Ostkrieg (32 page)

Manstein launched his attack on the Crimea on the eighteenth, but his forces, which lacked armored support, suffered heavy losses in the attempt to batter through strong Soviet defenses. The fall of Odessa two days earlier also contributed to German difficulties since many of the units evacuated from that city were now used in defense of the peninsula. With his attacking units exhausted, Manstein demanded the transfer of a mobile division, but, in view of the fuel situation and the priority
of seizing Rostov, Hitler refused. Manstein did, however, receive Luftwaffe reinforcements on 24 October, which enabled his troops to break through Soviet positions and occupy most of the Crimea, except for the fortress city of Sevastopol. This triumph, however, could not offset the increasing supply problems caused by the incessant rain, muddy roads, lack of vehicles and horses, and absence of converted rail lines. Halder, however, demanded the crossing of the Don in order to secure a base for future operations. Despite grumbling from his commanders about the unreliable supply situation, on 25 October Rundstedt ordered Reichenau, whose Sixth Army had finally captured Kharkov, to advance as far as Belgorad, Stülpnagel (the Seventeenth Army) to force a bridgehead over the Don at Izyum, and Kleist (the First Panzer Army) to move on Rostov. A pause would then follow, during which the troops would lay in supplies and wait for the ground to freeze before resuming the advance. Fearing that the momentum of the offensive would be lost, Halder pressured Rundstedt not to halt but to make every effort to meet his long-range strategic objectives. German commanders, lacking vehicles and fuel, responded to Halder's urging by forming pursuit detachments consisting of infantry and peasant carts. Although Rundstedt noted the link between supplies and the ability of his troops to attack and could have pointed to a morale report signaling a growing apathy among his troops, the OKH persisted in its impossible order for Army Group South to seize Maikop and Stalingrad. Even Hitler possessed a more realistic view, telling Brauchitsch in early November that the Ostheer could no longer hope to achieve its furthest objectives in 1941. Instead, the goal would be to weaken the Soviets and secure positions from which to complete operations in 1942.
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Despite a critical shortage of fuel and supplies, Kleist's First Panzer Army began its attack on Rostov on 5 November and achieved good initial success, advancing eighteen miles to the east. Two days later, however, torrential rains paralyzed all movement and gave the Soviets time to regroup and prepare their defenses. Kleist could resume the attack only on 17 November, after the rains had given way to temperatures as low as –8°F. Rostov fell three days later, but an enemy counterattack was already in the works. Soviet armies moved to reclaim Rostov on the twenty-second, putting such heavy pressure on Kleist that he was forced to abandon the city on the twenty-eighth. The psychological impact was marked on both sides: this was the first time the Germans had been forced out of a key city by a well-orchestrated Soviet counterattack.
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Since neither troops, supplies, nor operational assistance was available,
a withdrawal of the armored army from the hard-won Don crossing was inevitable, a proposition unthinkable to the OKH, whose directives were now so completely unrealistic as to border on the ludicrous. Hitler agreed that Army Group South no longer had the mobility or the strength to mount any further attacks but considered the location of a winter defensive line to be of the utmost importance. He objected to Rundstedt's proposed withdrawal to a position running from Taganrog along the Mius to the mouth of the Bakhmut and demanded that the retreat from Rostov be halted farther to the east. Although both Rundstedt and Kleist regarded Hitler's intermediate position as completely untenable—the army group commander remarking that the order could not be carried out—through a series of miscommunications Hitler received the impression that Rundstedt was openly defying his wishes. At 2:00
A.M
. on 1 December, therefore, the Führer relieved the field marshal of his command and replaced him with Reichenau, ironically the army commander most vocally critical of any offensive operations. Later that day, Reichenau telephoned with the news that the Russians had broken through and requested permission to withdraw to the line originally proposed by Rundstedt. Hitler granted Reichenau's request. On the second, Hitler flew to Kleist's headquarters to see the situation for himself. There, not only did he realize that Rundstedt had been correct in his assessments, but he also learned of the full sequence of events. He exonerated both Rundstedt and Kleist of any blame but did not reinstate the former; such an action would have been an admission of his own error. Reichenau's earlier assessment had been correct: an attack with exhausted troops who could not be supplied was irresponsible.
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Even had the logistic organization been a model of efficiency, however, German forces would have faced dire straits that autumn. A study by General Thomas's War Economy and Armaments Office concluded in early October that deliveries from the United States and Great Britain would to a great extent offset the lost industrial production of western Russia while the Germans could do little to interrupt the flow of such goods. At the same time, Thomas also made it clear that only the capture of the oil regions of the Caucasus along with the industrial areas of the Urals and Donets, targets hundreds of miles distant, would lead to a considerable weakening, but not necessarily a collapse, of the Soviet war economy. Thomas thus shattered Hitler's key assumption, that a seizure of western Russia would necessarily cripple the Soviet economy, although the Führer refused to believe this analysis. The Soviets had lost so much material, he asserted, that it would take the democracies five
years to replace it all; in any case, the Russians were beaten, and the campaign in the east had “essentially finally been decided.”
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If this sobering assessment of Soviet capabilities was not depressing enough, by October it had also become obvious that the German armaments industry could not satisfy the most pressing needs of the front. The German war economy suffered from two serious deficiencies, both of which had been aggravated by the failure to win a quick victory: a shortage of manpower and a lack of vital raw materials. Because of the extensive losses on the eastern front, in the autumn more young men had to be drafted for the army, while many skilled laborers in reserved occupations were also sent to the front. This resulted in a serious shortage of workers in the armaments industry that the Germans attempted to remedy by employing more women and older men. The only really effective solution, however, was to use Russian prisoners of war. Not until the very end of October, however, did Hitler drop his racial and ideological objections to the employment of Russian labor within Germany. On 31 October, he ordered the greatest possible exploitation of Russian labor, but, for most prisoners of war, this change of policy came too late. Amazingly, even as economic officials hoped that the serious labor problems could be overcome by deploying a large number of the 3 million Soviet prisoners, they seemed unaware of the fact that most of these men were either dead or physically unable to work. By German estimates, only 200,000 could be used immediately, as most of the others were “unfit for employment owing to typhus and malnutrition.” Goering, as head of the Four-Year Plan, should have had more than a passing interest in providing suitable workers for the German armaments industry. Instead, he joked about the plight of Russian prisoners of war, telling Ciano in November, “Hunger among Russian prisoners had reached such an extreme that . . . it was no longer necessary to send them under armed guard [to the rear]. It is enough to put at the head of a column of prisoners a camp kitchen . . . ; thousands and thousands of prisoners trail along like a herd of famished animals.” The situation did not begin to improve until the spring of 1942, when Hitler ordered that Russian prisoners be given enough to eat.
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Soviet prisoners of war were, in fact, among the first to feel the full brunt of Nazi racial policy; of those taken in 1941, few survived. In the first six months of the war, the Germans captured some 3.3 million Red Army soldiers, of whom barely a million were still alive by the end of 1941, with less than half of those in sufficiently good physical condition eventually to be employed as workers. Given the assumption of the Nazi leadership that success in the larger struggle against the Anglo-Saxon
powers depended on maintenance of solid morale at home, which in turn hinged on the provision of near-peacetime levels of nutrition, the food supply of the east had to be ruthlessly exploited. The logic of the hunger policy meant that countless millions of people in the east had to starve: the first to do so were Soviet prisoners of war. From the start, preparations for handling prisoners had been inadequate, deliberately so. Since the Soviet Union had signed neither the Hague nor the Geneva conventions on the treatment of prisoners, German authorities issued orders even before the invasion to disregard these standards of treatment. Reports from the summer of 1941 indicated that Red Army prisoners of war received daily rations as low as “20 grams of millet and 100 grams of bread without meat” or “100 grams of millet without bread.”
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By August, the consequences of this systematic neglect had become obvious. “News from the east is terrible again,” wrote Helmuth James von Moltke, later one of the leading figures in the German resistance to Hitler, in an August 1941 letter to his wife. “Again and again one hears reports that in transports of prisoners or Jews only 20 percent arrive, that there is starvation in the prisoner-of-war camps, that typhoid and all the other deficiency epidemics have broken out.” In the autumn, the military leadership launched a propaganda campaign opposing the humane treatment of Soviet prisoners of war. German troops were urged to avoid “false” sympathy for the starving and were reminded that “every item of food that is granted to the prisoners . . . must be taken from relatives at home or from German soldiers.” Since many Russians were already undernourished when they were captured, it was not surprising that thousands perished during the forced marches from the front. Some camps reported that only a fifth of prisoners arrived alive on transports; many desperate prisoners tried to survive by eating bark, leaves, and grass. In Minsk, where over 140,000 prisoners were kept in an extremely small area, men killed each other for a piece of bread or a drop of water.
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Conditions, and the mortality rate, became catastrophic in the autumn. The great encirclement battles netted the Germans hundreds of thousands of malnourished captives, most of whom were immediately sent off in columns on long marches lasting days or weeks. Those who dropped out along the way were simply shot, while the unlucky ones who survived found themselves confined in appalling conditions behind barbed wire in huge open-air camps that lacked even the most rudimentary accommodations. Already in a state of extreme exhaustion, the prisoners lived in the most primitive manner, with only holes dug into the ground or rude sod houses as shelter. In a rear-area camp near Rzhev supporting the Ninth Army, 450 people were shoved into one-story
barracks measuring thirty-six by seventy-two feet. Death was endemic since there were only two latrines for eleven thousand men. Prisoners subsisted on bark, leaves, grass, and nettles, with occasional instances of cannibalism reported. One German soldier noted with shock that many Soviet prisoners carried human body parts with them in order to have something to eat, not surprising since watchdogs received fifty times the rations of a Soviet prisoner of war. Mortality rates soared as men suffering from malnutrition succumbed to infectious diseases and hunger-induced epidemics.
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Despite this, in late October General Wagner, the army quartermaster-general, ordered a reduction in rations for those prisoners unable to work. This, coupled with the onset of severe winter weather, resulted in skyrocketing death rates, sometimes as much as 1 percent per day. Since army officials forbade the transporting of prisoners in anything but open railcars, large numbers, perhaps 20 percent of the total, now froze to death en route to camps. Even when the army relented and allowed them to be transported in closed but unheated cars, the effect, in the brutal Russian cold, was little different. Since these catastrophic conditions also existed in camps in the Reich, the mass deaths of Soviet prisoners of war was not due to ignorance or incompetence. To the Nazi leadership, it was axiomatic that Germans and Russians could not both be fed; the former would, thus, be supplied at the expense of the latter, regardless of the consequences. In a particularly macabre episode, beginning in December 1941 wounded Soviet prisoners were simply released into the civilian population because they had become “an unnecessary burden on the supply situation.” The result was that, during the extraordinarily harsh winter of 1941–1942, thousands of former prisoners, “who appeared to be almost emaciated, living skeletons, with festering, stinking wounds,” wandered among the local population.
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An earlier, mid-July decision meant a more immediate death for untold thousands of Soviet prisoners. That month, representatives of the OKW and the RSHA agreed that politically and racially “unacceptable elements” among the prisoners should be separated out of prisoner-of-war camps by special SS units and murdered. Over the course of the next few years, this action resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners. All these actions, of course, were from the outset stamped by Nazi racial and political ideology and fit seamlessly into the war of annihilation. On the eve of the invasion, Hitler had demanded that German troops be prepared to take extraordinary measures to exterminate the enemy mercilessly and totally. As events illustrated, many officers and men of the Wehrmacht possessed the necessary qualities to carry out
their Führer's wishes. It was, however, a Pyrrhic victory since Russian soldiers quickly came to realize that they had no alternative but to fight on, thus strengthening their resolve to resist.
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