bred an idealistic zeal, producing an over-sentimental outpouring of the Nazi Weltanschauung that in modern democratic and more cynical times would appear positively alien. Leutnant Hermann Witzemann, a former theology student, marching with an infantry unit eastwards from the Atlantic coast, grandly announced to his diary:
‘We marched in the morning! Over familiar roads billeting in familiar village quarters. Infantry once more on French roads, Infantry in wind and rain, tired and irritable in wretched quarters, longing for the homeland all the time. The Reich’s Infantry! German Infantry. I lead the first platoon! In nomine Dei! [In God’s Name!]’(2)
The postwar generation has had enormous difficulties reconciling and identifying with soldiers who clearly believed in God on the one hand and were seemingly decent human beings, yet on the other appeared receptive to a racist philosophy that enjoined them to disregard international law and the laws of armed conflict. One German soldier after the war, removed from the prevailing conditions that shaped and moulded him, gave an exasperated and often misconstrued view of the ‘Landser’ (the German equivalent of the British ‘Tommy’) on the eve of ‘Barbarossa’:
‘For me, it was a matter of course to become a soldier. Voluntary – not obliged to eh! If I hadn’t been called up I would have reported voluntarily in ’39. But not because of patriotism. I must say, all this sense of mission and “hurrah!” That wasn’t it at all. It was a family thing. My father was strict, but right.’
An element of racism formed an integral part of the society that had developed from the Imperial period, subdued to some extent during the Weimar Republic but more overt after 1933. He continued:
‘I was convinced we had to turn the Bolsheviks back. It has taken two World Wars – more! During peacetime alone the Bolsheviks had taken a human toll of eight million people. There you are! I found it shameful [he raised his voice angrily] that the German soldier is characterised as a murderer!’(3)
To comprehend this statement, one must penetrate and attempt to identify some of the aspects and atmosphere that characterised the Nazi social fabric. Its outward manifestation was to reflect and impact upon the character and conduct of the German soldier. The soldier was under peer pressure to conform to the commonly accepted prejudices of his fellows, which had the effect of intensifying them. In a letter a month before the invasion of Russia, one conscript related a conversation with his parents:
‘While eating dinner the subject of the Jews came up. To my astonishment everyone agreed that Jews must disappear from the earth.’(4)
Those disagreeing with such a notion were unlikely to identify themselves by standing apart from the crowd and speaking up. Indeed, the whole ethos of army service was about subjugating oneself to the whole. Such unquestioning obedience was likewise required by the Nazi state which the soldier served. It was, therefore, a question of individual choice and personal ethics in an environment demanding corporate obedience. The state in time insidiously corrupted values, which, if they were not changed, were effectively subdued. Margot Hielscher, an actress, explained:
‘I lived in Friedrichstrasse near the Kurfürstendamm [in Berlin] and many Jewish citizens lived in this district, so I experienced how they were treated by the shopkeepers and customers inside the shops. It was shameful. More shameful was the way we behaved. We were cowardly. We – unfortunately – simply turned away or failed to hear anything.’(5)
National Socialism exploited all the modern means at its disposal to institute social change – in particular the media of radio and film. Both were cheap. The Nazi regime ensured radio receivers were mass-produced and offered at little cost, while the cinema was popular and readily available. A breathless pace of change was achieved from 1933 onwards. Modern ideologies tended, in any case, to blur the process of choice and action. This was particularly the case for the young, many of whom were to be conscripted into military service. ‘There was no time to catch one’s breath, no time to reflect, no refuge from the endless pressure to participate.’(6)
Some three million German soldiers and their allies were poised to attack the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. How aware were they that there was some choice regarding the values they were ordered to compromise? Some 17–19 million Germans were eventually to serve on the Russian front from an overall total of 19–20
million under arms. Although all were old enough to kill as combat soldiers, they were completely naïve in terms of political awareness. Many actually reached adulthood during their service, but their only experience of politics was within a totalitarian state. They have since often been morally judged by historians who had only ever been exposed to the principles and values of the modern democratic constitutional state. Both conceptions are poles apart in terms of a common shared experience. Max Kuhnert, a German cavalry trooper, recalled the stultifying transition from civilian to military life. Even with six months’ Arbeitsdienst behind him, where ‘we had comradeship and learned discipline’ with a healthy life, the shock when it came was considerable:
‘For the first six months it was almost unbearable; we felt that we had lost our identity as slowly but surely we were moulded into soldiers. Politics never entered into it – in fact, no one in the army was allowed to vote.’(7)
Political choice is irrelevant when the vast majority of the population has no conception of what can or should be put in place of a totalitarian state. History also suggests(8) that brutal dictatorships inspire certain patterns of behaviour among people that in normal circumstances would be considered unusual, unappealing or even repulsive. Siegfried Knappe, serving as a young officer in 1938, recalled the impact of the Kristallnacht (pogrom conducted against the Jews in Berlin) among his fellows. ‘We did not talk about it in the barracks,’ he said, ‘because we were ashamed that our government would permit such a thing to happen.’ Reluctance to discuss such sensitive issues was not unusual. Knappe admitted: ‘strong anti-Semitism had always been just beneath the surface in the German population, but no one I knew supported this kind of excess.’(9) A revealing statement, indicative of the then prevalent flaw within the German character, true for officers and soldiers alike. Anti-Semitic excess was not even identifiable as such to many. Helmut Schmidt, a young Luftwaffe Flak officer serving with the 1st Panzer Division poised to invade Russia, has succinctly summed up the dilemma. His age group, he reasoned after the war, had no standard to measure themselves by, declaring:
War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 Page 4
