Hitler's Final Fortress - Breslau 1945 (13 page)

Despite their notoriety, the penal units were relatively few and sparingly used. On a day-to-day basis, the arbitrary nature of their officers was of far greater concern to the ordinary Red Army soldier. Some could be “sincere, intelligent and just”, infantryman Nikolai Litvin recalled. And some could be petty tyrants.
¹⁹
Such a man was mortar company commander Vladimir Gelfand’s senior. “There’s not a single soldier, not a single NCO or officer who’s not been scolded in the most obscene language at least once by the captain,” Gelfand wrote. The captain progressed from verbal to physical abuse: deprivation of sleep, beatings, a fist to the face. On several occasions he pulled out his pistol and shot it in the direction of the men who had incurred his wrath.
²⁰
Ukrainians suffered the most – especially those from territory liberated during the push west in 1944. “They had no combat experience and had been exposed to a lot of Fascist influence during the occupation,” one divisional commander observed. “We could not compare them with Leningraders who had withstood the blockade and had been steeled in numerous battles.”
²¹
After one heavy barrage, a Soviet commander complained: “All the West Ukrainians throw themselves into the rearward trenches. We cannot win any war with them!”
²²
The Soviets did little to endear themselves to the Ukrainians however. Before every battle, one officer told Ukrainian soldiers under his command he regarded them as Fascists who would have to atone for their crimes in blood. “At any time a man’s name could be called out and an order read out saying he was condemned to death as a Fascist agitator and enemy of the Soviet Union. The commander shot the men dead on the spot,” Ukrainian deserters told their German interrogators. “Every Ukrainian soldier wants to leave the Red Army as quickly as possible and desert to the Germans.”
²³

One Ukrainian scrambled over no-man’s land towards Infantry Regiment 514’s lines, “a very young chap, a soldier for just a month, evidently rounded up in the newly-conquered lands”. The deserter promised Hans Jürgen Hartmann that more would follow. He was right. A second, “just a kid, leapt over the trench, visibly relieved”. At dawn the next day, two more figures in earth-brown uniforms scampered into the German trenches near Zawichost, “one of them even with a ‘
Geil Gitlarr’
!”
²⁴

Otherwise, life on the easternmost extremity of the Baranow bridgehead was relentlessly monotonous. Every day Hartmann saw to his duties: bunker construction, cleanliness of the latrine, construction of posts, the gathering of ammunition cartridges, drainage of water in the trenches, visibility, observation of the enemy, contact with neighbouring units, the cleaning and care of weapons, and a hundred other trifles. And every day his men received lectures or instruction on five different subjects: the gathering of cartridges, the wearing of earmuffs, gas and air-raid drills, a reminder not to wear felt boots when it was wet, a reminder to use boot polish and toilet paper sparingly, about observation of the enemy or keeping their unit’s postal address secret, about behaviour in captivity – and on the toilet. And the war? The war, Hartmann observed, “seems to have been forgotten”. There were occasional raids on German lines by the Russians, more to keep the minds of the
frontoviki
active and “alleviate a little of the boredom”. But all day and all night, a couple of Red Army snipers observed the 514th’s lines, “shooting accurately if someone holds his head too long and too carelessly above the trench, or carelessly walks through the trench standing upright.”
²⁵

The men in Hans Jürgen Hartmann’s company wore a
feldgrau
– field grey, although the colour was more a dirty green – tunic, perhaps covered by a padded dirty white winter jacket. On their head was the felt field cap or
Stahlhelm
– steel helmet. In their hands, the MP44 machine-pistol was replacing the Mauser 98K rifle as the standard-issue weapon. It was a first-rate weapon, effective up to 400 yards, but it devoured ammunition at an alarming rate. So too did the standard-issue German machine-gun, the MG42, known as the
Hitlersäge
,
Singende Säge
or
Knochensäge
– Hitler saw, singing saw or bone saw – thanks to the noise it made as it dispensed up to 1,500 rounds a minute. The field kitchen provided the men with a breakfast of bread and jam, or perhaps
Schmalz
(pork or goose fat), a lunch normally consisting of stew and an evening meal of bread, meat and possibly a little cheese, all washed down with
Ersatz
– substitute – coffee. The ordinary German soldier, the
Soldat
or, more commonly, the
Landser
, enjoyed a few days’ rest behind the front at the
Soldatenheim
– soldiers’ home. Some units, such as 6th Infantry Division, formed cabaret troupes, while members of the
Deutsches Frauenwerk
– German Women’s Organisation – distributed charitable donations and food. What the
Landser
wanted most was the
Feldpost
– field post – letters from home, from family, from friends, from loved ones. But by late 1944 the
Feldpost
service was faltering. Lack of mail was a common complaint; the combing out of the postal service for soldiers and, above all, the wrecked rail system in the Reich meant it was not getting through.
²⁶

What
Feldpost
did leave or arrive in the trenches was scrutinized by the German Army’s censors. And in the autumn of 1944, despite the crushing defeat he had suffered, despite the fact that his homeland was subjected to bombing by day and night, the
Landser
still believed in Adolf Hitler. Sifting letters and postcards from the front, the staff of Fourth Panzer Army – driven 150 miles westwards from the Bug to the Vistula during the summer battles – learned that their men abhorred the attempt to kill their Führer at his East Prussian headquarters on 20 July. From 291st Infantry Division: “Every soldier on the Eastern Front rejects the
putsch
outright.” From the panzer army’s own staff: “Our faith in the Führer is much stronger now, our belief in victory much more confident and certain.” From 72nd Infantry Division: “Adolf Hitler will never capitulate, he will never give in, never lose his nerves, in short, he means more to us
Landsers
than you can understand.” Many ordinary soldiers hoped that, “there’ll be a purge of our nation so that we’re finally rid of the parasites”.
²⁷

They were not to be disappointed. In the wake of the 20 July plot, the German Army truly became Hitler’s Army. The military salute was replaced by the
deutsche Gruss
, the straight-armed Nazi salute. Hitler’s trusted lieutenant and head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, was put in charge of training and providing replacement soldiers for the front line. ‘Courts of honour’ were established to expel from the Armed Forces officers connected or suspected of connection with the 20 July putsch. By the autumn of 1944, the ‘Nazification’ of the Wehrmacht was complete, as one senior SS officer gloated. “There’s not one branch of the Wehrmacht, one inspection, General Staff officer course, or
Kriegsakademie
which manages to avoid having a number of SS leaders on its speaker programme.”
²⁸

In reality, the German Army was Adolf Hitler’s Army long before the July putsch. For years the German soldier had been subjected to National Socialist indoctrination through newspapers, leaflets, speeches, talks. “Faith in the Führer and his ideology is the bedrock for the life of all German people,” he was told. Or: “A fanatical will to fight and the persistence of belief in victory is rooted in National Socialist ideology.” The soldier of Adolf Hitler placed “blind faith in the Führer” and drew his strength “from his total faith in victory and belief in our Führer, Adolf Hitler.”
²⁹
On leave he was ordered to ignore the damage inflicted by Allied bombers and put rumourmongers and pessimists in their place. If anyone at home asked: “How much longer will the war last?” he was to respond immediately: “Until we have won.”
³⁰
Nazi indoctrination reached its apotheosis with the
Nationalsozialistische Führungsoffizier
– National Socialist Leadership Officer – the German equivalent of the Red Army
politruk
, who was charged with imbuing the German soldier with Nazi ardour, of creating a single fighting community of officers and men. “Wars of this proportion are decided neither by numerical nor material superiority,” their instructions stated. “The only decisive factors are the high values possessed by a nation: bravery, iron discipline, honour and the nation’s consciousness of being the standard bearers and the protagonists of a lofty idea.”
³¹
The methods of the National Socialist Leadership Officers mirrored those of the
politruks
: an apt passage from
Mein Kampf
was posted on daily orders as a ‘thought for the day’, there were lectures, films, community evenings for the men with folk music, a few of the Führer’s inspirational words, a rousing speech and fighting songs to finish things off. The walls of houses near the front were daubed with slogans: “Victory or Siberia!” or “We fight for the lives of our women and children!” Youngsters handed out leaflets urging the German soldier not to leave his post but to halt the Soviet onslaught. The men were encouraged to stop singing songs from the Reeperbahn or the
Der blaue Engel
in favour of those of the Nazi movement, such as the
Horst Wessel Lied
. The word
Katastrophe
– catastrophe – was stricken from the soldiers’ vocabulary and replaced with
Notstand
– crisis.
³²
Subtle methods did not always work, however. One
Leutnant
tried to encourage his men to fight to the bitter end by using the fable of the two frogs which fell into a jug of milk. “The first gives up the struggle and drowns, while the other thrashes about as long as he can and puts up a fight until the milk has turned to cheese and he has saved his life,” the officer explained. His men simply fell about laughing.
³³
Other efforts to rally the men were more blunt, more successful. The National Socialist Leadership Officers would foster hopes of new weapons, of revenge for the bombing of the Reich’s cities and, above all, they would stoke the flames of hatred for the foe from the East. ‘Asiatic subhumans’, ‘red mob’, ‘hordes from the steppe’, ‘red beasts’ – no pejorative was overlooked when it came to demonizing the Red Army. “Asia has never triumphed over Europe,” one officer assured his men. “This time too we will stem the Asiatic floodtide.”
³⁴
Pamphlets like
Wofür kämpfen wir
? – What are we fighting for? – were handed out, featuring articles with titles such as ‘What fate do the Bolsheviks have in store for your parents, your sisters, your wives, your children?’
³⁵
Bolshevism, the booklet explained, presented “a dangerous threat to all of Western Civilisation. Many a European,
ja
many an Anglo-Saxon would be shaken to his core if he could see the true face of Bolshevism.” It was down to the German soldier to defend “all of cultured civilization from Asiatic subjugation! What matters now is which ideology wins: the Jewish-Bolshevist demon of materialism or the creative ideology of German idealism, National Socialism.”
³⁶
Such propaganda fell on fertile ground. “Such a people may not and cannot triumph over the culture of the West,” one
Unteroffizier
wrote home. “There’s probably no point wasting any words on the subject as it will never happen.”
³⁷

It was more than belief in National Socialism, in Adolf Hitler, in the struggle to protect Germany from the ‘hordes from the steppe’ which kept the German soldier fighting in the winter of 1944. Fear played a significant role too. Like the Red Army, the Wehrmacht had long since used the
Strafkompanie
– punishment company – to discipline men for lesser infractions, forcing them to clear mines or bury the dead in noman’s land. For singing this ditty,

Es geht alles vorüber

Es geht alles vorbei

Erst geht der Führer

Und dann die Partei!

It will all be over

It will all be done with

First the Führer

Then the Party!

one
Gefreiter
was sentenced to two years in prison. Passing sentence, the judge observed: “There can be no doubt about the corrosive effect of the lyrics of this song.”
³⁸
More serious offenders were sent to the
Bewährungsbataillon
– probationary battalion – to prove themselves by “exceptional bravery” on particularly dangerous missions. As the Reich’s plight grew worse, such legal ‘niceties’ were invariably dispensed with. An officer had the power – “it was not only his right but his duty” – to shoot men on the spot for disobedience; there was no point delaying matters by beginning court-martial proceedings.
³⁹
Officers who slandered or insulted their Führer, who “undermined the German people’s power to resist” with reckless or insulting remarks, faced execution.
⁴⁰
Cowardice had to be punished with “the most ruthless severity”;
⁴¹
defeatists, shirkers and deserters faced execution. Behind the front lines the feared
Kettenhunde
– chain dogs, so called because of the distinctive dog tags around their necks – the military police, were “more dangerous than any Red Army soldier”.
⁴²
Any soldier found away from his unit without the authorised papers faced immediate execution. They were hung from trees or from lamp posts, with signs hung around their necks: “That’s how we deal with cowards”; “I’m hanging here because I was too cowardly to defend my Fatherland”; “I made a pact with the Bolsheviks”.
⁴³
Perhaps as many as 20,000 German soldiers were executed, most in the final year of the war. Their families were sent a blunt notification: