In the north heavy fighting developed immediately as the two
Soviet armies became embroiled with Paulus and his fourteen fresh
divisions, but in the south Kharitonov drove straight through the
Rumanians and captured Krasnograd. For three days, as Gorodnyanski
poured into the breach on the heels of the 9th Army, it must have
seemed to Timoshenko that Kharkov was within his grasp. But on 17th
May the first warning signs began to appear. The northern force,
having driven Paulus back to the line of the Belgorod-Kharkov railway
at the cost of heavy casualties, was unable to make further progress.
Here there was no question of a breakthrough, the German line had
been taken back, intact, as one piece. But in the south the 9th Army
was still driving in a vacuum, and had reached Karlovka, west of
Kharkov, and only thirty miles from Poltava. Yet all attempts to
widen the breach southward from Izyum and Barvenkovo were proving
fruitless against a determined resistance which was suspiciously
strong in tanks.
The farther west the 9th and 6th armies drove, the farther they
carried the mass of the Soviet armour from the danger point at
Barvenkovo. And on 17th May the two armies diverged, with
Gorodnyanski following his original instructions and turning north,
toward Merefa and Kharkov. That evening was not a happy one at
Timoshenko's headquarters.
Prisoners captured in the southern sector had been identified as
coming from the Panzers of Kleist's army, and mounting pressure
against Kharitonov's flank confirmed this rapidly accumulating German
strength there. Yet Russian armour was now strung out over seventy
miles, without having brought the enemy to combat in anything greater
than regimental strength. It was the first attempt at an armoured
operation on the scale which the Germans had displayed the previous
summer, and many weaknesses—the fragmentary nature of the
brigade organisation, a shortage of supply vehicles, lack of
anti-aircraft protection for the fuel convoys—were making
themselves apparent.
At midnight Timoshenko got through to the
Stavka
on the
telephone in the hope of extracting some qualified permission for
slowing down the offensive until he had cleared his flanks. Whether
he spoke personally or not, we do know that his "political
representative," N. S. Khrushchev, did. Stalin, however, would
not come to the telephone, and sent Malenkov, who told Khrushchev
that the orders remained in force and Kharkov must be captured.
At dawn on 18th May, Kleist's counteroffensive was unleashed
against the south side of the breach and within hours had broken
through to the confluence of the Oskol and the Donetz rivers at
Izyum, narrowing the base of the Russian penetration to less than
twenty miles. By evening Kharitonov had lost all control of his army,
which was defending itself in a series of desperate but isolated
battles; yet Gorodnyanski continued to press on northward, while the
divisions protecting his rear crumbled away. Once again Timoshenko's
headquarters approached the
Stavka
, and this time it was his
Chief of Staff, Bagramyan, who spoke. Once again Moscow repeated its
orders—the offensive was to be pursued to the end.
The end was truly not far off, for on the 19th, Paulus, who had
transferred his two Panzer corps to his right flank, began to assault
the northern side of the corridor, as it had now become, from the
Donetz to Krasnograd. On 23rd May, Paulus' tanks met those of Kleist
at Balakleya, and the noose was drawn tight. On 19th May the
Stavka
had at last relented, with a qualified order to Gorodnyanski to halt
his advance, but it was then far too late to recover anything but
debris from the encirclement. On the 20th, Timoshenko had sent his
deputy, General Kostenko, into the pocket to salvage what he could,
but less than a quarter of the 6th and 9th armies managed to escape
and all left their heavy equipment on the west bank of the Donetz.
Moscow admitted a loss of 5,000 dead, 70,000 missing, and 300 tanks
destroyed. The Germans claimed 24,000 prisoners and 1,200 tanks. (The
latter figure is certainly an overestimate, as Timoshenko's total
armoured strength was 845, and although it is unlikely that any were
rescued from the southern pocket, it is reasonable to suppose that
the 28th Army managed to save some in the north.)
If the
Stavka
offensive had imposed a serious delay on the
Germans' own plans, then it might be justified, even though failing
in its principal objective—the capture of Kharkov.
But under interrogation the German commanders maintained that the
effect was negligible. Certainly it was bought at a erippling price,
for at the beginning of June, while the German armies were reforming
for their summer campaign, there were less than two hundred tanks
left on the strength of the entire south and southwest fronts. The
numerical ratio, from being five to one in the Russian favour the
previous year, had now swung around to nealy ten to one against them.
eleven
| THE WEHRMACHT AT HIGH TIDE
On 28th June, under a sky heavy with foreboding, Bock's offensive
broke like a clap of thunder. Three armies split the Russian front
into fragments on either side of Kursk, and Hoth's eleven Panzer
divisions fanned out across hundreds of miles of open rolling corn
and steppe grass, toward Voronezh and the Don.
[From north to south, the 2nd Army (Weichs); 4th Panzer (Hoth);
and 6th Army (Paulus). Paulus, who was intended to establish the
"block" at Stalingrad, had an unusually strong army of
eleven divisions and a Panzer corps. It comprised the 29th Corps
(General Obstfelder), 17th Corps (General Hollidt), 7th Corps
(General Heitz), 30th Panzer Corps (General Stumme), and 51st Corps
(General von Seydlitz).]
Two days later the southern half of the Army group went over to
the attack below Kharkov, and Kleist took the 1st Panzer Army across
the Donetz.
The Russians were outnumbered and outgunned from the start, and
their shortage of armour made it difficult to mount even local
counterattacks. Of the four armies which faced the German onslaught,
one, the 40th, which took the full impact of Hoth's Panzer army, was
broken up in the first forty-eight hours. The 13th, Golikov's flank
guard on the "Bryansk front," was hastily folded back
northward, opening a breach between the two theatres which was to
widen daily. Two others, the 21st and the 28th—the latter
barely recovered from its mauling at Volchansk in May—reeled
back in a state of accelerating disorder, their command structure
degenerating into independent combat at divisional, then at brigade,
finally at regimental level. Without even the protection of mass,
which had characterised the Red Army's deployment in the Ukraine in
1941, or of swamp and forest, which allowed small groups to delay the
enemy in the battle of Moscow, these formations were at the mercy of
the Germans. Polarising around the meagre cover of some shallow
ravine or the wooden hutments of a
kolkhoz
, they fought out
their last battle under a deluge of firepower against which they
could oppose little save their own bravery.
. . . quite different from last year [wrote a sergeant in the
3rd Panzer Division]. It's more like Poland. The Russians aren't
nearly so thick on the ground. They fire their guns like madmen, but
they don't hurt us!
The progress of the German columns could be discerned at thirty or
forty miles' distance. An enormous dust cloud towered in the sky,
thickened by smoke from burning villages and gunfire. Heavy and dark
at the head of the column, the smoke lingered in the still atmosphere
of summer long after the tanks had passed on, a hanging barrage of
brown haze stretching back to the western horizon. War correspondents
with the advance waxed lyrical about the "Irresistible
Mastodon"—the
Mot Pulk
, or motorised square—which
these columns represented on the move, with the trucks and artillery
enclosed by a frame of Panzers. "It is the formation of the
Roman Legions, now brought up to date in the twentieth century to
tame the Mongol-Slav horde!"
During this triumphant period the philosophy of the
Untermensch
(subhuman) reached its peak, and every report and photograph from the
advancing Nordic armies emphasised the racial inferiority of the
enemy—"a mixture of low and lowest humanity, truly
subhumans" . . . "degenerate-looking orientals." "This
is how the Soviet soldier looks. Mongol physiognomies from the
prisoner-of-war camps." The SS publishing house brought out a
special magazine entitled, simply,
Untermensch
, made up of
photographs showing the despicable character and appearance of the
Eastern foe. "Whether under the Tartars, or Peter, or Stalin,
this people is born for the yoke."
[The author of this text, an SS Major Edwin Erich Dwinger, has
been quoted elsewhere in this work.
Untermensch
ended with the
assertion, "The
Untermensch
has risen to conquer the
world. Defend yourself, Europe!" This is a sentiment which
cannot be said to be entirely absent from West German circles to this
day.]
No gift of psychiatric interpretation is required to see that this
attitude was conceived as granting an unrestricted licence to
ill-treat and exploit the "subhumans" as inclination
directed—and inclination was the stronger because of the
perverse effrontery with which these creatures resisted the will of
their oppressors. "He fights when all struggle is senseless,"
complained one German journalist. "He fails to fight, or fights
quite wrongly, when there is still a chance of success."
The Germans had not been slow to find legal as well as ideological
justification for their treatment of the Russian soldier in
captivity. The Soviet Union was not a sisnatory to the Geneva
convention—therefore there was no obligation to apply even
those minimum standards to the care of her nationals. To facilitate
"administration" a special department of OKW. the
Allgemeines Wehrmachtsamt
(AWA), under General Reinecke, was
charged with responsibility for the captives outside the immediate
area of operations, which came under OKH. Overlapping both these
authorities, as usual, was the SS, which had been granted general
privileges in connection with "the liquidation of certain
categories and the segregation of others."
As early as July 1941 OKH had issued the following instructions to
the commanders of rear areas:
In line with the prestige and dignity of the German Army, every
German soldier must maintain distance and such an attitude with
regard to Russian prisoners of war as takes account of the bitterness
and inhuman brutality of the Russians in battle . . .
The instructions then proceeded to more detailed advice on the
enhancement of "prestige and dignity" . . .
. . . fleeing prisoners of war are to be shot without
preliminary warning to stop. All resistance of the prisoners, even
passive, must be entirely eliminated
immediately
by use of
arms (bayonet, rifle butt, or firearm).
Besides the direct infliction of violence the Germans virtually
sentenced to death all prisoners who fell into their hands in the
autumn and winter battles by stripping them of their magnificent
greatcoats and astrakhan hats. Huddled together in "cages."
often without shelter, much less heating, hundreds of thousands
literally froze to death.
This, at least, had the effect of easing the "problem"
of feeding them. General Nagel, of the economics branch of OKW (who
merits a more conspicuous place than history so far has allowed him
with his aphorism, "What matters is not what is true or false,
but exclusively what is believed"), declared in a
Wirtschaftsaufzeichnung
of September 1941:
In contrast to the feeding of other captives [i.e, British and
American] we are not bound by any obligation to feed Bolshevik
prisoners. Their rations must therefore be determined solely on the
basis of their labour performance for us.
The result, as Goering laughingly confided to Ciano, was that ".
. . after having eaten everything possible, including the soles of
their boots, they have begun to eat each other and, what is more
serious, have eaten a German sentry."
One high-ranking SS officer sent a private report to Himmler,
suggesting that about two million prisoners be shot "forthwith"
so as to leave double rations for the remaining half, which would
ensure that "real labour was available." But it was not
shortage of food that caused the Russian prisoners to starve—simply
the refusal of their captors to feed them.
Goering's jokes and the cold statistics of AWA must not be allowed
to obscure the frightful horror of these prison cages. Dark compounds
of misery and anguish, where the dead lay undisturbed in heaps for
weeks on end, they were often ravaged by epidemics so virulent that
no guard would enter—except with flame throwers when, in the
interests of "hygiene," the dying and corpses were set
alight together on their beds of verminous rags. The obsessive German
passion for carving notches on their guns has left us with a specific
record of the treatment accorded to their brave adversary.
Recorded deaths in prisoner-of-war camps and compounds totalled
1,981,000. In addition to this there is the sinister heading of
"Exterminations; Not accounted for; Deaths and disappearance in
transit," with the horrifying total of 1,308,000.
When these figures are augmented by the very large (but
unverifiable) totals of men who were simply done to death on the spot
where they surrendered, without ever passing through the prison
cages, the new dimension of hatred and barbarism that the Eastern
campaign was generating can be appreciated.
Following their defeat in the Kharkov battle during May the
Stavka
had been forced into a radical alteration of plan for the summer
operations. The high concentration of armour identified with Kleist
and Paulus indicated that the main weight of the German effort would
be in the south, and this was confirmed by "Lucy." Yet
"Lucy" had also forecast (with justification, as we now
know) a renewal of the assault on Leningrad, and Moscow was still at
the stage when "Lucy's" incredibly accurate information was
suspect as laying the foundation for a gigantic trap. It had been
decided therefore that the Red Army's reserves—such as they
were—should be kept around Moscow to guard against a renewal of
the offensive in the central area, whence they could be switched to
Leningrad or the south once German intentions became apparent-—for
the configuration of the Soviet railway system as it had been left by
the German gains of the previous year made it very much easier to
send force out of Moscow to the flanks than to concentrate suddenly
at the capital from the extremities of the front.