The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (23 page)

indecision. On July 3, having regained his nerve, he gave a stirring speech that depicted the battle in the starkly racial-nationalist language that became com- mon during the rest of the German- Soviet war: “ The enemy is cruel and merciless,” he told his countrymen. “He wants to restore the power of the landowner, re- establish Tsarism, and destroy the national culture of the peoples of the Soviet Union…and turn them into the slaves of German princes and barons.” In re- sponse, the Soviet people must be defiant, militant, courageous: “ There should be no room in our ranks,” he snarled, “for whimperers and cowards, for deserters and panic-mongers. Our people should be fearless in their struggle and should selflessly fight our patriotic war of liberation against the Fascist enslavers.”
8

These bold words did nothing to stop the German on- slaught. The Germans surrounded and destroyed whole Russian armies, and took hundreds of thousands of prisoners, many of whom were shot or penned in and left to die. On June 28, the Germans seized Minsk and took 300,000 prisoners; on July 16, Smolensk fell, along with another 300,000 prisoners; in early September the Germans surrounded Leningrad and were poised to swallow the city. The huge numbers of soldiers who were surrendering evidently alarmed Stalin, who on August 16, issued Order No. 270, denouncing the “pan-

ic and scandalous cowardice” of some officers and soldiers. The order directed all military personnel to shoot anyone unwilling to fight to the death; the wives of captured officers were henceforth to be imprisoned.
9
But such threats had little initial effect against the en- circling panzer divisions. In mid- September, the Ger- mans captured Kiev, and half a million Soviet soldiers surrendered. Millions of people fled the advancing armies, adding huge waves of refugees to the general chaos. Vasily Grossman, one of Ehrenburg’s fellow war correspondents for Red Star, described the scenes he saw near Orel, three hundred miles south of Moscow:

I thought I’d seen retreat, but I’ve never seen anything like what I am seeing now, and could never imagine anything of the kind. Exodus! Biblical exodus! Vehicles are moving in eight lanes, there’s the violent roaring of dozens of trucks trying simultaneously to tear their wheels out of the mud. Huge herds of sheep and cows are driven through the fields. They are followed by trains of horse-driven carts, there are thousands of wagons covered with colored sackcloth, veneer, tin. In them are refugees from Ukraine. There are also crowds of pedestrians with sacks, bundles, suitcases. This isn’t a flood, this isn’t a river, it’s the slow movement of a flowing ocean, this flow is hundreds of meters wide. Children’s heads, fair and dark, are looking out from

the improvised tents covering the carts, as well as the biblical beards of Jewish elders, shawls of peasant women, hats of Ukrainian uncles, and the black-haired heads of Jewish girls and women. What silence is in their eyes, what wise sorrow, what sensation of fate, of a universal catastrophe!
10

On October 2, the German army turned its focus to- ward the seizure of the biggest prize: Moscow. The city was bombed and shelled. Millions of panic-stricken residents fled, piling their belongings and families into wheelbarrows, private cars, buses, taxis, carts, fire en- gines, or anything with wheels. Official offices set about burning their archives and the air filled with black ash; the government transferred most of its offices five hun- dred miles eastward to Kuybyshev (Samara), though Stalin stayed behind. (He was obliged to set up an office in the Moscow subway, as the city had failed to prepare for the possibility of German air raids by building ad- equate shelters).
11
He declared martial law; looters and “panic-mongers” were shot on the spot. Stalin called on Marshal Georgi Zhukov, who had been directing the defense of Leningrad, to organize of the defense of Moscow. Citizens, mostly women and boys, were forced to dig antitank trenches. Soviet reinforcements from the Far East were thrown into the battle. The October weather turned foul and wet, leaving attackers and de-

fenders to struggle in the sticky mud that slowed their movements. A bitter struggle for the capital ensued, with threats of reprisals handed out to Soviet officers who did not stand firm. As ever, the Russians resorted to powerful words to rally their peoples. Ilya Ehrenburg captured the essence of the fight when he wrote, in late October, that “the war is changing its character now, it’s becoming as long as life, it’s becoming the odyssey of a people. Now everyone understands that it is a question of Russia’s fate—whether Russia will exist or not.” He boldly concluded: “we will survive.”
12
Stalin too roused his people to fury: on November 6, in celebrating the anniversary of the October Revolution, he defied the German claims to superiority: “ These people without honor or conscience, these people with the morality of animals, have the effrontery to call for the extermi- nation of the great Russian nation…Very well then! If they want a war of extermination,” he declared, “they shall have it!”
13
Yet the Germans were a mere ten miles from Moscow, and on November 17, Stalin was forced to give orders for a scorched-earth policy: everything that could be of any value to the invaders must be de- stroyed. Villages, crops, homes, were now set ablaze by retreating Red Army units.
14

The Germans failed to seize Moscow, and in the end failed, just, to destroy the Red Army. The Germans had

overextended their lines and underestimated Soviet resilience; they spent too much of their resources in gobbling up thousands of square miles of the Ukraine, when they should have concentrated all their efforts on Moscow; they took too many casualties in the drawn- out battles around the big cities, and finally were be- ginning to run low on ammunition and supplies; the weather, first rainy, then bitterly cold, hampered re- supply and logistics, and took the speed and mobility away from the panzer spearheads. In total, Hitler lost 250,000 soldiers killed, 500,000 wounded. Yet perhaps the most important element in the German failure was the amazing ability of the Red Army to recover from the appalling losses between June and December—2.6 million soldiers killed, three million soldiers taken prisoner—and to continue not only to fight but to go on the offensive. Soviet war leaders managed to find more men and get them to the front (ordering death for any man who retreated), and the Soviet war economy con- tinued to produce arms, drawing upon the resources of thousands of plants and factories that had been moved and rebuilt in the east with astonishing rapidity.
15
Now it was the turn of the Germans to be surprised. On De- cember 5, Stalin threw a counterattack of half a million men at the German positions, which pushed the invad- ers back some two hundred miles. It was not a general rout, but the threat to Moscow had ended, and the war

looked set to bog down into a bloody stalemate: just what Hitler could not afford.

The counteroffensive of December and January was decisive in the military history of the war, not only because it blunted the German attack, but because it drew back the curtain on German occupation policy in the east. In the towns and villages that the Germans had occupied, and which had now been liberated by the fighting, the Red Army soldiers came across aston- ishing atrocities that served to fire up their own sense of outrage and quickened their desire for vengeance. Town after town had been ransacked and set ablaze. Captured partisans had been brutally tortured and publicly hanged. Food stores had been stolen, livestock and horses killed or sent west, the land savaged. Gal- lows had been erected in every public square. In the town of Klin, which the Red Army liberated in mid- December, a journalist went to inspect the damage the Germans had wrought. Much of the city was shattered, burnt by the retreating soldiers. Yet for this journalist, and presumably for his readers, it was the desecration of a great cultural monument that left the deepest im- pression. The composer Tchaikovsky had lived here, and his home had been turned into a little museum. The Germans used the house as a toilet, relieving themselves on the floor. They ripped up floorboards for

firewood, and threw priceless manuscripts and books on the ground. “ They burned music and books, tram- pled old photographs with dirty boots, pulled portraits down from the walls…. Empty cans and cognac bottles littered the room.” Excrement stained the floors and walls. “A herd of crazed pigs could not have filthied the house the way the Germans had.”
16

It is telling that, in the midst of unspeakable human carnage and death, a writer for the Red Army news- paper would spend an entire essay on the destruc- tion of single small home that had once belonged to a Russian composer. The writer, Yevgeny Petrov, clearly felt that such behavior perfectly described the hea- then, uncultured, and animal qualities of the German invaders: a race of beasts, no more. Indeed, Russian war correspondents frequently deployed a bestial ver- nacular when describing the enemy. The Germans be- came, variously, hordes, vultures, mad dogs, cannibals, jackals, wolves (and, when retreating, sheep), snakes, beetles, and grubs. If not animals, they were likened to gangsters, hangmen, degenerates, pygmies, bandits, sadists, and devils. This language came from the pe- riod of the Bolshevik Revolution, when it was directed at capitalists and the bourgeoisie; in 1941, these terms seemed apt indeed to describe the predatory Germans. Yet by dehumanizing the Germans, Soviet war writers,

who wept over the tattered manuscripts of Tchaikovsky, were themselves laying the ground for a ferocious ret- ribution against the German invaders. Rabid beasts or pestilential locusts deserved only death and extermi- nation. “ This is a very grim war,” a captain told jour- nalist Alexander Werth. “And you cannot imagine the hatred the Germans have stirred up among our people. We are an easy-going, good-natured people, you know, but I assure you…I have never known such hatred be- fore.”
17

Though the battle of Moscow had been won, the situ- ation facing the Soviet Union at the start of 1942 was extremely grave. Millions of soldiers had been killed or taken prisoner, and most of the large cities of the western part of the country were under German oc- cupation, as were the food-producing regions of the Ukraine. The war economy had been badly disrupted by the invasion, and had to be rebuilt from scratch in the distant east, without the great assets of coal, steel, iron, aluminum, and copper that now lay in German hands. Moreover, the Germans had only been bloodied in the great December-January counteroffensives; they were hardly beaten. Along an immense front line, the war settled into a violent, brutal slugging match that still favored the better-armed, better-trained Germans. To the north, Leningrad was surrounded and cut off. The

city became a symbol of a martyred people, apparently condemned to suffer a slow, irreversible death. Three million people were trapped there, freezing and hun- gry; a million of them would die. Along the southern front, the Germans scored huge victories at Kharkov, Sevastopol, Voronezh, Rostov, and Krasnodar. On July 28, 1942, Stalin issued another of his periodic threats to his own people: “Not one step back!” he roared. “If we retreat any further we are digging our own graves and letting our Fatherland go to the dogs. It is there- fore time to end the retreat.” The means for doing so were typically brutal: soldiers who retreated were to be arrested and enrolled in penal battalions; and military police units were set up behind the lines with orders to fire at any Soviet troops that retreated.
18
Yet by August, the Germans were across the Don river, and pushing toward Stalingrad on the Volga.

There, at long last, the line held. “How the Red Army survived in Stalingrad,” writes Richard Overy in his ex- cellent survey of the Russian- German war, “defies mil- itary explanation.” The city was a dull, flat industrial center spread out twenty miles along the western bank of the Volga. If the Germans took it, they could place a choke hold on the supplies of oil and American lend- lease aid moving into Russia from central Asia and Iran. But of course the symbolic value attracted Hitler

even more: the city, once known as Tsaritsyn, had been the setting for heroic defenses against the White Rus- sian armies in the civil war, and none other than Stalin himself had then directed the defense of the city. For this reason, as John Erickson put it, Stalingrad “drew Hitler like a magnet.”
19

The Germans seemed to have all the advantages. On August 23, Stalingrad was hammered by a huge Luft- waffe bombing raid that set the city alight and killed 40,000 citizens. The same day, the German Sixth Army and Fourth Panzer Army, a quarter of a million men altogether, under the command of General Friedrich Paulus, reached the banks of the Volga, thereby sur- rounding the city. The defenders were pushed back to a narrow slice of the riverbank about twelve miles long and about a mile wide. They had their backs to the Volga, across which supplies could still come, though the pitiful barges that traversed the river were under constant and effective German artillery and air attack. The city, blackened and ruined by the initial bombing attack, became the setting for horrific street-to-street and hand-to-hand fighting. Every conceivable ruse and tactic of urban fighting was used by both sides, from snipers to infiltration to tunneling and mining and nighttime assaults, while artillery and air attacks filled the skies with shrieking missiles. For all of Sep-

tember and October until November 12, the Germans slowly chewed their way, foot by foot, into the city, pouring in men and materiel to try to push the Soviet defenders into the river. Their commitment to take the city at all costs proved their undoing, for on Novem- ber 19, General Zhukov unleashed a massive encircl- ing attack that had been under preparation since mid- September: a million men, secretly deployed well to the north and south of the city, knifed past and around the German armies laying siege to Stalingrad, and fell on their flanks. In four days, 330,000 German and Ro- manian soldiers were surrounded in a massive pocket from which they tried and failed to fight their way out. Over the next eight weeks, the Red Army tightened the noose around Paulus’s surrounded divisions, and pum- meled them to pieces. Hitler refused to allow them to surrender, and instead promoted Paulus to field mar- shal in the hopes of inspiring greater resistance. But the next day, on January 31, 1943, Paulus’s headquarters was overrun, and he was taken prisoner. So too were 90,000 German soldiers. One hundred and fifty thou- sand Germans died in the losing fight for Stalingrad. But the harvest of death had been far greater for the Soviets. They lost 47,000 killed and 650,000 wounded. Here was an apocolyptic bloodbath.