In April a more ambitious scheme was worked out. This involved the
seizure of Stalingrad, and the isthmus between the Don and the Volga,
"or at least to expose it [the city] to our heavy fire, so that
it loses its importance as a centre of war industry and of
communications." Granted the necessity of occupying the Donetz
basin and protecting it with the "buffer" of steppe in the
large bend of the Don, Stalingrad constituted an acceptable strategic
long-stop—particularly when its actual capture was subject to
the escape clause cited above. But for Hitler, Stalingrad was to be
the first step only.
His intention was to wheel north, along the line of the Volga, and
cut the communications of the Russian armies defending Moscow while
sending "scouting groups" still farther east, toward the
Urals. But Hitler recognised that an operation on this scale would be
possible only if the Red Army had suffered a defeat even more serious
than those of the previous summer. The alternative was to seize
Stalingrad as an anchor for the left flank while the mass of the
Panzer forces wheeled south to occupy the Caucasus, cut off the
Soviet oil supplies, and menace the borders of Persia and Turkey.
Halder claims that none of these ideas were communicated to OKH
during the planning stage:
In Hitler's written order to me to prepare an offensive in
South Russia for the Summer of 1942, the objective given was the
River Volga at Stalingrad. [We] therefore emphasised this objective
and held only a protection of the flank south of the River Don to be
necessary . . .
The eastern Caucasus were to be "blocked" and a mobile
reserve was to be held at Armavir, to stand guard against Russian
counterattacks south of the Manych. Halder remembered
some critical remarks made just at that time about the lack of
daring and initiative on the part of the General Staff. But Hitler
did not connect them with the restriction of objectives south of the
Don. Obviously he was not yet sure enough of himself to express his
objections to the OKH order.
Far from being obvious, it must be reckoned highly unlikely that
Hitler, who had ravaged the Army with his dismissals and conducted a
successful winter campaign virtually singlehanded, was "not yet
sure enough of himself" to impose his will on OKH. More probable
is that he still hoped the Russians' strength might be broken before
the Volga was reached, which would allow the fulfilment of the "large
solution," the northern sweep to Saratov and Kazan, and by
leaving the sequel to the capture of Stalingrad in a planning vacuum
he retained the option of a campaign in the Caucasus or a drive to
the Urals. The result was that OKH went into the campaign believing
that Stalingrad was the objective and that the forces in the Caucasus
were to have merely a "blocking" role; while the conception
of OKW, which Hitler was subsequently to communicate to some of the
subordinate army commanders, was that the block was to be established
at Stalingrad and the main forces committed either to the north or
south. Things were further complicated by the fact that OKH continued
to pay a kind of lip service to the idea of a campaign in the
Caucasus.
As long ago as the Orsha conference Paulus (who was Halder's
deputy at the time) recalls the Chief of the Army Staff saying, ".
. . when weather conditions permit we shall feel justified in making
an all-out thrust in the south towards Stalingrad
in order to
occupy the Maikop-Grozny area at an early date
, and thus improve
the situation as regards our limited supplies of oil." Still
more perplexing, Directive No. 41, which was issued in April 1942,
included the "seizure of the oil region of the Caucasus" in
the preamble concerning the general aim of the campaign, yet made no
mention of this in the main plan of operations.
Not unnaturally, this duality was reflected in the organisation of
the army group, which, although originally drawn up as one mass under
Bock (now recovered from his winter ailment), had an infrastructure
that would allow it to be split into two, Army Group B, under Weichs,
and an A, which was to be placed under List, at that time G.O.C. in
the Balkans. The B group was made up of the 2nd Army, the 4th Panzer
Army, and the very strong 6th Army of Paulus, and was intended to do
most of the fighting in the early stages. The A group looked at first
sight like a reserve force, with its high proportion of satellite
formations and its single German infantry army, the 17th, and under
the scheme outlined in Directive No. 41 it was to run in tandem with,
but slightly behind, Army Group B. But in his command List also had a
whole Panzer army, the 1st, under the dashing and vigorous Kleist.
And to Kleist the Führer had confided. As early as 1st April,
Hitler had told him that he and his Panzer army were to be the
instrument whereby the Reich would be assured of its oil supplies in
perpetuity and the mobility of the Red Army would be crippled for
good. Their discussion, Halder acidly commented, was a good example
of the way
in which Hitler succeeded in winning over the consent of
leaders of lower rank by clearly misrepresenting those ideas which
the OKH, as the superior organ, had rejected. It is characteristic of
the conditions within the high leadership of the German side that I
never came to hear of this discrepancy between the basic operational
order of the OKH and the directions given personally to an army
commander by Hitler.
The result of this "discrepancy" was that the commander
of the largest single armoured force in the army group was to go into
action with a private objective of his own. "Stalingrad,"
Kleist said after the war, "was, at the start, no more than a
name on the map to my Panzer army."
Numerically German strength stood at about the same level for the
campaign of 1942 as it had the previous year, and if the satellite
armies are included the total of divisions surpasses the 1941 figure,
for Hungary and Rumania had each increased its quota during the
winter. In terms of equipment and firepower the average German
division was better off, though only marginally so, and the number of
Panzer divisions had been raised from nineteen to twenty-five. But in
their quality and morale the Germans were already in a decline. No
army could have passed through the experiences of that dreadful
winter without suffering permanent damage; nor could it have felt the
successive disappointments of apparent victory and cruel frustration
which had alternated throughout the previous summer without a sense
of futility and gloom. It was a feeling that spread right back to,
and then recoiled from, the home front in the Reich.
For the German nation "the war" meant the war in the
East. The bombing, the U-boat campaign, the glamour of the Afrika
Korps, these were incidentals when over two million fathers,
husbands, brothers, were engaged day and night in a struggle with the
Untermensch
.
Oh yes, we were heroes all right. Nothing was too good for us
at home, and the press was full of our stories. The Eastern Front!
There was something about the words, when you told people you were
going there it was as if you had admitted some fatal disease.
Everyone was so friendly, a sort of forced cheerfulness—but
with a certain look in their eyes, that animal curiosity when you
gaze on something condemned . . .
And deep down so many of us believed it. In the evenings we
used to talk of the end. Some slit-eyed Mongol sniper was waiting for
each one of us. Sometimes all that mattered was that our bodies
should get back to the
Reich
, so that our children could visit
the graves.
The despair and fatalism which can already be detected in letters
and diaries at this time were not nearly so widespread as they were
to become in 1943, after the failure of
Zitadelle
. This was
partly because relatively few units had been involved in the winter
fighting and the practice of creating new divisions in preference to
building up the old ones to full strength helped to limit the spread
of defeatism at second hand. Nonetheless, the germ was there,
ineradicable; and its effect was to be seen on many occasions in
action at regimental and lower levels during the summer.
Those who went to the East passed already into a different world,
separated by a gulf almost as wide as that which had existed in the
Great War between the
permissionnaires
in Paris and the hills
of Verdun. Once they had traversed the frontier of the occupied
territories they were in a belt of country, up to five hundred miles
across, where the septic violence of Nazism festered openly—no
longer concealed beneath the trim roofs and
Gemütlichkeit
of suburban Germany. Mass murder, deportations, deliberate starvation
of prisoner cages, the burning alive of school children, "target
practice" on civilian hospitals—atrocities were so
commonplace that no man coming fresh to the scene could stay sane
without acquiring a protective veneer of brutalisation. One young
officer, lately arrived in the East,
received an order to shoot three hundred and fifty civilians,
allegedly partisans but including women and children, who had been
herded together in a big barn. He hesitated at first, but was then
warned that the penalty for disobedience is death. He begged for ten
minutes' time to think it over, and finally carried out the order
with machine-gun fire. He was so shaken by this episode that [after
being wounded] he was determined never to go back to the [Eastern]
front.
The doctrine of
Befehlt ist befehlt
could cut both ways on
occasion.
[Literally, "What is ordered is ordered." Since the war
the Germans have rationalised their brutalities at three levels.
First, that the end justifies the means, the end in this case being
"the New Europe" (the term "Europe" being
substituted for "Order" owing to the unhappy associations
of the former concept in contrast with the prevailing bias toward
European Union, etc.) Second, that the victims were Communists
anyway, and therefore their liquidation was in defence of "freedom."
And third,
Befehlt ist befehlt
—the obligation to obey
orders relieves the individual of direct responsibility for his
actions. These arguments can be heard with regularity at war crimes
trials, and crop up periodically in print—though whether they
were so carefully rationalised at the time is another question.]
At the German frontier near Posen there were railway sidings often
used for the routing of troop trains and other, more sinister traffic
from the East. Often freight cars jammed tight with Russian
prisoners, or Jews rounded up for the extermination camps, would
stand there, for days on end when the through traffic was heavy,
"giving off a faint droning sound, the supplication of thousands
of dying humans for air and water." Once the sidings were
occupied by a Wehrmacht hospital train. It, too, had been sealed, and
its markings removed as a protection against Partisans. The trucks
should have been opened at Brest-Litovsk, but the movement orders
were destroyed in an air raid and the train lost its identity. Soon,
as it was shunted across eastern Poland, it assumed another, more
fearful one. By the time it reached the sidings in Posen, over two
hundred of the German wounded had died. The Stationmaster and his
staff had heard the cries for help from within, but had done nothing
"as they thought it was a ruse . . . that the voices were those
of German-speaking Jews."
Among other factors affecting the morale of the German troops was
the failure to produce any really new weapons on a par with the T 34
or the
Katyusha
multiple rocket thrower. The infantry was
going into action equipped almost exactly as it had been the previous
summer, apart from an increase in the number of submachine gunners in
certain companies. The Panzers had been subjected to a more thorough
reorganisation (but this affected only those in the southern theatre.
The "old" understrength formations in the northern and
central army groups retained their original form in 1942).
The most important change in the composition of the Panzer
divisions was the inclusion of a full-strength battalion of 88-mm.
guns—still styled as an "anti-aircraft battalion" but
in reality included because of the proved tank-killing powers of that
famous gun. The motorcycle battalion was abolished, but one of the
four infantry battalions (sometimes two, in cases of elite and SS
Panzer formations) was re-equipped with armoured half-track personnel
carriers, which greatly improved its effectiveness in difficult
ground. The riflemen in these armoured carriers were designated
Panzergrenadier
, and this term soon spread to include all
infantry attached to a Panzer division.
Of the tank battalions, their firepower had been increased by the
long-delayed substitution of the L 60 50-mm. gun for the old 37-mm.
in the PzKw III (although the effectiveness of this was diminished by
the first batch being fitted with the L 42 gun in error; see p. 37)
and by the L 48 75-mm. being fitted to the PzKw IV. At the same time
the tank content of the divisions was raised by the addition of a
fourth company to each tank battalion. However, this increase in
strength was more nominal than real, as tank production in 1941 had
amounted to a meagre 3,256 and less than 100 units were delivered in
the first part of 1942. Losses in the 1941 campaign had totalled
nearly 3,000 and the tables of strength had been further reduced by
the withdrawal of many PzKw II's and I's to police and internal
duties, these models being no longer of value in the rugged school of
the Eastern front.
Thus, although four companies were duly constituted in each
battalion, very few were up to their required strength of twenty-two
PzKw III's or IV's. In fact, at the start of the summer of 1942,
German tank strength was numerically rather below that at the
beginning of the 1941 campaign. But this was offset by a ruthless
"starvation" of the units in the northern and central
sectors, and a concentration of all the new armour in Bock's group,
raising the Panzer density and the "force-to-space" ratio
in the area selected for the attack.