Bloodlands (34 page)

Ordinarily, a prisoner-of-war camp is a simple facility, built by soldiers for other soldiers, but meant to preserve life. Such camps arise in difficult conditions and in unfamiliar places; but they are constructed by people who know that their own comrades are being held as prisoners by the opposing army. German prisoner-of-war camps in the Soviet Union, however, were something far out of the ordinary. They were designed to end life. In principle, they were divided into three types: the Dulag (transit camp), the Stalag (base camp for enlisted men and noncommissioned officers), and the smaller Oflags (for officers). In practice, all three types of camps were often nothing more than an open field surrounded by barbed wire. Prisoners were not registered by name,
though they were counted. This was an astonishing break with law and custom. Even at the German concentration camps names were taken. There was only one other type of German facility where names were not taken, and it had not yet been invented. No advance provision was made for food, shelter, or medical care. There were no clinics and very often no toilets. Usually there was no shelter from the elements. The official calorie quotients for the prisoners were far below survival levels, and were often not met. In practice, only the stronger prisoners, and those who had been selected as guards, could be sure of getting any food at all.
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Soviet prisoners were at first confused by this treatment by the Wehrmacht. One of them guessed that “the Germans are teaching us to behave like comrades.” Unable to imagine that hunger was a policy, he guessed that the Germans wanted the Soviet prisoners to show solidarity with one another by sharing whatever food they had among themselves. Perhaps this soldier simply could not believe that, like the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany was a state that starved by policy. Ironically, the entire essence of German policy toward the prisoners was that they were not actually equal human beings, and thus certainly not fellow soldiers, and under no circumstances comrades. The guidelines of May 1941 had instructed German soldiers to remember the supposedly “inhuman brutality” of Russians in battle. German camp guards were informed in September that they would be punished if they used their weapons too little.
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In autumn 1941, the prisoners of war in all of the Dulags and Stalags went hungry. Though even Göring recognized that the Hunger Plan as such was impossible, the priorities of German occupation ensured that Soviet prisoners would starve. Imitating and radicalizing the policies of the Soviet Gulag, German authorities gave less food to those who could not work than to those who could, thereby hastening the deaths of the weaker. On 21 October 1941, those who could not work saw their official rations cut by twenty-seven percent. This was for many prisoners a purely theoretical reduction, since in many prisoner-of-war camps no one was fed on a regular basis, and in most the weaker had no regular access to food anyway. A remark of the quartermaster general of the army, Eduard Wagner, made explicit the policy of selection: those prisoners who could not work, he said on 13 November, “are to be starved.” Across the camps, prisoners ate whatever they could find: grass, bark, pine needles. They had no
meat unless a dog was shot. A few prisoners got horsemeat on a few occasions. Prisoners fought to lick utensils, while their German guards laughed at their behavior. When the cannibalism began, the Germans presented it as the result of the low level of Soviet civilization.
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The drastic conditions of the war bound the Wehrmacht ever more closely to the ideology of National Socialism. To be sure, the Germany military had been progressively nazified since 1933. Hitler had dismissed the threat of Röhm and his SA in 1934, and announced German rearmament and conscription in 1935. He had directed German industry toward arms production and produced a series of very real victories in 1938 (Austria, Czechoslovakia), 1939 (Poland), and 1940 (Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, and above all France). He had had several years to choose his favorites among the higher officers, and to purge those whose outlook he found too traditional. The victory in France in 1940 had brought the German military command very close to Hitler, as officers began to believe in his talent.

Yet it was the
lack
of victory in the Soviet Union that made the Wehrmacht inseparable from the Nazi regime. In the starving Soviet Union in autumn 1941, the Wehrmacht was in a moral trap, from which National Socialism seemed to offer the only escape. Any remnants of traditional soldierly ideals had to be abandoned in favor of a destructive ethic that made sense of the army’s predicament. To be sure, German soldiers had to be fed; but they were eating to gain strength to fight a war that had already been lost. To be sure, calories had to be extracted from the countryside to feed them; but this brought about essentially pointless starvation. As the army high command and the officers in the field implemented illegal and murderous policies, they found no justification except for the sort that Hitler provided: that human beings were containers of calories that should be emptied, and that Slavs, Jews, and Asians, the peoples of the Soviet Union, were less than human and thus more than expendable. Like Ukrainian communists in 1933, German officers in 1941 implemented a policy of starvation. In both cases, many individuals had objections or reservations at first, but the groups in the end implicated themselves in the crimes of the regime, and thus subordinated themselves to the moral claims of their leaders. They became the system as the system became catastrophe.

It was the Wehrmacht that established and ran the first network of camps, in Hitler’s Europe, where people died in the thousands, the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands, and finally the millions.

 

Some of the most infamous prisoner-of-war camps were in occupied Soviet Belarus, where by late November 1941 death rates had reached two percent
per day
. At Stalag 352 near Minsk, which one survivor remembered as “pure hell,” prisoners were packed together so tightly by barbed wire that they could scarcely move. They had to urinate and defecate where they stood. Some 109,500 people died there. At Dulag 185, Dulag 127, and Stalag 341, in the east Belarusian city Mahileu, witnesses saw mountains of unburied corpses outside the barbed wire. Some thirty to forty thousand prisoners died in these camps. At Dulag 131 at Bobruisk, the camp headquarters caught fire. Thousands of prisoners burned to death, and another 1,700 were gunned down as they tried to escape. All in all at least thirty thousand people died at Bobruisk. At Dulags 220 and 121 in Homel, as many as half of the prisoners had shelter in abandoned stables. The others had no shelter at all. In December 1941 death rates at these camps climbed from two hundred to four hundred to seven hundred a day. At Dulag 342 at Molodechno, conditions were so awful that prisoners submitted written petitions asking to be shot.
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The camps in occupied Soviet Ukraine were similar. At Stalag 306 at Kirovohrad, German guards reported that prisoners ate the bodies of comrades who had been shot, sometimes before the victims were dead. Rosalia Volkovskaia, a survivor of the women’s camp at Volodymyr Volynskyi, had a view of what the men faced at the local Stalag 365: “we women could see from above that many of the prisoners ate the corpses.” At Stalag 346 in Kremenchuk, where inmates got at most two hundred grams of bread per day, bodies were thrown into a pit every morning. As in Ukraine in 1933, sometimes the living were buried along with the dead. At least twenty thousand people died in that camp. At Dulag 162 in Stalino (today Donetsk), at least ten thousand prisoners at a time were crushed behind barbed wire in a small camp in the center of the city. People could only stand. Only the dying would lie down, because anyone who did would be trampled. Some twenty-five thousand perished, making room for more. Dulag 160 at Khorol, southwest of Kiev, was one of the larger camps.
Although the site was an abandoned brick factory, prisoners were forbidden to take shelter in its buildings. If they tried to escape there from the rain or snow, they were shot. The commandant of this camp liked to observe the spectacle of prisoners struggling for food. He would ride in on his horse amidst the crowds and crush people to death. In this and other camps near Kiev, perhaps thirty thousand prisoners died.
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Soviet prisoners of war were also held at dozens of facilities in occupied Poland, in the General Government (which had been extended to the southeast after the invasion of the Soviet Union). Here astonished members of the Polish resistance filed reports about the massive death of Soviet prisoners in the winter of 1941-1942. Some 45,690 people died in the camps in the General Government
in ten days
, between 21 and 30 October 1941. At Stalag 307 at Dęblin, some eighty thousand Soviet prisoners died over the course of the war. At Stalag 319 at Chełm some sixty thousand people perished; at Stalag 366 in Siedlce, fifty-five thousand; at Stalag 325 at Zamość, twenty-eight thousand; at Stalag 316 at Siedlce, twenty-three thousand. About half a million Soviet prisoners of war starved to death in the General Government. As of the end of 1941, the largest group of mortal victims of German rule in occupied Poland was neither the native Poles nor the native Jews, but Soviet prisoners of war who had been brought west to occupied Poland and left to freeze and starve. Despite the recent Soviet invasion of Poland, Polish peasants often tried to feed the starving Soviet prisoners they saw. In retaliation, the Germans shot the Polish women carrying the milk jugs, and destroyed whole Polish villages.
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Even had the Soviet prisoners all been healthy and well fed, death rates in winter 1941-1942 would have been high. Despite what many Germans thought, Slavs had no inborn resistance to cold. Unlike the Germans, Soviet soldiers had sometimes been equipped with winter gear; this the Germans stole. The prisoners of war were usually left without shelter and without warm clothing, enduring temperatures far below freezing. As the camps were often in fields, no trees or hills broke the ruthless winter winds. Prisoners would build for themselves, by hand in the hard earth, simple dugouts where they would sleep. At Homel three Soviet soldiers, comrades, tried to keep one another warm by sleeping in a tight group. Each would have a turn sleeping in the middle, in the best spot, taking the warmth of his friends. At least one of the three lived to tell the tale.
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For hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war, this was the second political famine in Ukraine in the space of eight years. Many thousands of soldiers from Soviet Ukraine saw their bellies swell for the second time, or witnessed cannibalism for the second time. No doubt very many survivors of the first mass starvation died in the second one. A few Ukrainians, such as Ivan Shulinskyi, managed to survive both. The son of a deported kulak, he recalled the starvation of 1933, and told people that he came from the “land of hunger.” He would cheer himself in German captivity by singing a traditional Ukrainian song:
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As during the Soviet starvation campaign of 1933, during the German starvation campaign of 1941 many local people in Ukraine did their best to help the dying. Women would identify men as relatives and thus arrange their release. Young women would marry prisoners who were on labor duty outside the camps. The Germans sometimes allowed this, since it meant that the men would be working in an area under German occupation to produce food for Germans. In the city of Kremenchuk, where the food situation seems not to have been dire, laborers from the camps would leave empty bags in the city when they went to work in the morning, and recover them full of food left by passersby in the evening. In 1941 conditions were favorable for such help, as the harvest was unusually good. Women (the reports are almost always of women) would try to feed the prisoners during the death marches or in the camps. Yet most prisoner-of-war camp commanders, most of the time, prevented civilians from approaching the camps with food. Usually such people were driven away by warning shots. Sometimes they were killed.
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The organization of the camps in the east revealed a contempt for life, the life of Slavs and Asians and Jews anyway, that made such mass starvation thinkable. In German prisoner-of-war camps for Red Army soldiers, the death rate over the course of the war was 57.5 percent. In the first eight months after Operation Barbarossa, it must have been far higher. In German prisoner-of-war camps for soldiers of the western Allies, the death rate was less than five percent.
As many Soviet prisoners of war died
on a single given day
in autumn 1941 as did British and American prisoners of war over the course of the entire Second World War.
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Just as the Soviet population could not be starved at will, the Soviet state could not be destroyed in one blow. But the Germans certainly tried. Part of the idea of the “lightning victory” was that the Wehrmacht would cover terrain so quickly that the soldiers, and the trailing Einsatzgruppen, would be able to kill Soviet political elites and Red Army political officers. The official “Guidelines for the Behavior of the Troops in Russia,” issued on 19 May 1941, demanded a “crackdown” on four groups: agitators, partisans, saboteurs, and Jews. The “Guidelines for the Treatment of Political Commissars” of 6 June 1941 specified that captured political officers were to be killed.
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