All Hell Let Loose (26 page)

Such misgivings did not extend to most of Hitler’s young soldiers, still flushed with the triumphs of 1940. ‘We were uncritically enthusiastic, proud to be alive in times we regarded as heroic,’ wrote twenty-one-year-old paratrooper Martin Poppel. He thrilled to the prospect of fighting in the east: ‘Our destination is Russia, our objective is war and victory … We’re desperate to be involved in the great struggle … There’s no country on earth that exerts such magnetic attraction on me as Bolshevist Russia.’ The Germans struck from East Prussia into Lithuania, from Poland towards Minsk and Kiev, from Hungary into Ukraine. Almost everywhere, they smashed contemptuously through Soviet formations, destroying planes wholesale on the ground – 1,200 in the first twenty-four hours.

In the Baltic republics, the invaders were bewildered to be greeted as liberators, with offerings of flowers and food. During the preceding weeks, Beria’s NKVD had made tens of thousands of arrests and consequently millions of enemies among Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians. Retreating Russian troops faced harassment and sniper fire from local inhabitants. Many civilians fled into the wilds until Stalin’s forces were expelled. ‘These days bogs and forests are more populated than farms and fields,’ wrote Estonian Juhan Jaik. ‘The forests and bogs are our territory while the fields and farms are occupied by the enemy.’ He meant the Russians, and they were soon gone.

Latvians seized three towns from their Soviet occupiers before the Germans arrived; by the end of 1941 Estonian partisans claimed to have captured 26,000 Soviet troops. In Ukraine likewise, the Red Army suffered at the hands of local guerrillas as well as the Germans. Ukrainian Polish teenager Stefan Kurylak was among a host of his countrymen who welcomed the expulsion of the Russians. One of their last acts in his village beside the Dniester was casually to hack down his best friend Stasha, fifteen years old, who had incurred their suspicion. The Germans’ arrival prompted widespread celebration among Ukrainians on both sides of the Soviet border. ‘As there seemed no doubt as to who the victors would be,’ wrote Kurylak, ‘our people … began to cooperate in every possible way with the German “liberators” … Some … even raised right arms to them smartly in the Nazi salute.’

In the first weeks of
Barbarossa
, the Wehrmacht achieved some of the greatest victories in the annals of war. Entire armies were enveloped and destroyed, notably at Białystok, Minsk and Smolensk. Stalin’s soldiers surrendered in tens and hundreds of thousands. Russian aircraft losses mounted daily. Twenty-year-old pilot Heinz Knoke, a dedicated Nazi, described the exhilaration of strafing: ‘I never shot as well as this before. My Ivans lie flat on the ground. One of them leaps to his feet and dashes into the trees. The remainder forget to get up again … Smiling faces all around when the pilots report. We have dreamed for a long time of doing something like this to the Bolshevists. Our feeling is not exactly one of hatred, so much as utter contempt. It is a genuine satisfaction for us to be able to trample the Bolshevists in the mud where they belong.’

Ivan Konovalov, one of thousands of Stalin’s pilots surprised by dive-bombers on his airfield, wrote: ‘All of a sudden there was an incredible roaring sound. Someone yelled “Take cover!” and I dived under a wing of my plane. Everything was burning – a terrible, raging fire.’ Alexander Andrievich, a supply officer, came upon the remains of a Soviet unit shattered by air attack: ‘There were hundreds upon hundreds of dead … I saw one of our generals standing by a crossroads. He had come to review his troops and was wearing his best parade uniform. But his soldiers were fleeing in the opposite direction. He stood there forlorn and alone, while the troops flooded past. Behind him was an obelisk, marking the route of Napoleon’s invasion in 1812.’ The Deputy Political Officer of the 5/147th Rifles led his men into action shouting, ‘For the Motherland and Stalin!’ and was among the first to fall.

In brilliant sunshine, German troops in shirtsleeves rode their tanks and trucks in triumphant dusty columns across hundreds of miles of plains, swamps, forests. ‘We were following Napoleon’s invasion route,’ Major General Hans von Griffenberg wrote later, ‘but we did not think that the lessons of the 1812 campaign applied to us. We were fighting with modern means of transport and communication – we thought that the vastness of Russia could be overcome by rail and motor engine, telegraph wire and radio. We had absolute faith in the infallibility of Blitzkrieg.’ A panzer gunner wrote to his father, a World War I veteran, in August 1941: ‘The pitiful hordes on the other side are nothing but felons who are driven by alcohol and the threat of pistols at their heads … a bunch of arseholes … Having encountered these Bolshevik hordes and seen how they live has made a lasting impression on me. Everyone, even the last doubter, knows today that the battle against these sub-humans, who’ve been whipped into frenzy by the Jews, was not only necessary but came in the nick of time. Our Führer has saved Europe from certain chaos.’ An artillery battery commander wrote on 8 July: ‘We launch wonderful attacks. There’s only one country one’s got to love because it is so marvellously beautiful – Germany. What in the world could compare with it?’ This officer was killed soon afterwards, but his enthusiasm no doubt cheered his final days.

The advancing armies streamed through towns and cities reduced to flaming desolation either by German guns or by the retreating Soviets. Thousands of casualties overwhelmed Russian field hospitals, arriving in trucks or carts, ‘some even crawling on their hands and knees, covered in blood’, in the words of medical orderly Vera Yukina. ‘We dressed their wounds, and surgeons removed shell fragments and bullets – and with little anaesthetic remaining, the operating theatre resounded to men’s groans, cries and calls for help.’ After the first five days of war, 5,000 casualties were crammed into one Tarnopol hospital intended for two hundred. Along the length of the front, stricken soldiers for whom there were no beds lay in rows on bare earth outside medical tents. Columns of prisoners tramped in bewildered thousands towards improvised cages, their numbers astounding their captors – and the audience in the Kremlin private cinema, when Stalin and his acolytes viewed captured German newsreels. A twenty-one-year-old translator, Zarubina Zoya, wrote: ‘When the commentator announced the number of Soviet troops killed or captured there was an audible gasp in the room, and one army commander close to me gripped the seat in front of him, rigid with shock. Stalin sat in stunned silence. I will always remember what appeared next on the screen – a close-up of our soldiers’ faces. They were just young kids, and they looked so helpless, so utterly lost.’

The world watched the unfolding drama with fascination and profoundly confused sentiments. In America, arch-isolationist Charles Lindbergh proclaimed: ‘I would a hundred times rather see my country ally herself with Britain, or even with Germany with all her faults, than the cruelty, the Godlessness and the barbarism that exist in Soviet Russia.’ Warwickshire housewife Clara Milburn found herself prey to bewilderment, writing on 22 June: ‘So now Russia will get a bit of what she gave Finland – and perhaps a lot more. Mr Churchill broadcast tonight and said we must stand by Russia. I suppose we must, as she is now against the enemy of mankind. But I wish we need not when I think of her ways, which are not our ways.’ On 1 July a Bucharest streetcar driver, seeing Mihail Sebastian with a newspaper in his hand, asked about the German advance. ‘Have they entered Moscow?’ ‘Not yet. But they will for sure – today or tomorrow.’ ‘Well, let them. Then we can make mincemeat of the yids.’

Euphoria overtook Berlin. Halder, the Wehrmacht’s chief of staff, declared on 3 July: ‘I think I am not exaggerating when I say that the campaign … has been won in fourteen days’; Hitler spoke of a victory parade in Moscow by the end of August. Former doubters in high places felt themselves confounded by Soviet command incompetence, the ease with which thousands of Russian aircraft had been destroyed, the effortless tactical superiority of the invaders. At the front Karl Fuchs, a tank gunner, exulted: ‘The war against these subhuman beings is almost over … We really let them have it! They are scoundrels, the mere scum of the earth – and they are no match for the German soldier.’ By 9 July Army Group Centre had completed the isolation of huge Soviet forces in Belorussia, which lost 300,000 prisoners and 2,500 tanks. Russian counterattacks delayed the capture of Smolensk until early August – a setback that afterwards proved significant, because it cost the Wehrmacht precious summer days – and the Red Army maintained strong resistance in the south. But when the forces of Bock and Rundstedt met at Lokhvitsa, east of Kiev, on 15 September, two entire Russian armies were trapped and destroyed, with the loss of half a million men. Leningrad was besieged, Moscow threatened.

The ruthlessness of the invaders was swiftly revealed. In France in 1940, more than a million French prisoners were caged and fed; in Russia, by contrast, prisoners were caged only to perish. First in hundreds of thousands, soon in millions, they starved to death in accordance with their captors’ design, and inability to cope with such numbers even had they wished to do so – the Reich’s camps had capacity for only 790,000. Some prisoners resorted to cannibalism. Many German units killed PoWs merely to escape the inconvenience of supervising their more protracted end. Gen. Joachim Lemelsen protested to the high command: ‘I am repeatedly finding out about the shooting of prisoners, defectors or deserters, carried out in an irresponsible, senseless and criminal manner. This is murder. Soon the Russians will get to hear about the countless corpses lying along the routes taken by our soldiers, without weapons and with hands raised, dispatched at close range by shots to the head. The result will be that the enemy will hide in the woods and fields and continue to fight – and we shall lose countless comrades.’

Berlin was indifferent. Hitler sought to conquer as much land, and to inherit as few people, as his armies could contrive. He often cited the precedent of the nineteenth-century American frontier, where the native inhabitants were almost extinguished to make way for settlers. On 25 June Police General Walter Stahlecker led Einsatzgruppe A into the Lithuanian city of Kaunas behind the panzers. A thousand Jews were rounded up and clubbed to death by Lithuanian collaborators at Lietukis garage, less than two hundred yards from Army HQ. Stahlecker reported: ‘These self-cleansing operations went smoothly because the army authorities, who had been informed beforehand, showed understanding for this procedure.’

The Soviets, for their part, shot many PoWs as well as their own political prisoners; when their retreating forces abandoned a hospital where 160 German wounded were held, these were killed either by smashing in their heads or throwing them from windows. A German platoon which surrendered after a Soviet counterattack on the Dubysa river on 23 June was found next day when the Russians were again driven back. They were not only dead, but mutilated. ‘Eyes had been put out, genitals cut off and other cruelties inflicted,’ wrote a shocked German staff officer. ‘This was our first such experience, but not the last. On the evening [after] these first two days I said to my general, “Sir, this will be a very different war from the one in Poland and France.”’ Whether or not the Germans’ atrocity story was true, a culture of massacre would characterise the eastern struggle.

Stalin delegated to Molotov, who strove to overcome his stutter, the task of informing the Russian people that they were at war, in a national broadcast at 1215 on 22 June. In the days that followed, the Soviet warlord met repeatedly with his key commanders – there were twenty-nine sessions on the day of the invasion – and made some critical decisions, notably for an evacuation eastwards of industrial plant. The NKVD embarked on wholesale executions and deportations of ‘unreliable elements’, which included many people who merely bore German names. All privately owned radios were confiscated, so that Russians became dependent on broadcast news relayed into factories and offices ‘at strictly determined times’. For some days, Stalin clung to an absurd, self-justificatory flicker of hope that the invasion represented a misunderstanding. There is fragmentary evidence that NKVD agents in neutral countries sought to explore with German interlocutors the possibility of further negotiations, which were spurned.

By 28 June when Minsk fell, such fantasies were dispelled. Stalin suffered a collapse of nerve which caused him to retreat to his dacha in the forest outside Moscow. When a Kremlin delegation headed by Anastas Mikoyan visited him on the 30th, he greeted them with obvious unease, asking sullenly, ‘Why have you come?’ He appears to have anticipated his own overthrow by the minions whom his vast misjudgement had betrayed. Instead, those irredeemably cowed and subservient men besought their ruler to lead them. This, at last, Stalin roused himself to do; on 3 July, he broadcast to the Russian people. In a notable break with the uncompromising authoritarianism that defined his rule, he began with an emotional appeal: ‘Comrades! Brothers and sisters! Fighters of our army and fleet! I address you, my friends!’ He called for a ‘Patriotic War’, the pre-emptive destruction of everything useful in the enemy’s path, and partisan warfare behind the front. Implicitly recognising the British as allies, without irony he declared the war to be part of ‘a united front of peoples standing for freedom’. Then he threw himself into personal direction of every detail of the Soviet Union’s defence as chairman of the Stavka (Staff HQ), the State Committee for Defence, the People’s Commissariat for Defence and the Transport Commission. On 8 August, he also appointed himself Supreme Commander of the Red Army.

Stalin would ultimately prove the most successful warlord of the conflict, yet no more than Hitler, Churchill or Roosevelt was he qualified to direct vast military operations. Ignorant of the concept of defence in depth, he rejected strategic retreat. His insistence that ground should be held to the last, even when armies faced encirclement, precipitated their destruction. Following the early battles, thousands of officers and men deemed guilty of incompetence or cowardice were shot, including Western Front commander Dmitry Pavlov. Stalin responded to reports of mass surrenders and desertions with draconian sanctions. His Order 270 of 16 August 1941 called for the execution of ‘malicious deserters’, and the arrest of their families: ‘Those falling into encirclements are to fight to the last … Those who prefer to surrender are to be destroyed by all available means.’ Order 270 was read aloud by commissars at thousands of soldiers’ assemblies.