Cruel World (53 page)

In late June 1941, Hitler could finally turn to the conquest of the territory that from the beginning had been the real object of his desire: the vast stretches united under the aegis of the Soviet Union. The Nordic nations of the West were mostly in his control, and Britain, almost everyone thought, would not last long. France, of no interest to Hitler except as an economic asset, posed no further threat, and the Balkans, including Greece, had also been somewhat shakily secured.

In retrospect it seems incredible that the Soviet government, always suspicious of its unlikely ally, despite warnings from many sources, was so surprised when German forces crossed its frontiers in the early hours of June 22, 129 years to the day after Napoleon, whom Hitler particularly hated, had done the same. The Germans were more than a month behind their planned schedule, but Hitler was confident of another rapid blitzkrieg victory, mistakenly believing, as invaders often do, that the supposedly primitive and downtrodden peoples of the Soviet Union would quickly abandon their regime. And indeed, many of them were at first so inclined, but the racial and economic policies of the Nazis, which were applied with the greatest possible brutality, instead inspired the majority of Russians to ferocious resistance in this conflict, which to this day is referred to in the former Soviet Union as the “Great Patriotic War” and not as World War II.

Hitler’s dogma concerning the Jews and Slavs was by now well established and, as we have seen, underlay the ethnic cleansing and resettlement of populations already in progress in Poland. To these were now added the “Asiatics” and “Mongols” of Russia, in fact all one and the same. In Hitler’s view, Russia, the “colossal empire in the East,” was now “ripe for dissolution,” which would occur as soon as “Bolshevik” and “Jewish” domination, virtually synonymous to him, were eliminated.
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After that, much of the Soviet territory could also be colonized by settlers of German blood.

Some were already there: the Nazis planned to embrace the 1.5 million ethnic Germans, long resident in the USSR, who were expected to play an important role in the new scene. But these were only a tiny fraction of the projected Germanic populace. To make room for the future thousands who would be brought in from the Reich and its newly occupied lands, Himmler mused at a gathering of SS officers, the “Slavic” population would have to be “reduced” by 30 million,
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an estimate later raised by Nazi racial analysts to 46 to 51 million.
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A German soldier prepares to execute a Jewish mother and child in the USSR
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(photo credit 11.1)

Nazi resettlement experience in Poland had been instructive. Its chaotic nature had not discouraged the ideologues, but better organization and tougher guidelines were clearly needed. For Russia, therefore, precise directives dealing with political and racial policy were debated and negotiated long before the invasion. Hitler soon discarded all thoughts of local rule in favor of the total destruction of indigenous leadership and bureaucracy. In the months before their forces were to go into action, the Army High Command and that of the SS were repeatedly instructed on Nazi population policy for the East, and turf divisions for the carrying out of various activities were carefully drawn. In March 1941, military leaders were reminded by Hitler that they must “rid themselves of obsolete ideologies” and that the coming war could not be fought in “a knightly fashion,” but was “a struggle … of ideologies and racial differences” that would “have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness.”
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It would, in short, continue the “war of annihilation.”

The “harshness” would encourage actions not usually permitted to the military. The great cities of Russia, and particularly Leningrad, viewed as
the seat of Communism, would not be allowed to surrender, but were to be “wiped off the face of the earth”
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without concern for their populations, which, indeed, were to be shot down as they attempted to flee. All “commissars,” who were “bearers of ideologies directly opposed to National Socialism,” a vague group that included anyone who could be remotely associated with the Soviet government, were to be liquidated, even though this was forbidden by the rules of war.

That was just the beginning. On May 13, in the so-called Jurisdictional Order, German forces were authorized to punish “offenses committed by enemy civilians” by shooting them on the spot instead of wasting time with courts-martial and the like. Although soldiers were supposed to consult with their officers before carrying out executions, it was ordered that they not be prosecuted for these executions if they failed to do so, “even where the deed is at the same time a military crime or offense.”
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This opened the way for the wanton killing of entire communities, particularly those suspected of giving aid to refugees and partisans. Those to be exterminated included Russia’s five million Jews, who were continually described as vermin and linked to banditry and Bolshevism in the reams of Nazi propaganda aimed at the troops.
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To get this dogma across to the average soldier, a special booklet, titled
Der Untermensch
, was issued. This remarkable document, replete with photographs of starving and brutalized Eastern children juxtaposed with happy Germans doing folk dances, and written in the purplest of prose, must rank among the most outrageous propaganda documents ever published:

Although the Wehrmacht was thus exhorted and authorized to carry out these draconian directives as part of the battle plan, the Nazis were not sure, after its timid performance in Poland, that it would do so with sufficient vigor. Taking no chances this time, four mobile special units, the infamous Einsatzgruppen, bigger and more sophisticated than the units used in Poland, were created to clear the newly conquered areas of as many Jews and “Bolsheviks” as possible during the fighting phase of the invasion, that is, before the complications of a law-ridden civil administration and greater public scrutiny were in place.

More positively, they were also supposed to seek out and register Russians of German origin wherever they found them, and, after eliminating those who had succumbed to Bolshevism, put the rest into positions of authority across the countryside. A Lebensborn operative was put in charge of this program and ordered to “immediately take care of the Ethnic-German children which are still of good and unmixed blood.”
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The units, controlled by the SS, would, by special agreement between SS agencies and the military High Command, be allowed to operate on the front lines within Wehrmacht combat areas.
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By early June the Einsatzgruppen had been briefed, trained, and positioned with the Army groups poised to enter the USSR.

The invasion force was gigantic. Some 3.2 million German troops (whose experienced officers by now had triumphed in Western Europe and Poland), aided by strong Romanian and Finnish forces, swept across the frontiers and, within days, with brilliant success, had advanced more than 100 miles into the USSR. By July 11 they had taken 328,878 Red Army prisoners of war. Reeling from the shock, the Soviets struggled to cope. Stalin, fearful of a coup due to his failure to foresee events, and depressed at being outsmarted by Hitler, retired to his dacha in a state of near collapse.
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But these conditions of panic were soon overcome. On July 7 a revived Stalin, making the war personal, called on his “comrades, citizens, brothers and sisters, fighters of our Army and Navy” and “friends” to “selflessly fight our patriotic war of liberation against the Fascist enslavers.” In the same speech he ordered the Red Army and the civilian population to evacuate all valuable property and food stocks that might be captured by the enemy and destroy what could not be moved. He also instructed the people to form partisan groups and to create, in the occupied areas, “intolerable conditions … for the enemy and his accomplices, who must be
persecuted and destroyed at every step.”
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But to make sure that those of his “friends” who might be inclined to choose “liberation” by the Germans from the Stalin regime would not do so, political commissars, removed from all Red Army units in 1940, were once again placed in its formations, and a number of officers were executed as scapegoats for the initial military debacle. This was bolstered by an NKVD order on August 16 (by which time the number of Soviet POWs had risen to 432,000) declaring that officers and political operatives taken prisoner were “malicious deserters” whose families could be arrested, and indeed that “everyone who has been captured is a traitor to the motherland.”
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The stage was now set for a fight to the death between two dictators to whom the rules of conventional warfare and the sufferings of individual citizens were irrelevant.

On the civilian front, the Soviet response to the invasion was massive. The arbitrary movement of groups of people is far easier in a totalitarian society than it is in a democracy, and within days the Soviet measures, many of which would rend families asunder forever, would surpass anything undertaken in the West. In the first week of July a plan was set in motion to move as much heavy industry as possible out of the western USSR. Hundreds of thousands of workers, often without their families, accompanied the machines. Throughout the summer and fall, thousands of trains ran night and day under heavy bombing. By November, a million and a half freight cars full of machinery for 1,523 plants, some of them huge, had been moved to the Urals, Siberia, and the Volga region, where local populations, working in terrible weather and without adequate food, constructed new buildings to house the arriving equipment, often completing them within fourteen days.
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Fearful of bombings like those being visited on London, both parents and the authorities immediately began the evacuation of children from the cities. In Leningrad, thousands were at first sent to the countryside west of the city and thus directly into the teeth of the blitzkrieg. Here too the Nazis indulged in strafing of passenger trains, killing hundreds of children in the process. Soon children were being reevacuated back to the city, but many would be stranded in the areas taken by the Germans. The luckier ones went east, to Siberia and the Volga region, but there were simply not enough trains to hold all of Leningrad’s children, whose hopeful parents jammed the railroad stations and the streets leading to them in their efforts to send them away.

Once again politics would influence evacuation policy to the detriment of the mainstream population: the NKVD sent out criminals, deserters,
ethnic Finns and Germans, and politically suspect groups such as former nobility and kulaks before everyone else.
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Other children never had a chance: farther south, near Kaunas, in Lithuania, Red Army men in units out on training exercises learned with despair that their sons and daughters, some in a vacation camp, had been overtaken by the German lines.
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For those able to escape, the evacuation voyages, like all others in this war, were horrendous. Trains often languished on sidings for days without food or water and took months to get to Siberia, where the children, clad in summer clothes, suffered terribly in the cold.
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The young people who stayed home were immediately swept up in the defense efforts. Regular Army units were rapidly mobilized. Student nurses were sent to field hospitals at the front. All male citizens aged sixteen to sixty and females aged eighteen to fifty were required to make themselves available for civil defense in towns and villages. A People’s Volunteer Corps was formed. Young Communists, university students, and some 90,000 teenagers were recruited as fire watchers, air-raid wardens, and auxiliary police. Thousands from these sometimes chaotic formations, including schoolchildren, went out along with their elders to prepare fortifications along a 200-mile line south and west of Leningrad.