Hitler’s Soldiers: The German Army in the Third Reich [Paperback ed.] 0300228805, 9780300228809

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BEN H. SHEPHERD

HITLER’S SOLDIERS THE GERMAN ARMY IN THE THIRD REICH

HITLER’S SOLDIERS

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HITLER’S SOLDIERS THE GERMAN ARMY IN THE THIRD REICH

BEN H. SHEPHERD

YALE UNIVERSIT Y PRESS NEW HAVEN AND LONDON iii

Copyright © 2016 Ben H. Shepherd All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers. For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact: U.S. Office: [email protected] Europe Office: [email protected]

yalebooks.com yalebooks.co.uk

Typeset in Minion Pro by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd Printed in Great Britain by Gomer Press, Llandysul, Ceredigion, Wales Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Shepherd, Ben (Ben H.) Title: Hitler’s soldiers : the German army in the Third Reich / Ben H. Shepherd. Description: New Haven : Yale University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references. LCCN 2016003731 | ISBN 9780300179033 (cloth : alkaline paper) LCSH: Germany. Heer—History—World War, 1939–1945. | Soldiers—Germany— History—20th century. | Germany. Heer—Military life—History—20th century. | World War, 1939–1945—Germany. | Command of troops—History—20th century. | World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns. | World War, 1939–1945—Occupied territories. | World War, 1939–1945—Atrocities. | War crimes—Germany—History—20th century. | BISAC: HISTORY / Military / World War II. | HISTORY / Europe / Germany. | HISTORY / Military / Strategy. Classification: LCC D757.1 .S54 2016 | DDC 940.54/1343—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016003731 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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CONTENTS

Preface Introduction

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Part I: Military Ascent, Moral Decline 1 2

The Army in the New Reich, 1933–36 The Road to War, 1936–39

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Part II: Triumph and Hubris 3 4 5 6 7 8

Poland, 1939–40 ‘Sitzkrieg’, 1939–40 The Greatest Victory, 1940 Occupying the West, 1940–41 Planning Operation Barbarossa, 1940–41 Barbarossa Unleashed, 1941

45 61 72 89 110 134

Part III: Losing the Initiative 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Barbarossa Undone, 1941 Resistance and Reaction, 1941: Western Europe and Southeast Europe Winter Crisis, 1941–42 The Desert War, 1941–42 Southern Russia and Stalingrad, 1942–43 Faces of Occupation, 1942–43: The Soviet Union Faces of Occupation, 1942–43: Western Europe and Southeast Europe The Initiative Lost, 1943

161 190 203 219 242 274 297 317

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Part IV: Beleaguered 17 18 19 20 21

Takeover in Southern Europe, 1943–44 The Eastern Front, 1943–44: The Ostheer Retreats The Eastern Front, 1943–44: The Frontsoldat Endures Italy, 1943–44 Fortress Europe Breached, 1943–44

341 356 376 397 418

Part V: Defeat, Destruction and Self-Destruction 22 23 24

The Greatest Defeat, 1944 The Army ‘Recovers’, 1944–45 The Army Self-Destructs, 1945 Conclusion

435 468 497 521

Acknowledgements Appendices Appendix I: Table of Acronyms Appendix II: Glossary of German Phrases Appendix III: Table of Equivalent Ranks Appendix IV: Figures Appendix V: Maps Notes Bibliography Index Notes on Illustrations

537 539 541 543 548 550 554 555 604 616 636

PREFACE

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his book tells the story of the German army under the Third Reich. It examines the army’s military performance, its relationship with the Nazi regime, its role in military occupation, and its culpability in war crimes. The end of the Cold War saw the release of a vast range of primary sources. This more comprehensive base of information, now made available to western historians, enabled better informed debate in this area, creating an outpouring of new scholarly literature on many aspects of the second World War. The present book is the first general history of the German army under the Third Reich to draw upon this new literature and the new perspectives it provides. The book takes a narrative approach to its subject. The first two chapters deal with the period 1933 to 1939. These chapters primarily consider the context of, and build-up to, the main period on which the book focuses, that of the Second World War itself, during which all four of the book’s concerns play central roles. Literature and sources In keeping with its broad-based approach, the book draws primarily upon English-language and German-language secondary literature. For illustrative purposes, it also draws upon select primary sources: official German army documents, drawn from the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv (BA-MA) in Freiburgim-Breisgau; excerpts from soldiers’ letters (Feldpostbriefe) from the Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte (BFZ), excerpts of both from various published collections, and various former officers’ memoirs. The selection of official documents consists largely of i) material produced by the German high command, and by larger field formations, concerned with the troops ideological and ‘nationalpolitical’ instruction, and ii) material produced by a selection of German army

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divisions, together with the corps and army-level commands to which they were subordinate, covering issues such as combat, logistics, and the determinants of troop morale. Divisions were selected on the basis of the comprehensiveness of archival material pertaining to them, be they official sources or Feldpostbriefe. The divisions were also selected with a view to assembling a small representative sample of different types of army division. Hence a small number of divisions frequently appear at various points in the text. The division that combines the most extensive sample of Feldpostbriefe with extensive official material is the 12th Panzer Division. Most of the letter excerpts that the book utilises are drawn from the Sterz collection at the BfZ. The main reason for this was accessibility, for an extensive series of excerpts from the letters has been selected, type up and listed by division, all for the benefit of researchers. Excerpts from the Schnepf collection, which the BfZ acquired only recently, have also been used. This is the first book to utilise material from this particular collection. Use of terms The book refers to the German army as ‘the German army’ and not as the Wehrmacht. Whilst many works emply the term ‘Wehrmacht’ to denote the German army, this is actually incorrect. ‘Wehrmacht’ directly translates as Armed Forces, and technically speaking the Wehrmacht comprised not just the army, but also the air force (Luftwaffe), navy (Kriegsmarine), and, from 1944, the Waffen-SS. The term ‘Wehrmacht’ is thus used to denote Armed Forces throughout the book. Other branches of the Armed Forces do receive attention throughout the book, however. This is particularly the case with the Waffen-SS, which fought and operated alongside the army but also rivalled it for resources; and also with the Luftwaffe. The Luftwaffe features in the story in three respects. Like the Waffen-SS, it was both a fellow armed service for the army but also a rival for manpower and resources. In addition, high-ranking Luftwaffe officers frequently acted as commanders of ground forces at army group level and above. In this capacity, they commanded large numbers of army troops. Online resources Every effort has been made to provide fully accurate information throughout the text and endnotes. Where any remaining updates are made following the book going to press, these are listed in an online document accessible via the following link: http://www.gcu.ac.uk/gsbs/staff/drbenshepherd/. This link also provides access to scanned examples of primary sources used in this study, for the benefit of readers interested in investigating such sources further.

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eventy years after its collapse in 1945, the Third Reich remains a potent source of public and media fascination. Images of the Nazis’ annual rallies at Nuremberg can still impress and horrify. The spectacle of Nazi troops and weaponry, orchestrated in vast torch-lit arenas, seems to capture the essence of Fascism: mindless obedience, servility and military power. These same images, images that were designed to energize the German people and frighten Nazism’s opponents at home and abroad, were staple ingredients of newspapers and newsreels around the world during the 1930s. For foreign observers, to experience this display and to then see and hear the subsequent news reports as Germany overran its weaker neighbours during the late 1930s and early 1940s was to imbibe a terrifying impression of a country with an unstoppable war machine and an insatiable desire for expansion. The fear, for European peoples especially, was: ‘When will they turn on us?’ Images designed to inspire the susceptible and terrify opponents even now have the power to chill and, for many people, prompt the question: ‘How could they lose?’ It was the German Wehrmacht, or armed forces, that achieved the Third Reich’s spectacular military conquests. And above all other branches of the Wehrmacht – the air force (Luftwaffe), the navy (Kriegsmarine) and, later, the militarized formations of the Waffen-SS – it was the German army that made the largest contribution. The German army, then, was the main sword arm of the Third Reich, of its national leader, Adolf Hitler, and of the ideology they espoused. Erwin Rommel, the most famous German general of the Second World War in Western eyes, affirmed this truth when he wrote in December 1938 that ‘the army of the Wehrmacht is the sword of the new German worldview’.1 The army and the Nazi movement did not come together overnight. Yet Nazism and militarism were ideal partners, for warfare held a central place in Nazi ideology. This was due above all to the ideas of Hitler himself.

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There remains debate over just how important the different formative stages of Hitler’s early life were to the development of his ideas. Certainly, two stages that did lay foundations for Hitler’s racist, Social Darwinist worldview were his time as a struggling artist-cum-drifter in Vienna between 1908 and 1913, and his service as a soldier of the Royal Bavarian Army on the western front between 1914 and 1918.2 Germany’s defeat in 1918, the political chaos that blighted the country in its aftermath, and its subsequent humiliation in the Treaty of Versailles were events that all radicalized Hitler further. In 1919 he joined the German Workers’ Party (DAP), shortly after it wins renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), becoming its principal speaker before ascending to the post of party chairman in 1921. Hitler’s writings during the 1920s espoused the then widely held belief that Germany had lost the war not in the field, but owing to a ‘stab in the back’ inflicted by civilian leaders, Communists, and Jews. Yet Hitler believed war was necessary not only to right this grave wrong, expand German territory and restore Germany’s status as a great power. Rather, these were all means to the same end to which Hitler believed wars should ultimately be fought – revitalizing and strengthening the German race itself. According to Hitler’s worldview, war was a biological and political necessity if the German nation and German people were to thrive in an international order characterized by a perpetual struggle between races for domination. ‘I believe,’ he proclaimed in a speech of May 1928, ‘that I have enough energy to lead our people whither it must shed its blood, not for an adjustment of boundaries, but to save it into the most distant future by securing so much land and space that the future will receive back many times the blood shed.’3 From the late 1920s onwards, economic crisis assailed the already fragile stability of the liberal democratic regime, the Weimar Republic, that had governed Germany since its defeat. From 1930 onwards, Hitler and the Nazis amassed enormous electoral support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles, appealing to Germans’ sense of economic grievance, and promoting panGermanism, anti-Semitism and anti-Communism. As Germany plunged ever deeper into political and economic chaos, Hitler became a key player in the country’s politics. He coopted a large chunk of Germany’s conservative elite, the military leadership included, becoming chancellor in 1933 and then national leader, Führer, the following year. During the late 1930s, Germany flaunted its expansionist intent by seizing Austria and much of Czechoslovakia. These acts of annexation brought growing international concern and condemnation, but no military consequences. However the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 finally led Britain, France and the dominions of the British Commonwealth to declare war on Germany. In May and June 1940, the German army trounced the armies of France, Britain and their allies in the west in a triumphant campaign, achieving in six

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weeks what its First World War predecessor had failed to achieve in four years. The army’s tactical and operational performance completely outclassed that of its opponents, inflicting upon them the most spectacularly swift military humiliation in modern European history. Thanks to its efforts, together with those of the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine, the Third Reich now dominated the European continent. Only Britain, together with her Empire and Commonwealth, continued to resist in an apparently hopeless struggle. The superiority and triumph of German arms were conveyed in countless photographic and newsreel images. Among the most famous were German infantry storming across the River Meuse, Panzers scything through opposition, Hitler and his entourage on a victorious sightseeing tour of Paris, and jubilant crowds hailing massed ranks of smartly attired troops in the Berlin victory parade of July 1940. Hitler’s army appeared invincible. This astounding record of military success goes a long way to explaining why the German army of the Second World War still enjoys a reputation as the most proficient, effective fighting force to take the field of modern land combat. At the peak of its powers, so runs popular belief, the army combined peerless standards of training with unmatched expertise in armoured warfare. The high point of the German army’s achievements encompassed not only the swift crushing of France in the spring of 1940, but also – despite immense logistical challenges and a numerically superior enemy – the conquest of most of the European Soviet Union during the second half of 1941. Erich von Manstein, widely regarded as the army’s finest general of the Second World War, attributed these achievements in his postwar memoir, Lost Victories, to ‘the decisive factor’ of ‘self-sacrifice, valour and devotion to duty of the German fighting soldier, combined with the ability of commanders at all levels and their readiness to assume responsibility. These are the qualities which won us our victories.’4 Whether or not this was the decisive factor, the causes of the army’s success warrant serious investigation. Before asking how the German army eventually lost, then, we need to ask how it won, so repeatedly and spectacularly, during the early years of the war. The qualities of the German soldier, and the ability of commanders at all levels to think and act independently and effectively, were indeed key to German victory. Yet further essential preconditions for the German army’s victories lay in its size, organization and technology. In every one of these respects, moreover, the German army also possessed weaknesses as well as strengths. It was the sum of the far greater weaknesses of its early opponents that further helped it to prevail. All these factors, too, then, warrant careful examination. The question of why the German army eventually lost is two questions in one: why the army’s string of triumphs was gradually brought to a halt – a process that was complete by the end of 1942 at the latest – and why it then

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suffered a succession of catastrophic defeats. The emphatic downturn in the army’s military fortunes was apparent to all but its most delusional commanders by the summer of 1943, as defeats in North Africa and the Mediterranean, and most dramatically in the Soviet Union, placed it irrevocably on the defensive. The culprit, according to the postwar memoirs of Manstein and other former generals, was Hitler. When it came to Hitler’s military failings, Manstein had plenty to say. What Hitler had lacked, Manstein claimed, was ‘all sense of judgment regarding what could be achieved and what could not’. Manstein also blamed ‘his overestimation of the power of the will. . . . In the face of his will, the essential elements of the “appreciation” of a situation on which every military commander’s decision must be based were virtually eliminated. And with that Hitler turned his back on reality.’5 Manstein wasn’t finished there, for he also claimed that ‘this overestimation of his own willpower, this disregard for the enemy’s resources and possible intentions, was not matched by a corresponding boldness of decision. The same man who, after his successes in politics up to 1938, had become a political gambler, actually recoiled from risks in the military field.’6 Manstein partly put this down to Hitler’s fears for his own prestige, his refusal to give up any piece of land he had captured, and a mind-frame that ‘conformed more to a mental picture of masses of the enemy bleeding to death before our lines than to the conception of a subtle fencer who knows how to make an occasional step backwards in order to lunge for the decisive thrust’.7 According to Manstein, Hitler had also debilitated Germany’s military performance thanks to a chaotic highcommand structure, one he himself had imposed to create ‘clashes deliberately in order that he alone should at all times have the decisive say’.8 Valid as all these criticisms may be, they contain not the slightest suggestion that the generals themselves, or the army’s own basic structures and premises, may have been at least partly to blame for its degradation and eventual destruction. The German army was in fact debilitated not just by Hitler, but also by economic and organizational weakness, and by the German army leadership’s regard – or rather disregard – for logistics, intelligence and grand strategy. In time, the effects of all this fatally damaged the German army at the operational level. Much of the blame lies not just with Hitler, but also with the generals themselves. And just as the weaknesses and mistakes of the German army’s early opponents were crucial to its early victories, so is it also important to examine closely the causes of Allied strength during the war’s latter half. Manstein and other former generals attributed the Allies’ eventual victory to their increasingly overwhelming superiority in manpower and material, particularly their strength in the air. But the causes of eventual Allied victory were more complex than simple brute force.

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A third question is how and why the army maintained its momentous struggle for so long. From 1943 onwards, the German army executed a fighting retreat of unparalleled tenacity, against an increasingly formidable Red Army in the east and a Western Allied coalition powered increasingly by the economic and military might of the United States. It did so to the mounting ruin of itself, its homeland and Nazism’s victims across occupied Europe, long after all plausible hope of victory had evaporated. For Manstein, the ‘how’ was attributable to those same qualities of self-sacrifice, valour, devotion to duty and proficiency of command that had won the German army its victories: ‘these alone enabled us to face the overwhelming superiority of our opponents.’9 Yet these are only part of the answer. That the Allied armies did not advance as smoothly and proficiently as they might have done was also due to their own deficiencies. The German army was also able to fight on against them for darker reasons about which, unsurprisingly, Manstein had similarly little to say. Just one example was the increasingly terroristic discipline that it inflicted upon its own troops. All three of these initial questions concern the German army’s fighting power. For many years after the Second World War, the talk among military scholars in the west was all of the superior qualities that the German army and its troops had displayed between 1939 and 1945. Much of this was due to the Cold War, a setting in which both German-speaking and English-speaking scholars, students and general readers of military history had an interest in eulogizing the German army. This was because the army of the liberal democratic federal republic of West Germany, the Bundeswehr, was both a NATO ally and the successor to the German army of the Third Reich. Moreover, the former German generals who now eulogized their old army had had experience of fighting in the Soviet Union. Readers in the west thus took an even greater interest in what they were saying. They took a greater interest still because the ex-generals were conveying a version of the German army’s story during the Second World War that maintained that quality could prevail against quantity. This, of course, was an attractive message for readers in the west, not to mention NATO planners, who contemplated the possibility of a conventional war between NATO and the numerically superior forces of the Warsaw Pact.10 The end of the Cold War brought the slaying of some scholarly sacred cows, and new opportunities for scholars to tap into a wealth of material in the countries of the former Soviet bloc. For these reasons, it provided an opportunity to scrutinize the performance of the German army and its Allied opponents in a more detailed and objective way. As to ‘why’ the overwhelming bulk of the army continued to defend a criminal regime leading its country to destruction, rather than turn on that regime as a few courageous officers eventually tried to do, Manstein’s memoirs said

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very little. At his trial for war crimes in 1949, he stated: ‘no senior military commander can for years on end expect his soldiers to lay down their lives for victory and then precipitate defeat by his own hand.’11 But that was saying very little also. And with reason – for swathes of the army, most prominently the bulk of its senior commanders, were to varying degrees culpable for the Nazi regime’s crimes. Following the Third Reich’s collapse in 1945, newsreels that had once conveyed German military might now conveyed the criminal horrors perpetrated by the Third Reich in pursuit of its goals. In addition to its peerless reputation as a fighting force, another element of the German army’s popular image is as a body of men who managed to distance themselves from these horrors: men who fought for their country out of patriotic duty rather than Nazi fanaticism, remaining aloof from the Nazi regime and untainted by its crimes. It was claimed, in other words, that while Germany’s reputation was blackened by the Nazis – and particularly by their ideological and criminal vanguard, the SS – the German army had generally fought correctly and retained its honour. Certainly, a multitude of former generals, including Manstein, insisted in their postwar memoirs that they had had no truck with those ‘utterly unsoldierly’ criminal orders with which the regime had furnished them – orders that, had they then transmitted them to their own men, ‘would have threatened not only the honour of our fighting troops but also their morale’.12 The fact that this viewpoint was generally swallowed in the west after the Second World War was partly due, again, to the Cold War. During the 1960s, however, West German scholars began to challenge this viewpoint just as a new young generation of West Germans was challenging the Nazi associations that it believed had tainted its parents’ generation. The end of the Cold War brought a further surge in scholarship. This was due, again, to the opening of new archival sources. From the 1980s, moreover, the wartime generation began to retire from the scene, and in more recent years is increasingly departing from it altogether. Although it is poignant to contemplate the passing of a generation, where the scholarship of the Third Reich is concerned it has undoubtedly created space for freer debate and more critical study. Decades of more recent scholarship have now demolished the image of the ‘clean Wehrmacht’.13 No serious account of the German army during the Nazi period can any longer avoid concluding that it was complicit in abhorrent crimes; indeed, it was also callously ruthless in the pursuit of its own military objectives. This was not only because Nazi ideology permeated the German army far more extensively than Manstein and his ilk would ever have admitted; it was also because of a mixture of utilitarian calculation, ruthless military attitudes and sometimes brutalizing pressure of circumstances. Yet it is also important to acknowledge and investigate why some soldiers, units and higher commands were more

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complicit than others, and indeed how far and why others still may not have been complicit at all. All this raises a fourth imperative question – of how the army could behave in this way, and of how far.This introduction, then, has so far posed four broad questions concerning the conduct, achievements and failures both moral and military of the German army under the Third Reich. The answers lie in examining the history of the army and its personnel, their strategy and operations, their tactics and technology, and their morality and ideology. But a prefacing question concerns just what caused the German army to align with Nazism in the first place. This question underpins all the others, and it is one to which this introduction now turns. *** The officer corps of the German Empire of 1871 to 1918 was dominated by the highly conservative Prussian officer corps. Prussia had been the most powerful of the individual kingdoms that unified as the new empire following the Franco-Prussian War. The traditional mainstays of the Prussian officer corps were the sons of Protestant clerics, of senior civil servants, and above all of the aristocratic and landowning Junker class, whose ancestral home lay in the lands east of the River Elbe. The ethos of the imperial officer corps made three particular demands upon its members. The first was unquestioning loyalty to the state. The second was that officers disengage from the complexities of German politics and society. Such an environment inevitably made officers more distrustful of any group, particularly of Jews and socialists, who were outside the conservative nationalist mainstream. The cultural climate of the officer corps did not entirely muffle more enlightened attitudes: for instance, the officer corps of the comparatively liberal southern German state of Württemberg was more accepting of Jews.14 But within such a socially and politically conservative institution as the wider officer corps, liberal influences were marginal at most. Extending membership of the officer corps to ‘patriotic’ bourgeois circles during the late nineteenth century did not change this. All this sapped officers’ moral and political faculties to such an extent that, when they finally contemplated either aligning themselves with Nazism or recoiling from it, most of them fatefully chose the former. The third demand, which followed directly from the second, was an almost myopic focus on soldiering. Here, the arch-conservatives who headed the officer corps made one concession to change: they knew a modern mass army needed a large, technically proficient officer corps. After all, the growth of industry, technology and populations across Europe during the decades before the First World War meant that armies were becoming not just larger, but also – with

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advances in firepower, transportation and communications, not to mention the rise of air power – more technocratic. Indeed, this was a major reason why the officer corps needed to widen its membership. But it nevertheless remained fixated on the narrow business of soldiering – tactics and operations – albeit in a technically updated form. This made it proficient at winning small engagements, battles and indeed campaigns. But officer cadets were taught little, if anything, about the wider means by which wars are won – economic resources, logistics, international diplomacy, high-level intelligence and, above all, strategy. It would prove to be a particular conceit of the German officer corps, during both world wars, to believe that its superior tactical and operational performance could overcome Germany’s acute strategic weaknesses. Those officers holding senior command positions in the Third Reich broadly belonged to one of two generations. The elder, born primarily during the 1870s and 1880s, hailed largely from the conservative aristocratic mainstay of the Prussian officer corps. The future senior commanders who belonged to this group predominantly served as junior and middle-ranking staff officers during the First World War. The second group, much larger and less aristocratic in origin, had mainly been born during the 1890s, and mainly served on the front line during the First World War. This was the Frontkämpfergeneration.15 The war had a profoundly hardening effect upon both groups of officers. The effect was especially profound among those who experienced the industrialscale carnage of the western front in Belgium and northern France. The staff officers of the First World War also drew broader but equally harsh conclusions as to how future wars were to be won, believing that victory in modern industrialized war would go to whichever side most effectively mobilized the sum total of its technological, economic and human resources. This included not just military personnel but also civilian populations, whether in Germany or in its occupied territories. Such officers embraced the ‘total’, allencompassing nature of modern industrialized warfare as surely as their frontline colleagues did. They also came to ascribe central importance to effective propaganda, iron discipline on home front and battlefront, and suppression of ‘defeatist’ elements. Indeed, many of the officers who would later hold high command under the Third Reich perceived acute danger from defeatist elements, whether real or imagined, as they sought scapegoats for the gruelling stalemate that bedevilled Germany’s war effort from late 1914 onwards. Such officers were overlooking Germany’s fundamental strategic handicap: for most of the First World War, the Germans were condemned to a fight on two fronts against an enemy coalition with superior economic resources, and to a British naval blockade that denied them resources and precipitated widespread starvation among the German population. They also overlooked the failings of the German high command, a body whose inept grasp of high-level

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logistics, international diplomacy and, above all, strategy worsened Germany’s plight immeasurably. For instance, the high command’s reckless effort to blockade Britain with a campaign of unrestricted submarine (U-boat) warfare hit US shipping hard, and played the greatest role in antagonizing the United States into the war on the Allied side in 1917. Similarly inept were the high command’s efforts to overcome the British blockade through more effective production and distribution of food. In unison with right-wing civilian nationalists, army officers’ search for scapegoats for Germany’s waning military fortunes fixed not upon their own high command, but upon civilians: democratically minded domestic politicians whose commitment to the war they deemed too feeble; socialists who, they believed, were actively undermining the war effort; and Jews. Many officers believed Jews were disproportionately represented among both politicians and socialists, and – echoing centuries-old forms of anti-Semitism – that Jewish businessmen, black-marketeers and swindlers were capitalizing on the human misery the war was causing. A particularly noxious belief that arose following the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia was that Jews were the puppet masters of Bolshevism. Indeed, the political condition of Germany during the second half of the First World War hardened anti-Semitic prejudices across much of German society, as well as within the officer corps. The idea that an infernal ‘Jew-Bolshevik’ intelligentsia ran the new revolutionary Russian state was one to which many army officers and, even more ardently, the Nazis would eventually subscribe. Yet the list of enemies in the German army officer’s fear-filled imaginings during and after the First World War went beyond Jews and Bolsheviks. Fighting on the eastern front also intensified many officers’ anti-Slavic prejudices. These were founded on centuries of antagonism between Germans and their eastern neighbours, and more recently on fears about the expansion of tsarist Russia. Indeed, it was these fears that had helped to impel the German high command towards war in 1914. AntiRussian sentiments were further stoked by the atrocities the Russian army inflicted upon German civilians during its brief invasion of East Prussia in August 1914. Many officers also experienced the ‘primitive’ conditions of the westernmost territory of Russia at a formative time in their lives though direct, violent encounter with the ‘backward east’ between 1915 and 1918.16 *** When Germany was forced to sue for peace in November 1918, virtually all the officers who would eventually comprise the leadership of Hitler’s army believed that the soldiers of the Kaiser’s army had been undone by defeatism, spread by cowardly or seditious groups on the home front. But this was putting

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the chicken before the egg, for German civilians had lost their will to continue the war largely because they knew that the German army, though still fighting in autumn 1918, was ultimately going to be undone on the front line. Regardless, the ‘stab in the back’ became a potent myth among army officers, as indeed it did among the nationalist right in Germany. Such officers were hardly going to be enamoured of the new democratic regime, the Weimar Republic, which replaced the now defunct imperial regime. Then, following national defeat and the Kaiser’s abdication, Germany was shaken by violent upheaval. Radical left-wing forces inspired by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia tried to seize power across central Europe. The vulnerable new Social Democrat-led government in Germany was forced to call upon units of the army and the right-wing vigilante Freikorps (Free Corps) to suppress the revolts that had sprung up in various German towns and cities. This they did with brutal efficiency and often, in the case of the Freikorps, bloodthirsty abandon. It was during this period that the contempt for socialism that many officers felt turned to hatred of Bolshevik revolution. Moreover, such was the link many drew between Jews and the far left that it further hardened their anti-Semitic prejudices. Coupled with the harsh lessons many officers drew from the First World War was the bitter resentment they felt at the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, imposed upon their defeated nation in 1919. The treaty imposed massive financial reparations, reduced Germany’s land mass, demilitarized the Rhineland – thus forbidding Germany from stationing troops along much of its western frontier – stripped Germany of its overseas colonies and saddled it with all the guilt for causing the war in the first place. For the army, three of the treaty’s terms were especially galling. The army was reduced to a dwarf 100,000-man body, the Reichswehr. The elite General Staff, which had directed Germany’s military policy and operations since 1871, was disbanded. Finally, much of the ancestral land of the traditional Junker officer class was ceded to the newly created state of Poland, or cut off from the rest of Germany by the new ‘Polish Corridor’. The Reichswehr leadership did not just seethe helplessly at all this. It looked to a time when Germany would be able once more to rearm openly, create a larger, genuinely powerful army and win back its position of power on the international stage. The Reichswehr leadership asserted, and indeed the civilian Defence Ministry accepted, that war would be a necessary part of this process. In 1926, the Truppenamt (Troops Office), a new planning body designed covertly to continue the work of the old General Staff, issued a memorandum stating that Germany would need to reoccupy the Rhineland, and secure the return of Upper Silesia, the Saar and the Polish Corridor. This, the Truppenamt predicted, would precipitate conflict with France, Belgium, Poland, Czechoslovakia and possibly Italy – all necessary, it believed, if

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Germany was to reclaim its continental and eventually world-power status. These immensely ambitious plans were based on the assumption that, with the right conditions and the right means, Germany could win a series of short, sharp wars over its opponents, just as Prussia had done during the wars of German unification between 1864 and 1871. The plans took no account of how powerful this potential array of opponents might be, or of the alliances it might forge with major powers further afield. This, then, was a further legacy of the stab-in-the-back myth. The myth absolved Germany’s military leadership from needing to engage with the broader strategic reasons for its defeat in the First World War. In doing so, it also made the military leadership more likely to identify the wrong formula, founded on the German army’s tactical and operational talents, for future victory.17 *** The particular lessons the Reichswehr drew from Germany’s defeat led it to devise a three-pronged strategy, one that it believed would enable the country to triumph in a future war. The first prong involved developing new tactics and weaponry, and, through them, concepts for successful military operations. The Reichswehr leadership was determined covertly to circumvent the Versailles Treaty’s armaments provisions. Indeed, among other things, it established a clandestine armoured-warfare training school in collaboration with the Red Army of the Soviet Union. The conservative Reichswehr and the Communist Red Army may have seemed strange bedfellows, but they found common cause as the armies of nations that were international lepers for most of the 1920s. Denied contact with other foreign armies, they pooled their expertise and resources to considerable mutual benefit. The Reichswehr was also determined to secure the best possible human material for its officers and rank-and-file troops, train them to exceptional standards, and attain a level of tactical and technical proficiency unmatched by any other army of the period. The drastic reduction in the size of the German officer corps would greatly aid this endeavour. Though its expansion before and during the First World War had reduced the dominance of the aristocratic Junker landowning class, its diminished size now enabled it to be socially selective again. Much more importantly, it now became not just a social elite, but also a professional one. This smaller, streamlined officer corps was able to jettison a great deal of dead wood and become more proficient in the process. The rise of the military technocrat, the ‘specialist in mass destruction’, was an international phenomenon during the interwar years, but it was especially pronounced within the Reichswehr. Smarting from defeat and humiliation, the

xx

INTRODUCTION

Reichswehr officer corps felt particularly spurred to excel at its craft, the more so as it absorbed a new generation of young officers eager for professional advancement.18 The Truppenamt was at the forefront of these efforts. Over the course of the 1920s, it aimed to combine the technical and organizational prowess of the old General Staff with the destructive power of industrialized, mechanized warfare. Forbidden by the Versailles Treaty to develop an armoured force, the Reichswehr initially practised armoured manoeuvres using wooden contraptions mounted on tricycles. Comical though the spectacle was, the intention was deadly serious, and the Reichswehr eventually developed an unrivalled proficiency in armouredwarfare tactics. The most important Reichswehr armoured manoeuvres took place in 1928, 1930 and, in particular, 1932. On the latter occasion the Reichswehr outdid all those other armies who actually possessed an armoured-warfare capability when its manoeuvres experimented with radio as a means of improving command and control. This would greatly improve communication on the battlefield and eventually give the Panzers a clear advantage over their armoured opponents during the first two years of the Second World War.19 The essence of the Reichswehr’s armoured doctrine was not new, but born of older principles embedded in the Prussian-dominated military culture of the German army. Prussian military doctrine had been developing since the seventeenth century, reaching its apogee in the wars of German unification. It preached rapid and aggressive manoeuvre, concentrated attack on the opposing army’s weak spots, and breakthrough to defeat and destroy its forces decisively. The revolution in defensive firepower and fortifications during the years before the First World War had rendered attack prohibitively costly, and precipitated the stalemate of the western front. Offensive-minded Prussian-style operational doctrine was now rendered temporarily redundant. But, by 1917, Germans units in the field were developing a new suite of tactics, storm-troop tactics, which would restore movement and effective offensive firepower to the battlefield. It was to these tactics that the Truppenamt would turn during the 1920s. Storm-troop tactics were a bottom-up phenomenon, originating in German victories on the Italian and eastern fronts in 1917. A brief but heavy bombardment, mixing gas shells and high explosives, aimed at maximum disruption by targeting enemy headquarters and communications rather than the troops in the trenches. The storm troops then raced forward in independently operating squads, bristling with wire-cutters, light artillery, light machine guns, grenades, and flame-throwers – equipment designed to enable them swiftly to break into and then through the enemy’s lines.20 Such tactics succeeded not simply because the storm troops were effective, but because they had coordinated the storm troops with artillery, follow-up infantry and pioneers in an effective combinedarms operation. Disastrously for the Germans, storm troops were unable to

INTRODUCTION

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achieve decisive victory on the western front in the spring and early summer of 1918. They faced well-resourced British, French, and US forces who coordinated their defence with great skill and resilience. The Allies then steadily pushed the Germans back through the late summer and autumn, in a series of combined-arms operations of their own. These operations, unlike those of the Germans, were able to employ tanks and air power. But Reichswehr armoured warfare specialists of the 1920s believed that replacing storm troops with tanks (Panzers), combining them with air power and other troop branches, and coordinating the whole according to Prussian-style operational art, could prove a recipe for rapid and decisive victory in the future. To ensure that both its frontline officers and more senior commanders would be equal to the task of conducting offensive mobile warfare, Reichswehr doctrine and training promoted Auftragstaktik, or ‘mission tactics’, a concept that had suffused Prusso-German military thinking since the nineteenth century.21 Although contemporaries and historians debated, and continue to debate, the exact meaning of the term, a recent extensive study drew on German military training manuals from the period 1871–1914 to maintain that Auftragstaktik was a complex approach, with several interdependent elements, to the increasingly unpredictable conditions of the battlefield. The officer who practised it successfully would be decisive, independently minded and offensively minded. This did not mean, however, that he could defy orders and lunge in any direction he wanted. He would lead his own men with authority, but would also obey his superiors, recognize the wider operation’s goal and, perhaps most importantly, be able to judge and respond to a particular battlefield situation in whatever way served that goal most effectively.22 Manstein conveyed this particular idea effectively in his memoirs, writing: ‘the granting of such independence to subordinate commanders does, of course, presuppose that all members of the military hierarchy are imbued with certain tactical or operational axioms. Only the school of the German General Staff can, I suppose, be said to have produced such a consistency of outlook.’23 Officers could get the mix wrong, though they often got away with it and indeed sometimes plucked victory from peril; a classic example was General Hermann von François, a corps commander in the German Eighth Army, which fought the Russian invasion of East Prussia in 1914. During that campaign, François first managed, through his own recklessness, to ruin a careful plan to ambush and destroy the Russian First Army, but then played a starring role in annihilating the Russian Second Army.24 The Second World War would produce numerous examples of such commanders. Essentially, however, the officer who mastered Auftragstaktik was the officer who employed the right mix of all the aforementioned qualities to suit the particular battlefield situation.25 Reichswehr doctrine also applied Auftragstaktik to defensive

xxii

INTRODUCTION

warfare. Such was the Reichswehr’s numerical weakness that it could not hope to hold its first line of defence were Germany to be invaded; instead, it instructed delayed resistance, essentially a fighting retreat from the first line of defence that would take advantage of the troops’ manoeuvrability and flexibility.26 The second element in the Reichswehr’s strategy was to get the nation physically organized for war, particularly through effective control of the economy. Of course, putting the German economy on a war footing could not be done covertly, and the Versailles Treaty hugely restricted what it could achieve on this front.27 But this reality did not stifle the Reichswehr’s ambitions, and in 1924 it established a Wirtschaftsstab (Economic Staff). The Wirtschaftsstab’s task was to forge strong links with German industry and make plans to develop a true ‘defence economy’, or Wehrwirtschaft.28 Finally, the Reichswehr leadership sought the kind of national leadership that would fortify the morale of both troops and civilians over the course of a future war. This, like the true ‘defence economy’ officers longed for, required a regime that genuinely shared the Reichswehr’s goals and stood ready to mobilize the German people in their cause. For almost all officers, the Weimar Republic was not that regime. By contrast, Wilhelm Groener, a former general and then national defence minister between 1928 and 1932, angered rightwing circles by accepting in principle that the country’s democratically elected leaders could control the Reichswehr’s development and deployment. Groener also took a much more measured view than most senior officers about what the Reichswehr’s goals should be: he believed Germany should avoid ventures beyond its military means and recognized that it needed international cooperation in order to survive. Groener particularly recognized that, because Germany was reliant upon US loans to pay off its war reparations, it was hardly going to be in a position to fight France.29 But when the USA withdrew its loans during the economic crisis that followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929, any hope for internationalist moderation from the Reichswehr leadership evaporated.30 As unemployment in Germany eventually soared to eight million, the Weimar party system was pulled to both extremes as the Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or KPD) and the Nazis soaked up votes from the mainstream parties, and Communists clashed bloodily with the brown-shirted ‘storm troopers’ of the Nazis’ paramilitary wing, the SA (Sturmabteilung, or Storm Section). Governments became increasingly untenable and short-lived, however many emergency decrees they might try to govern by. As the economic and political mayhem unfolded, the Reichswehr leadership steamed ahead with its three-pronged strategy. Now more than ever, it wished to see liberal democracy in Germany killed off and replaced with a regime more akin to itself. Initially, the Reichswehr leadership considered a conservative authoritarian

INTRODUCTION

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dictatorship, but it knew such a dictatorship required sufficient popular support to govern. This was something the Reichswehr could not command, either on its own, or through the short-lived authoritarian chancellorships of Franz von Papen and General Kurt von Schleicher in 1932. By this time, the Reichswehr leadership was contemplating an alliance with the only political party that appeared to have the potential both to command popular support and to stop the Communists – the Nazis. Many of the Reichswehr’s conservative-minded most senior officers had serious doubts about the Nazi movement, particularly the left-wing economic radicalism of some of its elements and the brutal, unruly thuggery of the SA. Yet the Nazis had long trumpeted their belief in militarizing German society. And a growing number of senior officers were coming to believe that the Nazis offered the only viable key to gaining mass support, mobilizing the German people for war, inspiring popular feeling among the vast majority and suppressing any dissenting minority that might spread the kind of defeatism that had allegedly wrecked the German war effort in 1918. Such officers reasoned that, under the Nazis, the German people would be inculcated with militaristic values, support the army’s expansion and technological renewal, and imbibe the nationalistic spirit necessary for Germany to wage a future war successfully. Lieutenant General Werner von Blomberg, writing as Hitler’s minister for war eighteen months after the Nazis took power, proclaimed: a commitment to nationalism is the clear basis of all military activity. We must not forget, however, that the ideology that shaped the new State is not only nationalist but National Socialist. National Socialism derives the basis for its actions from the vital necessities of the whole nation and from the duty of working together for the totality of the nation. It is founded on the idea of the community of blood and fate of all Germans. There is no dispute about the fact that this law is and must remain the basis for the service of the German soldier.31

Finally, on 30 January 1933, the aged Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, the last president of the Weimar Republic, appointed Hitler chancellor of Germany. More conservative senior officers were reassured that Hitler had at least agreed to head a cabinet whose members were mostly traditional conservatives themselves – men who, presumably, would keep the Nazis’ more extreme elements in check. Events would, of course, unfold in a vastly different way.

1. Adolf Hitler at the 1937 Nuremberg rally with, among others, Minister for War Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg (centre front); Blomberg’s number two, Lieutenant General Walther von Reichenau (front row right); and General Werner Freiherr von Fritsch, commander-in-chief of the army (second row left).

2. A Panzer Mark II on exercise in 1938.

3. German infantry fighting in Warsaw, September 1939.

4. Hitler at a military situation conference during the Polish campaign with Colonel General Wilhelm Keitel (centre), chief of the Armed Forces High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht); and Major General Alfred Jodl (left), the OKW’s chief of operations.

5. Ludwig Beck.

6. Walther von Brauchitsch.

7. Franz Halder.

8. Heinz Guderian.

9. Fedor von Bock.

10. Gerd von Rundstedt.

11. German troops passing through the Arc de Triomphe, Paris, in June 1940, at the close of the triumphant six-week campaign in the west.

12. German soldiers fraternizing with civilians during the early months of the German occupation of France in the summer of 1940.

13. German artillery firing upon Red Army positions during the opening weeks of Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941.

14. Soldiers of a propaganda company distributing copies of the frontline newspaper Der Stosstrupp (The Shock Troop) during the advance into the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941.

15. German soldiers tormenting an elderly Jew in the Ukraine during the first stage of Operation Barbarossa.

16. A German soldier with an MG 34 machine gun guarding a mass of Red Army soldiers taken prisoner after the battle of Kiev in September 1941.

17. German soldiers on the eastern front during the winter of 1941–42.

18. Soldiers of the Deutsches Afrika Korps (DAK) in desert conditions.

19. German infantry fighting in Stalingrad during the autumn of 1942.

20. German soldiers, among a crowd of onlookers, taking photographs of hanged Soviet partisans.

21. Erwin Rommel.

22. Albert Kesselring.

23. Friedrich Paulus.

24. Erich von Manstein.

25. Walter Model.

26. Ferdinand Schörner.

27. German troops entering British captivity at the end of the North African campaign in Tunisia, May 1943.

28. Panzers advancing in the face of Soviet artillery fire during Operation Citadel, Kursk salient, July 1943.

29. A column of German mobile assault guns (Sturmgeschütze) proceeding down a road in Thessalonika, Greece, in 1944.

30. On the eastern front, during 1943 and the first half of 1944, the German army subjected the regions through which it was retreating to a massive, indiscriminate scorched-earth campaign.

31–33. Although the German army was on the defensive from 1943 onwards, its resilience was boosted by the large quantities of high-quality small arms that German industry was producing.

34. A German infantry officer on the eastern front, 1943.

35. Josef Goebbels, Reich Minister for Propaganda, greeting a mixed group of soldiers from the army and the Waffen-SS, March 1944.

36. German troops in the mountainous environment of the Italian campaign of 1943–45.

37. German troops apprehensively scanning the skies for Allied aircraft, Normandy, summer 1944.

38–40. Three of the high-quality, if not entirely flawless, Panzer models that the German army deployed, often to great effect, against the advancing Allies during 1944. From top to bottom: the Tiger, the Panzer IV, and the Panther.

41. German troops advancing through the Ardennes during the Wehrmacht’s last major offensive in the west, December 1944.

42–43. Two faces of the German army’s destruction, Germany, 1945. On the left, teenage recruits surrendering, with obvious relief, to the Americans. On the right, American GIs taking down the corpse of a German soldier hanged by his own side for supposed cowardice.

xxiv

PART I

Military Ascent, Moral Decline

1

2

CHAPTER ONE

THE ARMY IN THE NEW REICH, 1933–36

D

uring their first eighteen months in power, the Nazis destroyed the existing German constitution and with it all sources of opposition, real or potential. They began incarcerating opponents and other ‘undesirables’ in a growing network of concentration camps. In June 1934, Hitler wiped out a swathe of political opponents, then declared himself Führer upon President Hindenburg’s death two months later. The army leadership, passively and sometimes actively, aided and abetted this entire process. It also increasingly subordinated itself to the Nazi regime. It did so not just for the military, political and – for some officers – ideological reasons according to which it had allowed the Nazis into power in January 1933, but also because of the phenomenal expansion of the army that the regime brought about. In 1933, the German army was a 100,000-man Reichswehr. By 1936, it contemplated a future wartime force of 2.6 million men, half a million more than the Germany army in 1914.1 Such breakneck expansion transformed it into a true ‘people’s army’, diluted the conservative character of the officer corps and made the army as a whole more subject to National Socialist influence. *** Driving this expansion was Hitler’s hugely ambitious programme of foreign and military policy.2 To the German public and the international community, Hitler presented a forceful yet peaceful image. His objective, he claimed, was to abolish the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, restore to Germany its military power and its rightful place among the great nations, and unify the German-speaking peoples of Europe. He did not publicly reveal – though anyone familiar with his writings of the 1920s would have known it – that these were only the first steps in a foreign-policy grand design of immense, radical

3

4

HITLER’S SOLDIERS

ambition. The inspiration for this design lay in Hitler’s Darwinian conviction that waging war and conquering foreign territory for living space (Lebensraum) were essential to the German people’s continued vitality, and to their victory in the struggle for domination among nations and races. An essential precondition of this, Hitler believed, was to indoctrinate the German people with National Socialist thinking and a correspondingly warlike mentality. The Nazis would found a racial community, a Volksgemeinschaft, that – at least according to the rhetoric – would cut across all social and economic divides and unify all Germans fulfilling the right racial, social and political criteria. Nazi social and economic policies and Nazi propaganda, Hitler proclaimed, would engender pride in the Volksgemeinschaft and in the German nation. In particular, the Nazi regime would indoctrinate future German soldiers through propaganda, youth groups, the education system and the new Reich Labour Service (Reichsarbeitsdienst, or RAD), while the armed forces would complete the process by training and further indoctrinating the troops themselves.3 More generally, the Nazis would work to instil a militaristic, warlike pride within the German people as a whole. The Nazis certainly had cause to feel optimistic on this particular score, for they were operating against a long-standing backdrop of popular militarism across much of German society. The Weimar years had seen a proliferation of veterans’ associations and a mushrooming of bestselling war-orientated literature. Hitler foresaw the next stage of German expansion as making central Europe a key area of German domination and economic exploitation. This would require a final reckoning with France, which had constructed an alliance system across central Europe – a reckoning that would also bring the even greater long-term benefit of destroying France as a great-power rival. This in turn would clear the way for the most important phase of Hitler’s foreignpolicy programme, the push to capture Lebensraum and vast economic resources in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. And there is much to indicate that Hitler would not have stopped there – that he would have used the economic resources of a German-dominated Europe as a basis for truly global power. This would have brought Germany into war with the United States and, if she refused to engage with the new global order, with Britain also. Three of the most important army figures during the period between 1933 and 1936 were Lieutenant General Werner Freiherr von Fritsch, commanderin-chief of the army from February 1934; Major General Ludwig Beck, chief of the Truppenamt between 1933 and 1935, before becoming head of the new army General Staff; and, most importantly, General von Blomberg, whom Hitler appointed minister for war in his new cabinet from January 1933. In May 1935, Blomberg became commander-in-chief of the armed forces, the Wehrmacht.

THE ARMY IN THE NEW REICH

5

Fritsch was a socially detached bachelor, immensely diligent and respected. He also detested Jews and democrats, making his feelings clear since the early 1920s with a directness remarkable for a serving senior officer. In 1924, he had written that ‘Ebert (the president of the Republic), pacifists, Jews, democrats . . . and the French are all the same thing, namely the people who want to destroy Germany.’4 All this, of course, made it easier for him to work with the Nazis. Beck was a strong advocate of rearmament and national expansion, but he was also shrewd. During the early years of the Third Reich, while the rebuilding German armed forces remained too weak to contemplate offensive action, he was instrumental in planning defensive strategies in the event of war, and in promoting Germany’s defensive security in the meantime. A first step towards creating greater defensive security, though it necessitated some nose-holding by officers of Junker stock, was the non-aggression pact Germany signed with Poland in 1934.5 In the longer term, Beck believed Germany should rearm enough to deter Britain and France from trying to prevent a new German hegemony in central Europe. He was also convinced of France’s long-standing intention to keep Germany in a permanent state of subjugation, writing that France ‘stands in the way of every extension of German power . . . and should for this reason be seen as Germany’s firm enemy’.6 Only later would the far more alarming scale of Hitler’s foreign-policy ambitions become clear to Beck. Blomberg was not an out-and-out Nazi, but he was prone to romantic, indeed naïve, political notions, and was easily influenced. A visit to the Soviet Union in the 1920s, for instance, left him highly impressed by Communism. Here, he perceived, was a totalitarian political system that had granted its armed forces enormous power and prestige. ‘It [the Red Army] lacked for little,’ he later recalled, ‘and I nearly came home a consummate Bolshevik.’7 Blomberg became convinced that Nazism would do the same for the armed forces in Germany, and set about assimilating the armed forces with the Nazi regime with an almost giddy enthusiasm. Among other things, he ordered that military uniforms display Nazi symbols, military personnel greet one another with the Nazi ‘Heil’ when in civilian attire and the army hold weekend courses to train SA storm troopers as border guards.8 Blomberg would take assimilation to even greater lengths from 1935 onwards. Spurring on Blomberg in all this was Colonel Walther von Reichenau, the ambitious head of Blomberg’s ministerial office. On his appointment to the latter post in February 1933, he declared: ‘our path leads forwards, which means: join the new state and claim the position that is our due!’9 Many of Reichenau’s army colleagues scorned his bumptious manner and thrusting careerism. They also derided the obsequious enthusiasm with which Blomberg applied himself to enmeshing the army in the new regime, nicknaming him the Gummilöwe, or ‘rubber lion’.10 Yet while many in the army’s senior officer corps

6

HITLER’S SOLDIERS

harboured reservations about the Nazis, precious few behaved accordingly. Indeed, many aristocratic officers derided Blomberg’s closeness to the largely middle-class Nazi leadership not because they were anti-Nazi, but because they were snobs.11 At this stage, only a small number of senior army officers were committed Nazis. But many aged between about forty and fifty, most of whom had been Frontkämpfer during the First World War, were particularly exhilarated at the opportunities the new regime offered.12 Technically minded officers such as Lieutenant Colonel Heinz Guderian, aged forty-four when the Nazis came to power, were dazzled at the prospect of developing and commanding an expanded, technically cutting-edge army. The Nazis’ espousal of all things military and the fact that their own leadership numbered so many war veterans also helped them win the approval of many Frontkämpfer among the senior officer corps. Harder to convince were the older, most senior officers, such as General of Infantry Gerd von Rundstedt and Lieutenant General Fedor von Bock. Such men belonged to that group, born between the mid-1870s and mid-1880s, who had served mainly as staff officers during the First World War. As a socially homogeneous group, hailing predominantly from aristocratic Prussian stock, they held the officer corps’s traditionally conservative attitudes. They longed for Germany to regain its great-power status, but were deeply uneasy about the Nazi movement’s revolutionary elements. On the other hand, they tended from the start to blame the regime’s early ‘excesses’ on extreme Nazi elements, rather than on Hitler. Moreover, older officers, like many of their younger colleagues, already widely shared Nazi ideology’s disdain for Slavs, Bolsheviks and Jews, even if they felt it less intensely than the Nazis themselves did. When, in February 1933 and again in February 1934, Hitler conveyed to the army’s most senior officers his long-term ambition of waging a racial war in the east, they did not take his utterances especially seriously. Major General Maximillian Freiherr von Weichs would go on to command army groups in southern Russia and the Balkans during the Second World War. He transcribed Hitler’s words at the February 1934 meeting, later recalling: ‘the soldier was used to taking a politician’s words not entirely seriously. To justify his political aims he often selects aspects that don’t correspond to his true intentions.’ But neither did the generals recoil from the vision Hitler was presenting to them. According to Weichs, ‘these sinister intimations were probably soon forgotten’.13 And the officer corps as a whole did believe the Nazi regime would infuse the German people with the unified, militaristic spirit that it would need to stay the course in a future war. Hitler also directed at the officer corps copious rhetoric about the army being the second pillar of the new Nazi state, alongside the Nazi Party. Officers lapped this up, acceding to a process that would in fact see the army increasingly subordinated to the Nazi regime.

THE ARMY IN THE NEW REICH

7

The officer corps deluded themselves all the more easily because of the resources showered upon the army, and upon the armed forces generally, during the regime’s early years. The first key announcement as to how much cash was to be allocated to rearmament seems to have come in June 1933. The annual allocation of about 4.4 billion Reichsmarks eclipsed the hundreds of millions the Weimar Republic had spent annually.14 And 4.4 billion Reichsmarks was just the start; in 1935, the armed forces’ share of government expenditure rose to 73 per cent.15 Big business bought into the Nazi economic programme, albeit with some reservations, partly because rearmament promised enormous profits and business opportunities, partly because the Nazis had obligingly destroyed the trade unions, and partly because the Nazis were able to manipulate big business by divide and rule, particularly coopting those sections of commerce and industry that had most to gain from rearmament. Initially, rearmament was to be financed secretly through loans, granted by the various large companies that stood to gain from it. Blomberg was allowed to bypass the Finance Ministry, present his demands to a three-man committee and, if he did not get his way, go straight to Hitler. The regime also spent far more on rearmament than on civilian work-creation schemes. Even ostensibly non-military projects had a military use. For instance, the new network of Autobahnen (motorways), on which work commenced soon after the Nazis assumed power, would be able to convey 300,000 troops from east to west within two days.16 From March 1935, Hitler would stop rearming secretly and announce his intentions openly. *** Meanwhile, the Nazi movement faced an internal power struggle, one that would entangle and then taint the army leadership. The struggle was between the leadership of the SA, particularly chief of staff Ernst Röhm, on the one hand, and the army leadership, other conservative elites and Röhm’s rivals in the Nazi movement, on the other. The storm troopers’ thuggery towards the Nazis’ opponents had been immensely useful when the Nazis were campaigning for power. Now that they had reached their goal, however, the storm troopers were becoming a lawless, destabilizing element on German streets. The national conservative bloc, to which the army leadership belonged, was generally unconcerned if the SA assaulted Communists, socialists and Jews. But their rowdiness threatened to get out of hand and destabilize German commerce and local government. The SA leadership, stressing the social in National Socialism, was also calling for radically redistributive economic measures. This undermined Hitler’s appeal to the conservative elites on whose support and expertise he extensively relied during the Nazis’ early period in power.

8

HITLER’S SOLDIERS

As far as the Reichswehr in particular was concerned, Röhm called for the SA to be absorbed into it. This would not only fully militarize the much larger SA, but also enable it virtually to swallow up the Reichswehr. Hitler was well aware of how much this prospect alarmed the Reichswehr leadership. And this was an elite whose professionalism Hitler badly needed if he were to realize his military and foreign-policy goals. Many officers, with socially conservative views commonplace in the west during the 1930s, also deplored the open homosexuality of Röhm and other SA leaders. This concern, however, was secondary to the power-political danger the SA posed. Relations between the two organizations were not entirely antagonistic: many middle-ranking army officers enjoyed good working relations with senior SA men, who were mostly ex-soldiers themselves, over matters of training and border security.17 Overall, however, the Reichswehr leadership regarded the SA with palpable alarm, and as a menace if not to its own existence, then certainly to its power position in matters of national defence. The key individual in Röhm’s eventual downfall was Heinrich Himmler. Himmler commanded the Schutzstaffel, the SS. The SS had been founded in 1925, essentially as Hitler’s personal bodyguard, or Leibstandarte. So loyal did it prove to Hitler that, on the Nazis’ assumption of power, he expanded his bodyguard to regimental size as the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, or LAH. That same year, further SS units raised as guards for the new concentration camps were organized into Totenkopf (Death’s Head) units. Then, in 1934, three regiments of special-service troops, the SS-Verfügungstruppe, or SS-VT, were raised to suppress internal insurrections. Both they and the LAH were fitted out as motorized infantry; eventually, they would form the nucleus of the mechanized divisions of the Waffen-SS (literally, ‘Weapons SS’).18 In 1934, meanwhile, the SS-VT would play a key role in removing Röhm and his colleagues. Himmler, though technically subordinate to Röhm, sought to discredit him in Hitler’s eyes and advance his own ambitions by claiming that Röhm was plotting a coup against Hitler. Given that Hitler was anxious to retain the conservatives’ support and aware of their antipathy towards the SA, Himmler was to some extent pushing at an open door. For his part, Blomberg told Hitler that if he did not restore order and bring the SA back under control, President Hindenburg would declare martial law. To give such demands more traction, Reichswehr intelligence ‘uncovered’ an order from Röhm for arming the SA in preparation for an attack on the army.19 On the night of 30 June 1934, Röhm and other SA leaders were seized by the SS, then murdered either on the spot or over the following days. The purge, known as the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, also wiped out numerous other real or imagined opponents and critics of Hitler’s leadership. Two former

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9

generals – Kurt von Schleicher, Hitler’s predecessor as chancellor, and his aide, Major General Ferdinand von Bredow – were among the slain. These particular killings appalled many army officers. For Captain Henning von Tresckow, the affair strengthened his growing disgust at the Nazi regime, a disgust that had already been brewing with the regime’s assault on the German constitution and its undermining of the churches.20 But other officers, satisfied that the SA had been neutralized, kept their disgust private. Reichenau exploited this sentiment in guidelines for the Reichswehr’s political instruction, issued in 1934, which proclaimed: ‘the Reich Chancellor kept his word when he nipped in the bud Röhm’s attempt to incorporate the SA into the Reichswehr. We love him because he has shown himself a true soldier.’21 Blomberg now directed the army’s troops to view SS men as ‘comrades’. At the same time Himmler was using the power vacuum created by the Night of the Long Knives to buttress the power base of the SS, and extend its control to the state’s police forces, and build up the already existing SS formations as the nucleus of the future Waffen-SS – a body that would eventually rival the army for control of military manpower and resources. Blomberg, in his capacity as minister for war, now authorized numerous measures that aided and abetted this process. Among other things, he gave his approval for the Totenkopf formations to become a division in the event of war. By contrast, the leadership of the army itself tried to delay the development of militarized SS units, restrict the expansion of their training and retain overall control over them. It got its way, but only temporarily.22 In other respects, both Blomberg and the army leadership further rewarded the faith Hitler was placing in them. Following President Hindenburg’s death in August 1934, Hitler merged the offices of chancellor and state president into the new office of Führer. Blomberg and Reichenau now devised an oath of loyalty for the troops to swear to Hitler personally. Though Fritsch and Beck had deep misgivings about subordinating the army to Hitler to this extent, the great majority of officers readily acquiesced in it.23 The oath exemplified how far the military leadership was increasingly prepared to identify itself with the Nazi regime as it sought to consolidate its own position in the new Reich. On the swearing of the oath, Colonel General Wilhelm Heye, a former Reichswehr army head, proclaimed: ‘Adolf Hitler has given us the most soldierly state – a united German Wehrmacht [armed forces] without territorial boundaries and with the unified Army, a unified Luftwaffe, and a unified Navy.’24 After 1945, many former officers would claim that the obligation under which the oath had placed them, and its appeal to their sense of soldierly honour, had prevented them from acting independently of, or against, the Nazi regime. ‘The oath of allegiance was not something we had learned to play fast and loose with,’ maintained Erich von Manstein.25 Yet there is a healthy

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cynicism in suspecting that at least some officers only ‘discovered’ this moral dilemma after 1945 so as to justify their earlier inaction.26 *** The army leadership was also increasingly dazzled by the military possibilities now opening up. In the spring of 1935, the entire army underwent its single most radical transformation under the Third Reich. Hitler publicly declared he was ending the Versailles armaments restrictions, reintroducing conscription, and founding a new and expanded army, navy and air force under the collective name of the Wehrmacht. Among other things, Hitler announced that he intended to build a peacetime force of thirty-six divisions – a fivefold increase in the army’s size.27 The great majority of the new divisions would be infantry divisions. As the army continuously expanded and reorganized over the years before and throughout the war, its infantry divisions would be categorized in different ‘waves’. First-wave divisions would comprise the army’s active peacetime infantry divisions, and would be the most formidable in terms of manpower and equipment. Divisions in successive waves were less generously furnished on both scores. Moreover, their manpower largely comprised different types of reservist of varying degrees of quality.28 From the start, however, the most important and formidable element of all in the army’s evolution would be its armoured force. Not only the army’s composition was transformed, but also its character. A peacetime expansion to thirty-six divisions, even without the army’s likely wartime manpower needs, meant that neither the new army nor its officer corps could remain the socially selective, technocratic institution of the Weimar years. This, Hitler declared, was to be a true people’s army, representing all sectors of German society. A particularly pressing challenge was finding enough suitable officer material. A flood of young recruits and older reactivated officers now entered the corps. Moreover, during 1935 and 1936, 56,000 policemen joined the Wehrmacht, 1,200 of them as officers.29 This measure increasingly blurred the distinction between army and SS, as the latter achieved full control of Germany’s police forces between 1934 and 1936.30 Himmler’s control over the German police was formalized in June 1936; Hitler augmented his title as head of the SS to appoint him Reichsführer-SS und Chef der deutschen Polizei; from then on, the ‘SS and Police’ was officially one organization. The army also endeavoured to recruit officers from among higher-level school students, capitalizing on Nazi ideology’s saturation of the school curriculum. In the later words of Major General Hans Friessner, the army’s inspector of education and training, ‘the Wehrmacht has not just the right, but also the duty, to align all educational and training methods with its demands, and

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thereby secure the best degree of military power’.31 Nevertheless, the army’s recruitment efforts in schools were initially ad hoc; their most pressing concern was simply to pack as many new recruits into the officer corps as possible. Despite all these measures, the army remained underofficered when it went to war, a deficiency that would worsen as the war continued.32 The vast new intake transformed the officer corps’s social make-up. Between 1928 and 1930, nearly two-thirds of officer candidates still originated from the officer corps’s ‘favoured’ aristocratic and upper-middle-class circles. The new officer corps did not entirely embody the people’s army of Nazi rhetoric: between 1939 and 1941, men from aristocratic and upper-middle-class backgrounds comprised a quarter of all candidates. As a proportion of the population, then, they were still overrepresented. But the officer corps certainly reflected the entire swathe of the German middle and upper classes more than before. In particular, the 1939–41 period saw men from extensively pro-Nazi white-collar families rise from a third to 54 per cent of all candidates.33 Though the working class was largely absent, rapidly mounting wartime casualties would eventually change that. But, by the late 1930s, any distinctive, long-established officer ethos was already disappearing. Instead, the Wehrmacht and army leadership sought to ingrain officers and men with a new mentality befitting an army that supposedly embodied the new community to which all politically and racially ‘acceptable’ Germans were deemed to belong. During 1935 and 1936, the Wehrmacht produced numerous publications intended to inculcate officers and men with the importance of the military and political tasks that faced them.34 It was Blomberg, again, who played the largest role. In July 1936, he ordered that any politically unreliable officer be reported to the Gestapo. He assisted the Nazi attack on organized religion, by making church services for the troops optional instead of compulsory. Jews were to be excluded from the officer corps and army, and Blomberg also banned soldiers from marrying non-Aryan women or patronizing Jewish warehouses and shops.35 But Blomberg’s perhaps most far-reaching measure came on 30 January 1936, the third anniversary of the Nazis’ accession to power, when he ordered officer colleges and academies to devote at least two hours per month to ‘national political teaching’. Officers down to company level were to take direct responsibility for such teaching, and also to convey to their men the importance of the ‘unity and community of soldiery and National Socialist ideology’.36 *** Yet only in the final years of the war would the Wehrmacht seek to instil a spirit of true ideological fanaticism into its troops. In 1935, by contrast, Hitler declared himself ‘not concerned that the recruits coming in turn the soldiers

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into National Socialists, but that the army turn the National Socialists coming into it, into soldiers’.37 Therein, however, lay the rub – for many of the ‘ordinary’ Germans who were coming into the army had reason to feel less than effusive about the Nazi regime. It is always difficult to find reliable measures of public opinion under a dictatorship. Nevertheless, the morale reports of the Reich Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD), as well as from the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD) and other non-Nazi organizations in exile, together help to build a semi-reliable picture. Although unemployment largely disappeared under the Nazis, Germans in the main did not feel a surge in personal prosperity, because the German economy’s overwhelming focus on rearmament limited families’ access not just to consumer goods, but also to foodstuffs and essentials. Many lower-middle-class Germans were disgruntled when the Nazis reneged on their pre-1933 promise to break up large department stores in favour of small businesses, and rural Germans were aggrieved when the regime similarly abandoned a pledge to redistribute agricultural land. Many workers resented, at least initially, the destruction of the trade unions and the suppression of wage increases. Religiously minded Germans, particularly Catholics, railed at Nazi attacks on freedom of worship. And Germans across the social spectrum widely despised the arrogance, incompetence and corruption of local Nazi Party officials. Quite apart from anything else, from German unification through the imperial and Weimar eras, Germans had continued to feel a strong sense of local and regional identity, of Heimat. How a local or regional community’s social and religious composition broke down, then, was something that might make it more receptive to Nazism or, by the same token, less receptive.38 Either way, there was a limit to how far the Nazis were able to beget a true, uniform spirit of Volksgemeinschaft among the German people. There was, therefore, also a limit to how Nazified the army’s new recruits were likely to be. Even so, it would be nonsense to conclude that 1930s Nazi Germany was essentially a nation of unenthused grumblers. The disturbing truth is that Nazism integrated Germans much more than it alienated them. This in turn assured the army a flood of recruits who, though they might not be fanatical hardcore Nazis in the main, were well disposed towards the worldview the Nazis propagated and ready to take up arms in its cause. Pernicious antiSemitism was widespread in the west during the interwar years. But in Germany, partly because of developments during and immediately after the First World War, it was more pronounced than in numerous other countries. Mainstream Germans may not have felt as intensely anti-Semitic as the Nazis, but the Nazis did persuade more than enough Germans during the 1930s that there was indeed a Jewish ‘problem’, even if most Germans preferred to see it solved by legislative discrimination rather than brutal terror.39

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Many officers who had hitherto served with the police held authoritarian attitudes strongly in tune with Nazi values.40 More generally, Nazi policies provided plenty for which the bulk of mainstream Germans were grateful. The ‘ordered’ state of German society following the chaos of the late Weimar years, and the restoration of full employment, were successes that the Nazis trumpeted to the utmost via their propaganda machine. Even though the Nazis could not rightly claim full credit for this state of affairs, and full employment was not accompanied by significant wage rises, most ordinary Germans felt personally and economically safer under the Nazis than under Weimar. Mass propaganda media, the education system, youth groups and service in the RAD all combined to instil a ‘feel-good’ attitude based upon this sense of security, together with messages of national pride, unity and purpose. Furthermore, discriminating against Jews and against social and political ‘undesirables’ made ‘mainstream’ Germans feel more integrated; those Germans who met the right social, political and, above all, racial criteria could feel part of a ‘national community’ and enjoy far greater self-confidence than they had a few years previously. In the words of Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, ‘it is no accident that Germans of that generation tend to describe the Third Reich, up until Germany’s military defeat at Stalingrad, as a “great time”. Such people were categorically incapable of experiencing the exclusion, persecution, and dispossession of others for what they were.’41 This attitude did not condition people to wish genocide on the Jews or any other group, but it did help to numb ‘ordinary’ Germans during the 1930s to the discrimination and persecution inflicted upon ‘out’ groups. These groups comprised Jews most prominently, but also religious and political dissidents and an array of supposed social deviants, including juvenile delinquents, homosexuals, prostitutes, alcoholics, travellers, the homeless and the ‘work-shy’. Among Germans who went on to serve in the Wehrmacht, it would not be too much of a leap to argue that being harshly disposed towards such groups, and numb to their suffering, might beget a similar attitude towards civilians in at least some parts of occupied Europe during the war itself.42 There is also every reason to suppose that German youth tended to be more receptive than older age groups to National Socialist messages. This, of course, would have a direct effect upon the main influx of recruits into the army. Depending on their particular age, most of the army’s young new recruits during the Third Reich would already have undergone ideological and militaristic programming in schools, the Hitler Youth movement and the RAD. The Hitler Youth, which comprised the Deutsche Jungvolk for boys aged between ten and fourteen and then the Hitlerjugend – the Hitler Youth proper – for those aged up to eighteen, also provided boys with activities such as hiking, camping and orienteering. Such activities, as well as being enjoyable in their

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own right, enabled German boys to become physically fit and acquire a range of practical skills applicable to soldiering. Just as importantly, the Hitler Youth sought to infuse its members with a strong sense of comradeship. As one former Hitler Youth leader recalled after the war: ‘I was full of enthusiasm when I joined the Jungvolk at the age of ten. What boy isn’t fired by being presented with high ideals such as comradeship, loyalty, and honour?’43 In June 1934, an informer for the SPD in exile described the attitude of German youth: ‘The drill, the uniform, the camp life, [the fact] that school and the parental home take second place behind the community of the young – all this is wonderful. Great times without danger. Many believe that economic paths have opened to them due to the persecution of Jews and Marxists.’44 The RAD was designed to toughen and socialize boys further, weed out any lingering ‘bookish’ tendencies within them, and set them to providing a practical service for the Reich by working on motorway construction and other public-works schemes. The RAD made heavy physical demands on its members. Friedrich Grupe recalled: ‘Early in the morning at 4am out of bed to a long cross country run with early morning exercise, then washing up, breakfast, ceremonial raising of the flag and already by 5am marching to the labour site in work overalls with spades at our shoulders.’ The RAD also aimed to strengthen character, comradeship and cohesion further, and indeed to replicate the Volksgemeinschaft in microcosm. Grupe wrote in his diary in 1937: ‘We’re putting our conception of National Socialism into action: we are all the same in our service for the people, no one has asked his origins or class, whether he is rich or poor.’45 There were also specialist organizations to which many German youths belonged, such as the National Socialist Motor Vehicle Corps (Nationalsozialistische Kraftfahrkorps, or NSKK), which prepared them for future service in particular branches of the Wehrmacht. Further, the very fact that the Wehrmacht existed buttressed the Nazi regime’s popularity among the general public and, consequently, among the army’s new recruits. When Hitler announced conscription, SPD informants noted the widespread enthusiasm this prompted, particularly among the young. Conscription appealed to the militaristic attitudes that much of the public had harboured during as well as before the Weimar years. It also appealed to the view that it ‘does the young fellows no harm if once again they get knocked into shape’, as SPD informants in Bavaria put it.46 It was also another sign that Germany had returned to the ranks of the great powers. From 1934 onwards, the Nazi Party’s annual Nuremberg rally included a ‘Day of the Wehrmacht’, featuring enormous parades and displays of military equipment. Skilled workers felt considerable pride over the armaments they were producing. This was also a further means of cementing the bond between troops and people; as a wartime Panzer manual asserted: ‘For every shell you fire, your father has

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paid 100 Reichsmarks in taxes, your mother has worked for a week in the factory.’47 Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels further promoted the Wehrmacht’s image with a sustained campaign of positive press coverage.48 At the heart of all this was the figure of Hitler himself. Nazi propaganda ascribed to him almost superhuman powers and created a potent ‘Hitler myth’ in the process. It successfully credited him with all the regime’s purported social and economic achievements, and promoted a personal image that enabled him to avoid blame for all the defects of the regime that the German public identified. The deeply integrating effect Hitler would come to have upon many ordinary Germans would reach its zenith in the wake of Germany’s lightning victory over France in 1940, but the groundwork was laid during the early to mid-1930s.49 *** Regardless of which branch of the army soldiers were eventually selected for, their raising and training was the task in the first instance of the Replacement Army (Ersatzheer). The basic operational unit of the army was the division. This was the lowest level of formation that was capable of independent operationallevel combat activity, encompassing as it did combat troops, communications troops and support services. Each of the new army’s divisions contained a replacement battalion that directly undertook the training of new recruits. These were then transferred to a march battalion, which was responsible in turn for transferring them to their ‘parent’ division. Upon arrival at their parent division, the men of the march battalion were distributed across the various regiments. This was also a regionally based system: Reich territory was organized into military districts (Wehrkreise). Divisions were raised within particular Wehrkreise, and their troops could thus expect to go on to serve alongside comrades from the same region as themselves. The system was also designed to ensure that, come wartime, soldiers who were wounded were returned to their old units once they had convalesced. Indeed, each division had its own convalescent home. Because this system was regionally based, it made army units considerably more cohesive.50 The new army retained the Reichswehr’s intensive approach to training. Recruits first completed sixteen weeks of basic training under the replacement battalion.51 Physical standards were exacting, army training particularly priding itself on getting troops to march long distances with full kit. Some training depots took things to extremes; there was nothing unique about a training programme that sought to dehumanize recruits in order to fashion a cohesive force out of them, but some depots subjected their recruits to particular humiliation. According to veterans interviewed after 1945, recruits were sometimes ordered to clean latrines with a toothbrush or – apparently an established

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tradition in the German army – pluck straw out of excrement. There was no recourse to official complaint. Yet soldiers who endured all this seem mainly to have regarded it as hard drill necessary for promoting soldierly discipline.52 Trainee officers experienced high training standards also. Until 1937, they underwent a four-year training programme. This was then shortened, but its requirements remained strict. The army also sought to avoid recruiting substandard officer material, relying instead upon correspondingly greater numbers of NCOs. Under the Reichswehr, NCOs had undergone three and a half years of training. This had created a firm base of high-quality NCOs upon which the new army could now build. The new army itself had to accelerate the NCO production line, and it did so in two ways. At the age of sixteen, Hitler Youth boys spent two weeks in barracks on a military preparation camp, where they received lessons in marksmanship with rifles and machine guns. Those who performed most outstandingly could then attend preliminary NCO training. After a year of this, they received another six months’ training as Obergrenadiere. Alternatively, NCOs could be selected after showing sufficient promise in their first year as a private soldier. In order to attract more recruits to the NCO pool, potential trainees were offered a five-year service option alongside the already established twelve-year option.53 These truncated procedures did not reduce the quality of NCOs, for the army also retained the Reichswehr’s emphasis on developing aggressive, flexible and independent thinking in both officers and NCOs, the better to acclimatize them to the demands of Auftragstaktik. In the words of a training directive of October 1940: ‘Bravery and personal ability are not enough. . . . The younger NCOs who have been proven in war are to be made aware of how they can become leaders, educators and instructors.’54 The new Truppenführung (‘troop leadership’) manual of 1933 had such principles at its heart, stating that ‘unpredictable factors often have decisive influence’, and stressing that the commander must act as leader and educator in all situations.55 How all this translated into practice, and the thoroughness of the training that the troops received, are exemplified by infantry training. German army training principles during the 1930s maintained that the most important infantry weapon was the machine gun. Until 1942, the German infantry’s main machine gun was the MG 34. This weapon was effective on both the offensive and the defensive, and could also bring down aircraft. It had a higher rate of fire than its British equivalent, the Bren. The German army believed that the machine gun, with support from riflemen, was the key to winning firefights. Hence a machine gun, and with it the equivalent firepower of a whole platoon of riflemen, was allotted to every German infantry section.56 The army’s infantry squad tactics, as laid out in the Truppenführung manual, built on older principles of German military training. They stressed

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flexible and independent-minded thinking, aggression, physical resourcefulness and the effective use of weaponry.57 In deploying his squad for combat, the squad leader needed to take rapid note of the surrounding terrain, and position his men to exploit fully the available contours and cover. Trees, for instance, made ideal positions for riflemen. The squad leader was also expected rapidly to select the best targets; infantry training enabled squad leaders to improve this skill by simultaneously presenting flags indicating different potential targets in different locations. By these means, the squad leader and his men gained experience in identifying the most threatening targets. Recruits also practised full-blown fire and manoeuvre against serious resistance; among other things, they were trained to throw grenades while on the move. No detail was neglected: for instance, recruits were also trained to move their bodies tactically, by such means as crawling undercover, going on all fours, or worming on their stomachs and pushing with their feet.58 So superior were the new army’s resources to those of the old Reichswehr that the Truppenführung manual was also able to resurrect the principles of well-provisioned defence in depth. Such techniques had greatly aided the Germans on the western front during the First World War. Outposts would be positioned before the forward defence line in order to delay and disrupt the enemy advance. The forward line itself would be the forefront of an in-depth trench system containing obstacles, small dugouts and nests of individual arms. The troops would make rapid local counterattacks, preferably in the enemy’s flanks. Where necessary, they would delay the enemy with resistance, including artillery bombardment, to buy time and cover withdrawal to rear defensive lines. In sum, the troops would employ ‘changing behaviour, mobility, speed, surprise, concealment and other methods of deception’ – all examples of improvisation emanating from Auftragstaktik.59 Formidable as this corpus of training and doctrine was, the German infantry of the 1930s did not become a smooth-running machine overnight. For instance, as the army’s 1936 manoeuvres showed, troops often failed to distinguish between a fighting withdrawal and an actual retreat.60 Even so, the quality of the training they were receiving was clear. Two things above all set the German army apart from those opponents it would face during the war’s first two years: its emphasis on the qualities of Auftragstaktik, and its ability consistently to refine and improve its training and doctrine. *** German armoured-warfare techniques were founded on the army’s experience of the storm-troop tactics of the First World War, of the Allies’ combinedarms offensives of 1918, and of the period of clandestine cooperation between

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the Reichswehr and the Red Army. The first Panzer troop school was founded in November 1933. Basic training was the same as the infantry’s, together with additional training in anti-tank gunnery. After six months, recruits were split into groups for further training as gunners, Panzer drivers and mechanics, or signalmen. Exposing Panzer recruits to infantry and anti-tank training was one of the ways in which they became proficient in combined-arms fighting. Gunnery practice involved various techniques, including firing at moving targets dragged by sledges. Teamwork was even more central for Panzers than for infantry; tank men were trained individually at first, but then the various members of a particular Panzer’s crew were brought together to operate as a team. Commanders of individual Panzers were drawn from the besttrained crews, Panzer platoon commanders from the best individual Panzer commanders.61 The new army’s first major development in armoured warfare came with the formation of the first four Panzer divisions in 1935. Panzer divisions were designed as self-supporting mini-armies based solidly on combined-arms principles. They comprised not only Panzers, but also motorized infantry, artillery, pioneers, reconnaissance and a motorized supply column. They were thus well suited to operating independently, and to optimizing those key qualities of initiative, flexibility and aggression that were at the core of German army doctrine. Once the Panzers had broken through the enemy’s defence line, motorized infantry and artillery would move up rapidly to form a whole that could withstand enemy counterattack. This force would then regroup, advance and repeat the process. Over the course of the war, the advantages of the Panzer division’s organization were applied to ever larger groupings – Panzer corps, Panzer groups, and eventually Panzer armies – and to smaller, special-purpose Kampfgruppen (battle groups). Replicating the Panzer divisions’ strength on such a scale increasingly enabled Panzer formations not just to break through the enemy’s lines, but also to fan out and link up with one another far into the enemy’s rear, then encircle and destroy his forces. The new Luftwaffe would be allotted an important supporting role, disrupting the enemy’s communications and efforts to get reinforcements up to the line.62 The new army further refined its armoured-warfare techniques by continuing the series of large-scale manoeuvres that the Reichswehr had begun, only now using the real thing. According to his self-promoting memoirs, Heinz Guderian was not only one of Germany’s leading armoured-warfare generals during the Second World War, but also the key figure in the development of the Panzer divisions during the 1930s. Guderian did indeed write several articles for specialist military journals, one of which was used by the General Staff itself, and a book on armoured-warfare tactics, Achtung – Panzer!, which was widely read following its publication in 1937. But Guderian was also a brazen

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self-publicist, whose overall contribution to the development of armoured warfare, while undoubtedly important, was less epoch-making than he later claimed.63 In truth, Guderian was only one of several figures who contributed to the development of armoured warfare within the German army, and the contributions made by some of these figures were more important than Guderian’s. For instance, Colonel Oswald Lutz had assembled the Reichswehr’s first makeshift combined-arms mechanized force in 1930, a body that had gone on to form the basis of the Reichswehr’s Motor Transport Command. He also commanded the first Panzer division to undergo field manoeuvres in August 1935. Lutz, now a lieutenant general, was first to recognize that Panzers should operate as an aggressive, flexible, independent strike arm. He also believed they should attack the enemy in the flanks, and at other weak spots identified at reconnaissance, rather than head-on. And though Guderian and Lutz worked together to develop the Panzer force, Lutz was senior and a more effective networker than his temperamental subordinate. Nor was Guderian the only German armouredwarfare theorist who proposed equipping Panzers with radio.64 Guderian also exaggerated the degree of opposition that thrusting, dynamic Panzer men – above all himself – faced from stuffy reactionaries at the army’s head and within its other branches. The principal Luddite, according to Guderian, was General Beck, who supposedly said to him in 1934: ‘No, no, I don’t want to have anything to do with you people. You move too fast for me.’65 In fact, Beck was no stranger to innovation himself; after all, it was on his watch as army chief of staff that the Truppenführung regulations were issued and the first Panzer divisions established. As for his supposed disdain for armoured warfare – in the autumn of 1935, he urged the creation of forty-eight new Panzer battalions.66 Beck was concerned less about the value of an armoured force per se than about its quality if it was expanded too rapidly. He and others also feared that expanding the armoured force at breakneck speed would unbalance the entire army, and prevent it from integrating that force effectively along sound combined-arms principles.67 There was certainly major disagreement concerning the relationship Panzers should have with infantry. In particular, the Truppenführung manual placed high priority on locating and enveloping the enemy’s main force, but it saw the Panzers’ main role as supporting infantry attacks rather than operating as an independent strike force.68 Indeed, when it came to infantry-armour cooperation, German tactics would still be found wanting come the outbreak of war. The mainstays of the early Panzer divisions were their Mark I and Mark II light tanks. These were a far cry from the armoured colossi of the Second World War’s latter years. The particularly diminutive Mark I was equipped with

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two machine guns and armour only 13 millimetres (half-an-inch) thick. But the Mark II was a clear improvement. Even though its greater weight hindered cross-country movement, it was faster than the Mark I and also sported a 2-centimetre gun and armour of up to 30 millimetres thick.69 As the 1930s went on, medium Mark III and IV Panzers came into production. These were developed as a compromise between Guderian’s preference for a large force of light tanks, and the need for heavy models. A major advantage was their ability to upgrade their armour and armament. They would not be mass-produced, however, until the war itself.70 Production of the Panzer force, and the phases of its technical development from the Mark Is and IIs in 1935 through to the colossal Tiger II nearly a decade later, were the work of different companies at different times, including Krupp, Henschel, Porsche and Daimler-Benz.71 Heading army planning was the new General Staff. Modelled on the old imperial General Staff, it similarly underwent a rigorous, extensive training programme. Yet the programme reflected the weaknesses as well as strengths of German military thinking. Staff officers were immersed in all manner of operational planning, but their schooling in broader matters such as strategy, diplomacy and logistics was still less thorough than it needed to be.72 Moreover, officers received only a handful of lectures on military intelligence, and no detailed training in intelligence techniques.73 The army was also having to fight a turf war with the new Wehrmachtsamt (Wehrmacht Office), the renamed Reichswehr Ministry with General von Blomberg at its head. General von Fritsch and General Beck wanted the army to retain a dominant, independent policy role, but Blomberg wanted it brought more firmly under the aegis of the Wehrmachtsamt. Blomberg received ample assistance from numerous army officers, such as Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl, who had been appointed to work in the Wehrmachtsamt. Once they became ministry men, they went native, undermining efforts to maintain a separate and powerful army command and seeking to subordinate elements of the armed forces to Hitler more directly. The army leadership became mired in this dispute at a time when Reich Marshal Hermann Göring and Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, commanders-in-chief of the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine respectively, were able to gain ever more unfettered access to Hitler. Far from being a parochial dispute, turf wars between the army and central Wehrmacht offices would increasingly debilitate the unity and effectiveness of the highcommand structure. *** Between 1933 and 1936, then, the German army leadership took its first, largely willing steps down a path of growing subordination to the Nazi regime.

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It did so largely for political and ‘professional’ reasons. Regardless of how far many generals shared the Nazis’ repugnance of Jews and Bolsheviks, they supported the new regime primarily because of what it offered the army: conscription, rearmament, technological investment and the mobilization of society. Different parts of this package spoke to different generals in different ways; Guderian’s technocratic sensitivities, for instance, were particularly enticed by the third of these. And no one surpassed Blomberg in his enthusiasm for Nazism’s apparent potential to mobilize and unify society, as his own courting of the SS showed. But the entire package spoke to the generals’ vision of an aggrandized army, with the full economic and political backing of the state, restoring Germany’s great-power status through war. The potency of this vision outweighed the disapproval with which some generals regarded Nazism’s rowdier, more radical elements or the lower-middle-class background of the movement’s leaders. It also helped to blind generals to the frightening scale of Hitler’s own ambitions. The generals’ complicity in political murder was the first step in their wider collusion in the regime’s crimes. They were also instrumental in indoctrinating the army’s vastly augmented manpower from 1935 onwards. This new army was as socially diverse as it was vast; nevertheless, its new personnel were largely willing to adhere to the ideological, nationalistic agenda the army served. The regime’s social and economic policies, its propagandizing and mobilization of German youth, and the appeal of the Volksgemeinschaft and of Hitler himself, all fused with the militaristic attitudes that permeated much of German society. The army’s Panzer wing developed, and the army as a whole inherited the superior doctrine and training methods that the Reichswehr had bequeathed. Nevertheless, breakneck expansion brought growing pains, and institutional turf wars and poor strategic grasp limited the effectiveness of the army’s highest command levels. All these trends would become more pronounced as war approached during the late 1930s.

CHAPTER TWO

THE ROAD TO WAR, 1936–39

 T

‘

he more enemies, the more honour!’ This was General von Blomberg’s riposte to worries that Germany’s rapid rearmament would antagonize foreign nations.1 It was a particularly guileless statement even by his standards. Between 1936 and 1939, the massive rearmament drive ordered by Hitler and lauded by the Wehrmacht had equally massive destabilizing effects upon Germany’s economy, the international diplomatic system and the international military balance. The result was a major war of a kind that Germany had not expected to fight so soon and for which it was not fully prepared. Many senior officers were concerned at the pace of events, but some were more concerned than others, and none took effective united action to slow or halt it. But this is unsurprising, given the alacrity with which the army became further subjugated to the Nazi regime during this time. ***

The pressures spawned by rearmament cast an ever darker shadow over the whole period, and it is worth briefly surveying those pressures before examining the German army’s role in the path to war more closely. From 1935, rearmament soaked up the great majority of the Nazi regime’s re-employment efforts, and this made increasing demands upon the German economy. In 1932, eight million citizens of Weimar Germany were unemployed. Between then and 1934, the last Weimar governments and then the Nazis themselves sought to boost employment through public-works schemes. Most of these were non-military in nature; rearmament itself was slow to commence because the infrastructure of rearmament, including bases and barracks, had to be created first.2 But from 1935, rearmament, and schemes to build ‘public works’ with a military use such as the new Autobahnen, were Hitler’s favoured means of continuing to drive down unemployment – favoured, of course, because they corresponded to his warlike ambitions.

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In focusing so predominantly on preparation for war, the German economy faced two particular problems. Firstly, it was heavily dependent upon international resources. Secondly, it was faced with trying to reconcile the rearmament drive with German civilians’ need for foodstuffs and consumer goods. This ‘guns versus butter’ problem heavily preoccupied the regime during the 1930s. The satirical British magazine Punch lampooned the Nazis’ dilemma in June 1937. It published a cartoon of Hitler training a dachshund dressed as a soldier to resist food: the dog balances a lump of fat on his nose while balancing his own body on a munition shell. ‘Trust!’ is the cartoon’s title. ‘Yes, but I’ve been “trusting” such a long time!’ retorts the dog.3 These twin dangers threatened to suck in imports to an extent that could precipitate a balance-of-payments crisis, sparking runaway inflation and potentially destroying public support for the regime. In order to sustain such a massive rearmament drive, then, the Nazi regime needed a resource base large enough to enable it to satisfy the needs of both rearmament and the civilian population. Ultimately, it would find that it could only secure such a resource base by embarking upon foreign conquests even sooner. Yet the economic dilemma it faced was still not enough on its own to compel Germany into war as early as 1939. For the regime was able to employ various measures to ease its predicament, or at least stave off the point at which it might grow critical. At no time between 1933 and 1939 did the German people suffer economic hardships anything like as bad as those they had endured between 1929 and 1932. Agricultural reforms and selective rationing sustained Germany’s food supply, and welfare payments further dampened the potential for unrest. The Nazis introduced wage and price controls to manage inflation, and the apparatus of state terror suppressed remaining discord. The quarter from which the Nazis might have expected the most social trouble was the industrialized working class. Yet strict work regulations, the destruction of the trade unions, the efficacy of the Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) organization, or KdF, and Nazi propaganda’s appeal to anti-Semitism and working-class patriotism, all helped to stifle potential working-class dissent.4 In October 1936, moreover, Hitler introduced the Four-Year Plan, a drive for economic self-sufficiency designed to make Germany less reliant upon imports. Yet though all these measures might go some way to counteracting the mounting pressures upon the German economy, there was a limit to what they could do in the long term. For the pressures themselves intensified as a result of the international arms race precipitated by the rearmament and expansion, not only of Nazi Germany but also of Fascist Italy and imperial Japan. Both countries were not only governed, like Germany, by aggressive militaristic regimes; in the wake of the economic crisis of the early 1930s, they believed that conquering foreign territory and resources would make them

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economically self-sufficient and immune to the ill winds of the global economy. As a result, all of Germany’s major potential opponents in a future war – Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States – began to raise military spending as the 1930s went on.5 As far as Hitler was concerned, Germany could not risk losing ground in the arms race it had helped precipitate, and the pressure to keep pace intensified the very same economic and political problems that the Nazi regime was seeking to ease. As a result, Hitler injected an ever greater element of risk into his foreign policy. He accelerated its timetable to seize more territory and resources, further escalating international tensions in the process. This made a general European war likely sooner rather than later – when neither the Reich nor the German army was fully prepared for it. *** In March 1936, Germany’s stock of foreign raw materials and grain dwindled to perilously low levels.6 That same month, Hitler took radical action to try to ease the economic pressure. His focus was on the region of Germany west of the River Rhine. The Rhineland had been demilitarized under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, with Germany forbidden to call up recruits or keep troops there and restricted as to what types of weaponry it could produce there. Ending these restrictions by fully reincorporating the Rhineland into Germany had always been a long-term aim of Hitler’s, as indeed it would have been for any interwar German government, since it would help secure Germany’s western frontier in the event of war. Hitler’s decision to remilitarize the Rhineland quickly was prompted by the growing pressures on the economy and – if the SD’s regular morale reports are to be believed – by the effect that stagnating living standards were having upon public opinion. Not only would remilitarizing the Rhineland provide a foreign-policy boost to the regime’s popularity; it would also free up the Rhineland’s industrial capacity for arms production. Hitler also moved when he did because of the opportunities the international situation presented. Hitler and the army leadership were aware, as Britain and France would have been aware had they intervened, that the German army was still far from ready for war. But Hitler gambled, if not all that recklessly, that the British and French governments would be too distracted by other problems, both domestic and international, to intervene. Above all, Hitler knew that the British and French were currently preoccupied with Fascist Italy’s recent invasion of Abyssinia in east Africa. With the United States pursuing a policy of international isolation, Britain and France were the leading lights in the League of Nations, the worthy but toothless arbiter of international disputes that had been founded after the First World War. The League’s condemnation of the

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1. Germany in 1939

invasion had turned Italy away from Britain and France, thus making her unlikely to support either of them in a stand against Germany. Hitler’s judgment proved correct. When German troops marched in – their apparent numbers swelled by clever editing of the Nazi propaganda newsreels – Britain and France did indeed stop short of intervention.

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Hitler’s success in reoccupying the Rhineland buttressed the Nazi regime’s domestic popularity, and the passive British and French response emboldened him further. Among other things, he now became less inclined to heed any general who might counsel caution over Germany’s lack of military preparedness against Britain and France. He noted Fritsch and Beck’s opposition to the Rhineland operation: among other things, they had scorned the idea of disguising the troops’ movements as SA and RAD exercises. He also noted the distinct lack of nerve Blomberg had displayed during the operation’s more tense moments, later accusing the Wehrmacht commander-in-chief of behaving like a ‘hysterical old maid’.7 *** But Britain and France’s inaction over the Rhineland brought no let-up in their own rearmament efforts. In August 1936, for instance, the government in Paris approved a fourteen billion-franc programme to expand the French army.8 The Wehrmacht reacted by making further demands on the German economy. In June 1936, for instance, the army called for enough infrastructure and equipment to support a field army of over a hundred divisions and 3.5 million men by the autumn of 1940. It also called for the establishment of three new, five hundred-strong Panzer divisions, in addition to the three founded in October 1935, and four motorized divisions and three light divisions of more than two hundred armoured fighting vehicles apiece.9 Fulfilling demands for weaponry of such a patently offensive nature could only alarm foreign governments further and provoke them into rearming even faster. Moreover, producing all this war material would mean retooling many German factories and also building many new ones. Furthermore, once such factories were geared towards producing armaments, they would need to keep receiving huge follow-on orders in order to maintain war-readiness. The only alternative would be to convert them to civilian production, but that risked creating huge unemployment and delaying their reconversion once war actually broke out. Thus did Germany’s rearmament drive generate a further, self-reinforcing momentum.10 In October 1936, as the arms race and its challenges intensified further, Hitler appointed Hermann Göring as head of the Office of the Four-Year Plan. The latter’s purpose was to make Germany less reliant on foreign exchange and more economically self-sufficient. Above all, Hitler declared that the Wehrmacht must be operational within four years and the German economy fit for war within the same timeframe.11 The Four-Year Plan made a particular push for companies to develop synthetic materials. Many other materials were rationed. When the private sector could not provide the necessary industrial capacity, the regime

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established its own companies to do the job.12 Overall, however, the plan’s successes were patchy, the rearmament push stagnated and shortages grew increasingly acute. In October 1936, for instance, the army had estimated it needed 270,500 tons of steel per month, but from the following February it received only 195,000 per month.13 The army was also in intense competition for resources with the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine. The Wirtschaftsrüstungsamt (Wehrmacht Office of Economics and Armaments), headed by Colonel Georg Thomas, did draw up guidelines for more orderly allocation, but the three services flouted them. Indeed, in July 1937, Thomas complained to Hitler: ‘the battle for steel is even being fought with underhanded means. . . . This disorder undermines the smooth running of the economy and endangers the authority of the state.’14 Hitler, insure as to whether to divide and rule or because he lacked the grasp or inclination to assert himself in economic policy as in foreign policy, failed to impose any effective system from above. Göring, too much the economic dilettante despite his undoubted radical drive, failed likewise. *** At least army doctrine did not stagnate, particularly when it came to armoured warfare. The September 1936 manoeuvres in Hesse explored how Panzers should be used, particularly in terrain such as the muddy plains of Poland and the western Soviet Union. The autumn 1937 manoeuvres in Mecklenburg had a particularly marked effect upon armoured doctrine. They were conducted in arduous terrain, in which the Panzers had to negotiate rolling hills and high-water rivers and lakes, without the support of an adequate transport infrastructure. The outcome of the manoeuvres was effectively decided within around less than half of the seven days allocated to them, when the 3rd Panzer Division played the leading role in capturing the bridgehead at Malchin. This proved that Panzers could play a spearheading role in combinedarms tactics, and not just act as support for infantry.15 The Mecklenburg manoeuvres were, in Robert Citino’s words, the Panzers’ ‘coming out party’.16 The Panzers also benefited from real combat experience, for German Panzer and air crews grouped under the ‘Condor Legion’ fought on the Nationalist side during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39. The Panzer formations became familiar with ground combat, while the Luftwaffe carried out interdiction missions, disrupting the enemy’s supply, communications and troop movements – not to mention obliterating the defenceless town of Guernica as target practice for strategic bombing.17 In November 1937, Hitler grew even more vocal in his fears for Germany’s performance in the arms race and for its long-term future. On 5 November, he

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held a meeting of his military chiefs at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Hitler’s army adjutant, Colonel Friedrich Hossbach, took handwritten notes. Hitler asserted that Germany lacked the means of long-term economic self-sufficiency, that reclaiming Germany’s lost colonies in Africa was not a viable alternative and that, above all, Germany needed to conquer foreign territory for Lebensraum in the east. This third point was not new to Hitler’s audience; what was new was the timetable Hitler now announced for achieving it. He believed Germany would need to conquer for Lebensraum, and thus precipitate war with the major European powers, by 1943–45 at the latest; after that, Germany’s likely principal opponents would be too strong to defeat, and Germany itself would be blighted by food crises and falling birth rates. Obsessed with his own mortality, Hitler also cited the ageing of the Nazi movement’s leaders as a further reason to move sooner rather than later. Some of those present were particularly unsettled when Hitler outlined certain scenarios that, he asserted, should precipitate an early move against Austria and Czechoslovakia, despite the risk of war with Britain and France as a result. Securing Austria and Czechoslovakia would protect Germany’s eastern flank prior to any attack she might launch in the west, as well as improve the security of Germany’s frontiers more generally. Moreover, taking Austria and Czechoslovakia would win for the Reich not just an increased food supply, but also an influx of ethnic Germans to the tune of a further twelve army divisions.18 Blomberg, Fritsch and indeed Göring – though not Kriegsmarine chief Raeder, who was itching to take on the Royal Navy – had misgivings. They were not concerned about the scale or direction Hitler was thinking of, but they were concerned about the timing. They particularly fretted that Hitler foresaw scenarios in which he would be willing to risk war with Britain and France before 1943 – a combination that the three men were not convinced Germany was ready to face. Nevertheless, they all swung behind the plans in the meeting’s aftermath. General Beck, however, was much more alarmed. He was increasingly fearful of the scale, direction and timing of Hitler’s territorial ambitions. For Beck, Austria and Czechoslovakia were living space, whereas Hitler merely saw them as a stepping stone to vast areas of Lebensraum further east.19 Beck did not oppose Hitler’s foreign policy on moral grounds; rather, he increasingly believed it would lead Germany into a major war too soon, with catastrophic results. He also continued to believe that Germany’s interests lay not in a race war in eastern Europe, but in regional hegemony over central Europe.20 In 1938, however, Blomberg, Fritsch and Beck would all depart their posts. In their place would come a new military command structure, led for the most part by men more unquestioning of Hitler’s will. ***

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In January 1938, both Blomberg and Fritsch were brought low by personal scandals of a kind that touched both the social and ideological nerves of the time. Blomberg’s new wife was revealed as a former prostitute – ‘Blomberg’s married a whore!’ as Göring announced it.21 In an added twist, it transpired that she had had a Jewish pimp at one point. Perhaps above all, Hitler feared for his own prestige: having been a witness at the wedding, he now faced the danger of being a laughing stock if he did not take decisive action. Blomberg might just have held on in the face of all this. But his particular subservience to Hitler and the Nazis, especially his efforts to impose centralized control on all three branches of the Wehrmacht, had deprived him of influential friends among the army leadership. These included General von Fritsch. Ironically, Fritsch himself ended up having to resign almost simultaneously. His opposition to the military expansion of the SS had made him a powerful enemy in Himmler. Himmler now worked with his suborinate Reinhard Heydrich, feared chief of the Sicherheitspolizei und SD (the Security Police and Reich Security Service), in an effort to discredit the general. They unearthed a report that Fritsch had had a relationship with a rent boy. The charge was groundless, and a military tribunal later exonerated Fritsch, but Hitler failed to reinstate him. Hitler had not wanted rid of either man. He nevertheless used the opportunity of their departure to reorganize fundamentally the highest levels of military command. He reshuffled twelve generals, Blomberg and Fritsch aside, from the army and air force, together with another fifty-one posts across the two services. The navy, whose commander-in-chief, Admiral Raeder, had expressed no misgivings about Hitler’s plans, was left untouched.22 Blomberg’s old War Ministry was abolished and replaced by the Armed Forces High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW), with General of Artillery Keitel at its head.23 Later on, in September 1939, Major General Jodl became chief of the OKW Operation Office, whose task was to advise the Führer on all issues concerning the conduct of military operations. Keitel was a manipulable individual of nervous disposition and limited intelligence. The main characteristics that commended him to Hitler were his enthusiasm, dedication to hard work and total obedience. Derisive colleagues referred to him as Lakeitel – a play on ‘Lackey Keitel’. Burckhardt Müller-Hillebrand, who served as adjutant for several years to General Franz Halder, the army chief of staff from 1938 to 1942, recalled a particular occasion that said everything about the regard in which Keitel’s colleagues held him. He walked past Keitel in the corridor at one of Hitler’s military headquarters, without saluting, after Keitel’s promotion to field marshal. When Müller-Hillebrand asked who the field marshal was, and was mortified at his own failure to salute him, Halder told him: ‘Don’t worry, it’s only Keitel.’24 Jodl, meanwhile, was highly professional but deeply impressionable. He

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also drank and ate well and, spending prodigious amounts of time in Hitler’s company doing both, he rapidly came to idolize the Führer and fall under his ideological sway.25 Meanwhile, the army was allotted its own separate command office, the Army High Command (Oberkommando des Heeres, or OKH).26 Fritsch’s replacement as army commander-in-chief was the supine General Walther von Brauchitsch. In the words of Gerhard Weinberg, Brauchitsch was ‘an anatomical marvel, a man totally without a backbone’.27 In fact, the main cause of his abasement was not anatomical, but domestic. Brauchitsch was estranged from his wife and wished to marry again, but his wife was demanding massive financial compensation. When Göring learned of Brauchitsch’s domestic circumstances, he saw potential for getting a genuinely pliable commander-inchief appointed. He recommended to Hitler that he appoint Brauchitsch, buy off his ex-wife and allow him to marry his mistress. Thus was Brauchitsch personally and financially beholden to Hitler from the moment he became army commander-in-chief. Indeed, his new wife would constantly remind him of ‘how much we owe the Führer’.28 His tenure would be largely marked by a degrading measure of servility to Hitler. Two other new appointees would become increasingly valuable to the regime. One was Major General Bodewin Keitel, Wilhelm’s brother, who as chief of the Army Personnel Office played a pivotal role in officer selection. The other was Major Rudolf Schmundt, who as Hitler’s Wehrmacht adjutant was instrumental in conveying the Führer’s wishes to the army chiefs. In October 1942, by which time he too was a major general, he succeeded Bodewin Keitel. All this left a marginalized, frustrated General Beck as army chief of staff. In contrast to him, none of the new military appointees would attempt to put any kind of brake on Hitler’s foreign-policy ventures.29 Nor did the new high-command set-up augur well for effective planning. Officially, the OKH ran army operations, the OKW broader strategy. But Hitler had arranged matters to ensure that he himself essentially ran everything. The OKW was to function as Hitler’s personal military office, issuing his general orders to the various service branch headquarters. Despite its broad strategic official remit, it was not senior to the OKH in any substantive way. On the other hand, staff officers of both the OKH and OKW still enjoyed considerable influence. Hitler had yet to attain the degree of colossal overconfidence in his own military abilities that he would reach during the Second World War. For the time being, this left him extensively reliant on the professionals. Similarly, the service branches still enjoyed considerable leeway in formulating their own plans consistent with Hitler’s general orders, before sending them back to him for approval. Yet even here there was a downside. However impressive the high command’s general grasp of operational planning might be – and this too had

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its flaws – its grasp of logistics, intelligence and, above all, strategy remained as inadequate as it had been during the First World War.30 *** Hitler’s first foreign-policy enterprise of 1938, the Anschluss, saw Austria annexed to the Reich. It proceeded in March, bloodlessly, and with the enthusiastic support of many Austrians. As with the Rhineland, incorporating Austria into the Reich had always been part of Hitler’s foreign-policy programme. As also with the Rhineland, economic motives help explain why Hitler moved when he did. In early 1938, Germany was being compelled to export more in order to balance out the greater volume of imports it needed to help fuel rearmament.31 Thus Göring, as head of the Four-Year Plan, was especially proactive in pushing Hitler to annex Austria sooner rather than later in order to exploit its economic resources, particularly its labour. Hitler did not initially wish to see the Reich formally annex Austria with immediate effect, but events forced his hand. In particular, the Austrian chancellor, Kurt Schuschnigg, anxious to preserve his country’s independence, announced a referendum on union with Germany that could conceivably have gone either way. This might have set back the cause of annexation drastically. To pre-empt it, Hitler resolved on a peaceful but emphatic Wehrmacht incursion into the country. Again, although the annexation of Austria contravened the Treaty of Versailles, neither Britain nor France intervened; the British government in particular believed that the Germans were only going into their own backyard. Generally, the French were less persuaded of the merits of appeasement than the British, but with Britain unwilling to face down Germany, the French lacked alternative candidates as robust alliance partners. Neither a largely ostracized Soviet Union nor a largely isolationist United States could be counted on, but what would most directly hamstring any effort to frustrate Hitler’s designs on Austria was the position of Fascist Italy and its dictator Benito Mussolini. Italy had been growing closer to Germany since 1936, not least because of the two countries’ backing of the Nationalist side in the Spanish Civil War. Thus in 1938, in contrast to previous occasions, Mussolini did not constrain Germany where Austria was concerned. Yet despite all this, neither Hitler nor the Wehrmacht could know for sure how Britain and France would react. Two further unknowables were whether Czechoslovakia would try to intervene, and whether the Austrian Federal Army, or Bundesheer, would try to resist. As with the prospective referendum, there were signs that Bundesheer units might jump either way.32 Because of the circumstances entailed and the scenarios to be considered, the Wehrmacht’s move into Austria was highly improvised. This reveals much

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about the army’s shortcomings in 1938, but also about its readiness to address its shortcomings in the light of experience. The army’s march plan was completed on 10 March, five days before the operation took place. It had to compromise between Hitler’s aim of using minimum force, so as not to provoke wider international action, the Wehrmacht’s need to ensure the safety of its troops and the short notice with which the latter were to be assembled. Two army corps from Bavaria, together with a motorized force comprising Lieutenant General Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Division, and motorized Luftwaffe ground troops and SS troops, were placed under the command of the Eighth Army. Its forces were to occupy Upper and Lower Austria, particularly the fast approaches to Vienna, while other units were to protect its southern flank by going into the Tyrol. The terrain was tricky, including river crossings and mountain passes. Ground troops and Luftwaffe aircraft alike were not to fire upon Austrian forces unless the Austrians fired first.33 The last-minute nature of the mobilization spawned a certain amount of chaos. Many of the reservists employed were not suitable: for instance, some artillery batteries complained that their men could not ride horses properly. The autumn 1937 recruits were not yet fully trained, some were still too weedy for their uniforms to fit them, many soldiers had not been able to break in their boots properly and two divisions needed to buy nearly twenty thousand pairs of long johns for their men once they reached Vienna. Overall, however, the army’s conduct of the invasion was far less inept than some contemporary observers, particularly Winston Churchill – in an effort to embarrass British prime minister Neville Chamberlain for indulging Hitler – tried to claim.34 And the Bundesheer did not open fire. The 2nd Panzer Division, charged with racing ahead as the spearhead towards Vienna, did face considerable difficulties. It was unable to refuel in Bavaria because the Bavarian army corps used for the operation had taken all the fuel already. The division found that the Austrian petrol stations provided inferior fuel that overheated motors and burned through cylinder-head gaskets. Supply units could not keep up with the spearhead – a legacy of Hitler having started the operation four hours earlier than scheduled in order to get in quickly and maintain the element of surprise.35 The British military attaché in Vienna reported ‘some decidedly dangerous driving around bends, and . . . several vehicles with drivers who had forgotten that the Austrians drive on the left-hand side of the road’.36 Despite all this, the German motorized elements reached their objectives. Units acknowledged their failings, and their self-critical reports would prove valuable to future operations.37 Indeed, the fact that our knowledge of the operation’s failings is so detailed is due to the comprehensive nature of the reports that the army compiled in its aftermath.

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The success of the operation and the jubilation – if by no means universal – of the Austrian population were sufficient to banish the anger many senior officers felt over General von Fritsch’s shabby treatment. Guderian, for instance, was struck by the crowds’ ‘elemental enthusiasm’,38 and the unit diary writer of Panzerjägerabteilung (Panzer Anti-Tank Section) 10 wrote that ‘the light in the eyes of the soldiers and the jubilant population showed that this really was recognized as a great historical moment’.39 Annexation brought immediate benefits for the Wehrmacht, and for the German army in particular. Among other things, though absorbing an importdependent Austria into the Reich caused long-term damage to Germany’s balance of payments, an influx of over 400,000 hitherto unemployed Austrians immediately boosted rearmament.40 Moreover, the German army absorbed the Bundesheer. While numerous senior Austrian commanders disapproved of National Socialism, many of their younger colleagues were avowedly pro-Nazi. The former were men who had been officers in the Royal and Imperial Army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; they were politically conservative and strongly Catholic. Just prior to and during the Anschluss, however, younger pro-Nazi officers removed many of their non-Nazi superiors from their posts. Austria was renamed the Ostmark (Eastern March), and the troops of the former Bundesheer and the new recruits raised by the two new Austrian Wehrkreise would go on to provide valuable manpower for the German army, particularly for its mountain divisions. *** Britain and France’s inertia over the Anschluss emboldened Hitler further. His next target was Czechoslovakia. Invasion would not only secure Germany’s eastern frontier and absorb the three million ethnic Germans of the country’s Sudeten German minority; it would also give Hitler the satisfaction of destroying a functioning parliamentary democracy in Germany’s eastern backyard. He also coveted the country’s sizable armaments industry. Hitler used the purported grievances of the Sudeten Germans as an excuse to make demands on Czechoslovakia; he insisted that the Sudetenland, which encompassed Czechoslovakia’s western border regions, be transferred to the Reich. His real aim, however, was to provoke war with Czechoslovakia. Britain and France initially urged the Czechs to deal with Hitler over the Sudetenland. Hitler, eager for war, now upped the ante by declaring not only that the Sudetenland must be occupied immediately, but also that territorial demands by Poland and Hungary upon Czech territory must be satisfied. This time, Britain and France threatened, if half-heartedly, to intervene on Czechoslovakia’s behalf. Hitler claimed that the British and French were bluffing, though he may have done this less because he believed it than because he was trying to fortify

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the resolve of his generals.41 Some among the army leadership struck a warning note. Beck, finally seeing an opportunity to head off Hitler’s foreign adventuring before it took Germany over the precipice, declared in July 1938 that soldiers’ duty had its limits ‘where their knowledge, their conscience and their responsibility forbids the carrying out of an order’.42 Unfortunately, Beck’s fellow generals were now too supine, too swayed by Hitler, or too preoccupied with narrower concerns of rearmament and operational planning, to proffer Beck effective support.43 ‘Water flows down from the top,’ Jodl asserted the following month, a remark clearly aimed at Beck.44 Jodl, like a growing number of generals, believed that senior commanders should obey orders rather than try to do politics. Beck eventually resigned as army chief of staff in August, before leaving the army in October. He then described Hitler as a ‘psychopath through and through’, and the increasingly beholden military elite as ‘imbeciles, mediocrities and criminals’.45 Over time, his opposition to Hitler grew courageous and principled rather than calculating and pragmatic, and he became prominent in efforts to overthrow the Nazi regime. But Beck was not the only military commander who feared the consequences of war with Britain and France in the summer of 1938. While the Luftwaffe enjoyed a production lead over the British and French air forces, that lead was far from unassailable. Invading Britain was out of the question given the Royal Navy’s vast numerical superiority over the Kriegsmarine. Moreover, should the United States proffer economic support to Britain and France, let alone military support, then Germany could not hope to win.46 Brauchitsch actually conveyed the generals’ concerns to Hitler, however weakly. For his troubles, the Führer summoned the commander-in-chief to his mountain residence, the Berghof, on the Obersalzberg in Bavaria. Here, in Ian Kershaw’s words, Hitler subjected Brauchitsch to ‘such a ferocious high-decibel verbal assault, lasting several hours, that those sitting on the terrace below the open windows of Hitler’s room felt embarrassed enough to move inside’.47 In fact, the summer of 1938 saw the first stirrings of clandestine opposition to the Hitler regime within conservative military, diplomatic and political circles. It helped that several senior officers had time on their hands following Hitler’s reorganization of the high command. More fundamentally, the conspirators – despite their different viewpoints and approaches – shared a growing alarm at the increasingly radical, aggressive nature of the Nazi state, as well as the danger that it could take Germany into war prematurely.48 With Beck’s departure, they placed their hopes in his highly able replacement as army chief of staff, General Franz Halder. Halder too was aware of the dangers that Hitler’s increasingly reckless foreign policy posed. Indeed, he reportedly remarked to the conspirators: ‘ideally, we should blow Hitler sky high in his train a few days after the declaration of war, then put out a report saying he was the victim of an enemy

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bombing attack’.49 In reality, Halder was an enigmatic, sensitive individual whose viewpoint could change unpredictably according to circumstance. Though he sought to prevent a premature war, he did not seek the overthrow of Hitler as an end in itself. He failed to match his words with practical support for the conspirators, preferring instead to see how the Sudeten crisis panned out.50 By late September, Hitler was growing reluctantly mindful of his senior military commanders’ warnings, of Chamberlain’s threat to support Czechoslovakia in the event of a German attack and of Mussolini’s offer to mediate. At the Munich conference, Hitler eventually agreed a negotiated settlement by which the Reich would acquire the Sudetenland by peaceful means and the territorial integrity of the rump of Czechoslovakia would be guaranteed – even though the Czechs themselves were not invited to the conference. Most of the army’s top-level generals were euphoric that Germany’s resurgence as a great power had been further augmented without having had to go to war so soon. Guderian wrote to his wife: ‘achieving such a victory without drawing the sword is unprecedented in all history’.51 So far did the generals now fall into line that Jodl confided smugly to his diary: ‘Hopefully the unbelievers, weaklings and doubters are now converted, and will remain so.’52 All talk of a coup attempt fizzled out for the present, and Halder shunned any further machinations to that end. No longer would the anti-Hitler conspirators be able to count one of their number at the highest levels of military command. *** By the terms of the Munich agreement, Hitler accepted to settle all future European disputes through peaceful consultation. But the logic of his own ideological and territorial ambitions was such that he could not contemplate sticking to the agreement. He again asserted that Britain and France’s threats of war over Czechoslovakia had been a bluff, and that ‘our enemies are little worms. I saw them at Munich.’53 In October, he called for a fivefold growth in the Luftwaffe, warships built at a faster rate, and large-calibre guns and heavy tanks in increasing quantities for the army.54 The target date for most of the major arms programmes was 1942. But now, partly in response to all-toocorrect reports that Hitler was already getting restless after Munich, Britain and France further intensified their own rearmament.55 Even more alarmingly for Germany, November 1938 saw the signing of an Anglo-American trade agreement. This did not contain military clauses – even though the Germans convinced themselves that it did – but it certainly suggested that the Americans might render military assistance to Britain and France in the future. The agreement demonstrated that the United States, under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was finally emerging from its isolationist cocoon – a

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development that could only hurt Germany.56 Meanwhile, Hitler’s grandiose new armaments targets were already being scuppered by Germany’s cash-flow crisis and its shortage of foreign exchange.57 In a speech to the Reichstag on the sixth anniversary of the Nazis’ coming to power, Hitler railed against Germany’s economic straitjacket and damned the shadowy forces that he believed were orchestrating US actions – a theme he constantly reiterated during late 1938 and 1939. He asserted: ‘if international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!’58 He also claimed that, seeing as the Western powers were denying Germany its right to Lebensraum, the Germans must ‘export, or die’.59 To this end, the Four-Year Plan would be reinvigorated with even greater efficiency. Greater efficiency could not, however, reconcile a drive for rearmament with a drive for exports. The upshot for the Wehrmacht was that it could expect severe cuts in its resource allocations. The fall in steel allocations had an especially damaging effect upon the army. By 1939, production of infantry ammunition was dropping alarmingly, a programme to produce 1,200 medium tanks and command vehicles between October 1939 and October 1940 had been halved, and a lack of building steel was condemning three hundred infantry battalions to sleeping in tents.60 The need to escape the economic straitjacket and continue rearmament impelled Hitler’s audacious foreign-policy conduct afresh in 1939. He now sought to reduce the danger of Germany facing two fronts in the event of war. His first step to this effect was to try and persuade Poland to conclude a formal military alliance with Germany. Since the signing of the Polish-German nonaggression pact, Hitler and German military planners had seen Poland as a potentially useful ally against the Soviet Union. Among other things, they noted the Poles’ victory over the Bolsheviks in 1920, when the Poles had employed large cavalry formations along lines similar to those Hitler and the army leadership now envisaged for Germany’s mechanized formations.61 Poland was not a formidable military power by any means in 1939, but by setting it against the Soviet Union, Hitler at least hoped to prevent it from allying with France in the event of war.62 He tested the Poles’ goodwill by asking for the return of the Polish Corridor, but the Poles, now recognizing Hitler’s pledges as not worth the paper they were written on, remained immune to his overtures. It was a desire to put pressure on the Poles that partly impelled Hitler’s next foreign-policy move. In March 1939, he turned on the rump Czechoslovak state. He accused the Czechoslovak government of border provocations, and persuaded the Slovaks, through a combination of carrot and stick, to break away

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from the state and effectively become a German vassal. He judged correctly that Britain and France would not stand up for Czechoslovakia’s territorial integrity if the country had already ceased to exist. He then blackmailed the Czechs, with the prospect of an annihilating aerial bombardment of Prague, into allowing German troops to take over the remaining Czech lands. These were now renamed the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. With all the former Czechoslovak lands under German domination, Germany’s geostrategic position vis-à-vis Poland was greatly strengthened. But this time the British and French finally took a stand against Hitler, pledging support to Poland in the event of a German attack. Chamberlain, in particular, seemed finally to have shed his illusions. Reassured, the Poles continued to spurn Hitler.63 On the other hand, ruling the Protectorate brought a major increment for Germany’s rearmament efforts. It now had access to the vast majority of Czechoslovakia’s industrial wealth and resources, including the highly prized Skoda works, which generated prodigious amounts of armaments, locomotives and machinery.64 General von Brauchitsch acclaimed Hitler’s actions over Czechoslovakia; Halder, however, was more reticent, and Colonel Eduard Wagner, chief of the Army Supply Department in the General Staff, wrote: ‘we have nothing to fear at present, but soon the bill will be presented to us’.65 But although many generals may have felt a foreboding at the pace of events, they were no longer prepared to voice it openly. *** The new Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was the setting for the first SS and Police crimes in occupied Europe, crimes that took place under the army’s nose. This is not to say that the army acquiesced willingly. General of Infantry Johannes Blaskowitz, Wehrmacht commander in Bohemia, was a committed Christian who sought to reassure the Czech civilian administration that he would behave with soldierly decency in return for its full cooperation. Given the manner of his later conduct in Poland, there is little reason to doubt his sincerity on this occasion. Nevertheless, the Gestapo arrested five thousand people in Prague on the night the Germans seized power. In addition, Jewishowned shops were closed, and the first concentration camp on Czech soil was established outside the capital.66 Meanwhile, the SS ate into the army’s one-time monopoly on the bearing of arms. Indeed, two former army officers, Paul Hausser and Felix Steiner, actually joined the militarized SS during the mid-1930s, and would go on to high-level command within it during the war. From 1936, as chief of the Inspectorate of Militarized SS Formations, Hausser altered the units’ structure and training regimes to make them more militarily effective. In the process, he drew on army

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principles and his extensive army contacts. Thus did Hausser’s work not only make the militarized SS more professional; the fact that army officers were willing to help him was an early example of how, over time, the army came to see the Waffen-SS not simply as a rival, but also as a valuable fellow military organization.67 In August 1938, Hitler finally proclaimed that armed SS formations would be independent of the army. The SS now attempted to persuade potential recruits to join its armed formations rather than the army, with some success. By the end of the winter of 1938–39, the total strength of SS-VT and Totenkopf formations stood at 26,000. Although the scale of the army’s own expansion still dwarfed this figure, it was a sign of the direction the SS was taking. In May 1939, Hitler declared that the armed SS units would form a combat division of their own in the event of war.68 By November, armed SS formations would exist to the tune of three divisions, together with a motorized brigade and fifty thousand trained reinforcements and replacements. Gottlob Berger, chief of recruitment in the SS Main Office, now coined the term Waffen-SS (‘Weapons-SS’) for the first time.69 Concerned as the army leadership was by these developments, it had lost the power to counteract them. Proving its ideological reliability may have seemed a better means of staying the further slippage of its power, and this would have been one reason why the high command now intensified its own efforts to indoctrinate the troops. For instance, new OKW schooling brochures were distributed down to the level of platoon commander, and for the first time the high command attached equal importance to National Socialist indoctrination and weapons training.70 Moreover, the language used in such material resembled Hitler’s now increasingly incendiary language about the Jews. For instance, the article ‘Der Weltkampf des Juden’ (‘The Jews’ Global Battle’), published in December 1938 in Richtlinien für den Unterricht über politische Fragen (Guidelines for Political Instruction) wrote of ‘Jewry’s century-old intention to annihilate’ Germany.71 That the high command still had some way to go in radicalizing its officers against Jews is suggested by a report from the US military attaché in Vienna during the days following the Anschluss. The military attaché had described German army officers ‘intervening against the particularly public mishandling of Jews’, and ‘saving the affected Jews from vengeful party functionaries’, as frenzied mobs of Austrian Nazis assaulted them.72 Hitler too assumed a more proactive role in officers’ education, directly addressing groups at various command levels throughout early 1939, proclaiming that the German people must be educated into ‘fanatical faith in victory’.73 *** With regard to Poland, meanwhile, Hitler moved from persuasion to coercion. In May, he told the generals to steel themselves for a war over Poland, and not

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a short war at that: ‘Everybody’s government must strive for a short war. The government must, however, also prepare for a war of from ten to fifteen years’ duration. . . . The idea of getting out cheaply is dangerous; there is no such possibility.’74 But Hitler was unable to secure the hoped-for military commitments from Italy and Japan. In the event of war, then, Germany faced a potential coalition of Britain and France – with economic and perhaps eventually military support from the United States – together with the Reich’s principal ideological enemy, the Soviet Union. In July 1939, however, opposition from Congress forced Roosevelt to postpone a scheme to allow belligerents to buy arms on a ‘cash-and-carry’ basis.75 More dramatically, the following month Nazi Germany astonished the world by securing a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. Neither side had any illusion that this was anything more than a temporary truce, but it provided for mutual economic assistance and gave each party the short-term security it needed to pursue its immediate goals. For Germany, the pact at the very least reduced the potential damage that war with Britain and France might wreak. It banished the danger not only of the two-front nightmare that had blighted Germany during the First World War, but also of the crippling shortages that a British naval blockade might inflict. Among other things, the Soviet Union became Germany’s main source of imported animal feed, and of 34 per cent of its oil.‘The conclussion of this treaty has saved us,’ announced Colonel Wagner.76 War with Britain and France over Poland was still a scenario that posed enormous risks. Hitler may have calculated that the Nazi–Soviet pact would deter Britain and France from intervening on Poland’s behalf. On the other hand, the United States was temporarily irrelevant and the Soviet Union on benignly neutral terms with Germany. The Luftwaffe was formidable and the German army now the largest in Europe. Moreover, the army’s doctrine and training, particularly in armoured warfare, were superior to those of its prospective enemies. In view of all this, Hitler may have considered the timing the least-worst option for war with Britain and France – a war that, after all, he considered inevitable sooner or later.77 Either way, on 1 September, Germany invaded Poland, and two days later France, Britain, and the dominions of the British Empire and Commonwealth declared war on Germany. The generals themselves broadly welcomed the Nazi–Soviet pact because it removed the danger of a two-front war. But even with the signing of the pact, many generals remained deeply uneasy at the prospect of confronting Britain and France. In particular, fears of another British naval blockade still loomed large for them. So did the fact that, despite all its expansion and improvement, the army was still far less motorized than it needed to be: only 8 per cent of German industry’s vehicle output was allocated to it. But the Nazi–Soviet pact did silence any concerns the generals might otherwise have voiced openly.78

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Furthermore, they now broadly shared Hitler’s view that, given the Western powers’ clear determination to stifle Germany’s great-power ambitions, war with them was inevitable sooner or later.79 On 22 August, Hitler gave a talk to a select group of generals, in which he asserted that Germany must commit to ‘a battle of life and death’ against the Western powers.80 By contrast, the generals contemplated war with Poland with unalloyed enthusiasm. Most exuberant of all were the generals of Junker stock, who relished the prospect of retaking their ancestral lands in a final reckoning with the Poles. General of Cavalry Erich Hoepner, who commanded XVI Motorized Corps, proclaimed: ‘the Polish question must be solved once and for all’.81 Guderian would regard himself as a latter-day Teutonic knight during the campaign, going so far as to divert the armoured spearhead of his XIX Motorized Corps to ‘liberate’ his ancestral estate.82 Manstein, who would be chief of staff to High Command East during the Polish campaign, wrote after the war: ‘every time we looked at the map we were reminded of our precarious situation. That irrational demarcation of the frontier! That mutilation of our Fatherland!’83 These were sentiments to which Hitler’s 22 August speech also appealed directly, and sucessfully. *** Between 1936 and 1939, the German army’s organization and methods underwent considerable improvement. The Panzer force announced its arrival emphatically, and the army as a whole refined its way of operating as it accumulated valuable lessons through experience in Spain and Austria. But against the backdrop of the ‘guns-versus-butter’ dilemma, the three branches of the Wehrmacht competed for limited economic resources, and the German army enjoyed only limited success in securing the materials it needed to rearm and expand. The international arms race unleashed by the rearmament process exacerbated these problems. It also threatened to go against Germany, and thus pushed Hitler towards an accelerated foreign-policy timetable predicated on gaining more resources sooner. Hitler’s approach to foreign policy, with all the risks of escalation it entailed, did not win the army leadership’s universal approval. Nevertheless, the cumulative success of Hitler’s foreign policy gambles increasingly eroded opposition within the army. So too did the fact that such gambles brought more manpower and economic resources, and thereby the means of further rearmament, into the German fold. By the summer of 1939, the more cautious and clear-headed among the army’s leadership had been sacked, or had left their posts. Others resigned themselves to the situation, or complied enthusiastically with Hitler’s wishes, within a new high-command structure designed with that very purpose in mind. All this augured poorly for effective military planning,

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but promisingly – if that is the right word – for the army’s ongoing nationalpolitical indoctrination. By now, the steady ascent of the SS in the military sphere challenged the army’s power at the same time as the latter was being eroded from above, and compelled the army to assimilate with the regime even further. The German army’s leadership entered war resigned to the prospect of fighting Britain and France, but exuberant at the prospect of fighting Poland. Nowhere was the exuberance stronger than among those generals whose ancestral lands had been relinquished to Poland after the First World War. In military terms, there were several respects in which the army could regard the prospect of war more confidently than its opponents. Yet there was no escaping the fact that a major war had come sooner than it had expected, or was genuinely prepared for.

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PART II

Triumph and Hubris

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CHAPTER THREE

POLAND, 1939–40

 I

‘

n my opinion, the [Polish] government should go to the gallows,’ wrote Lance Corporal Josef B. of the 2nd Panzer Division on 9 September 1939. ‘It’s just mad to fight against our superiority, and their people don’t even know why.’1 This comment encapsulates the contempt many German soldiers felt towards the Poles, whether as a people or as a military opponent. The Germans defeated them with old operational concepts supported by new tools,2 but, above all, they won thanks to a massive force disparity between themselves and the Poles. The campaign also deeply affected the army behind the battlefront. Polish civilians and POWs alike suffered harsh, sometimes brutal, treatment at the German army’s hands. Most shamefully of all, the army leadership failed to prevent the SS and police from murdering large numbers of Polish Jews and Polish civilians from those sections of the population whom the Nazi leadership considered a threat to security within the newly conquered territory. All of this ominously lowered the moral threshold of actions the army was prepared to condone, or itself commit, in its later military campaigns. *** Despite the economic forces that had constrained Germany’s rearmament drive, both the army and the Luftwaffe had made enormous strides since 1935. The mobilized German army now comprised just short of three million men, supported by 400,000 horses and 200,000 vehicles. The Poles relied upon cavalry far more than the Germans did – though not so far, as is widely believed, as vaingloriously sending in cavalry against Panzers. There was only one proper armoured division in the entire Polish army, and the Panzers also enjoyed superior communication and superior mechanization. Each Panzer division had a motorized radio company and field telephones, whereas Polish motorized formations, such as they were, possessed only the latter.3

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The Poles were also strategically hamstrung. The British and French intended to let the Germans fritter their forces in an attack in the west, hoping that naval blockade and aerial bombing would erode German civilians’ morale and that the United States would eventually join the Allied coalition and settle the issue. Meanwhile, however, they could not provide military aid to the Poles. The Polish land mass was also too small for Polish forces to withdraw strategically; because of this, and also because it was under domestic political pressure to keep Polish soil as inviolate as possible, the weak and outnumbered Polish army committed to trying to hold the Germans along the entire frontier. ‘Into the Polish dispositions the German plan fitted like a glove,’ wrote Friedrich von Mellenthin, intelligence officer with III Corps, in his memoirs.4 To make matters worse for the Poles, the British and French had initially cautioned them against ‘premature’ mobilization for fear of antagonizing the Germans. This had forced the Poles to rush mobilization at the end of August. Nor had the Poles sufficiently provided for the families of reservists. This caused a spike in desertion from the Polish army during the campaign, particularly among its ethnic German soldiers.5 The strategic aim of the invasion, which the Germans codenamed Fall Weiss (Case White), was to smash into the Polish defensive positions along the border and catch the main Polish forces in a pincer movement. The German forces were distributed between two armies under Army Group North, commanded by Colonel General von Bock, and three under Army Group South, commanded by the newly reactivated Colonel General von Rundstedt. Army Group North was to cut across the Polish Corridor from Pomerania and East Prussia, and encircle and defeat Polish forces there, then drive south bypassing Warsaw. Army Group South was to attack largely from Silesia, seizing the River Vistula above and below Warsaw, and encircling and destroying Polish forces west of the city. Its main thrust was allotted to Reichenau’s Tenth Army. Reichenau was now a general of artillery. His bumptious demeanour and overwearing ambition had alienated colleagues and caused his career as a ‘political’ general to stall, but he was compensated in the Polish campaign with an army command half of whose formations were motorized.6 Army Group North, less mechanized than Army Group South with only Guderian’s II Panzer Corps at its disposal, faced some fierce Polish resistance, particularly in the sector of the German Third Army. It did not help that it could not amass its artillery in strategically telling strength; German army doctrine did not regard artillery as a decisive weapon; the army’s heavy artillery was still horse-drawn in 1939, and its artillery in general was dispersed among battalions and regiments.7 The Polish position at Mława proved especially irksome to Army Group North, and the Mark I and Mark II Panzers, together with the SS motorized regiments, suffered heavy losses in trying to take it. Bock had to redistribute his forces confusingly in the wake of this delay, but Army

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Group North was able to resume its southward advance when its Third and Fourth armies linked up. Unteroffizier Priess, serving in II Panzer Corps, later described the desolate aftermath of a vain attempt by Polish troops in the Corridor to link up with their forces further south: ‘The bodies of dead Poles lay piled up among a chaotic litter of baggage wagons, motor vehicles and numerous guns, whose teams of horses lay dead in their harnesses. Heaps of munitions lay next to countless hurriedly discarded rifles, bayonets, gas masks and all kinds of other equipment. It was a sombre, doom-laden site. Perhaps it was here at this spot that the Führer recalled the quotation he was later to use in his speech after the overthrow of Poland . . . “Man and horse and wagon, The Lord smote them all.” ’8 The Tenth Army, making Army Group South’s main thrust northeast towards Warsaw, achieved the swiftest progress of the campaign. Its breakthrough between the Lodz Army and the Kraków Army made full use of Panzers to cut through the Polish defences, then drive ahead and block the Polish forces as they vainly sought to escape being trapped by the German jaws. At the same time, the Poles endured devastating air attack from the Luftwaffe’s Ju88 ‘Stuka’ dive-bombers.9 Army Group South’s Fourteenth Army included the 2nd Panzer Division. First Lieutenant Rudolf Behr, of the division’s 4th Panzer Regiment, later described with almost lipsmacking relish the destruction his Panzer platoon wrought upon the enemy in a Polish village: ‘Now our tanks open up, just a few shells at first among the densest groups to set the ball rolling! I observe the effect: fabulous! On the edge of the wood some try to reach cover. They are caught in our machine-gun fire. Knocked out! A small detachment has disappeared into a house, from whose windows and roof they are soon blasting fierce fire at us. One shell aimed at the roof and another at the front of the house, and the survivors are driven out into the open again. Our machine-gun takes loving care of them.’10 Anecdotes such as this regularly peppered Panzer men’s accounts of their early campaigns. This one depicts a particularly savage example of the huntsman-like exhilaration of handling superior destructive technology, a feeling Panzer men shared with Luftwaffe airmen and u-boat crews.11 Indeed, Behr also wrote of the ‘pride at the glorious comradeship that embraces the whole crew; officers, NCOs and men. Pride above all at the invincible might of this young German weapon we love so much: our tanks.’12 As well as besting the Polish air force and hamstringing Polish ground forces with considerable ease, the Luftwaffe destroyed fortifications such as the Modlin position northwest of Warsaw. The invasion also ran smoothly because Hitler was prevented from playing a major direct role in it. He was already eager to lead the Reich’s military campaigns from the front, but this particular campaign was over before he could influence its conduct significantly. Even while it was,

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ongoing the military train in which Hitler travelled was too small for a staff that could have carried out substantial operational planning.13 Six days into the campaign, the only large Polish formation the Germans had yet to hit was the Poznan Army. This was at least able to give the Germans a scare when, on 9 September, as it retreated to escape encirclement, it crashed into overextended elements of the German Eighth Army along the River Bzura west of Warsaw. Even so, it was actually unable to break out, and in any case had nowhere to break out to.14 When it came to urban, night-time or forest fighting, however, the Panzers’ training in rapid offensive warfare let them down. The first German spearhead to reach Warsaw, on 8 September, was the Tenth Army’s 4th Panzer Division. It got a singeing for its troubles. Untried in urban warfare, it failed to coordinate its Panzers and infantry. Instead, the Panzers went ahead of the infantry; without the infantry’s protection, the Panzers were dangerously exposed to Polish fire from the surrounding urban landscape. Nor did the division effectively use its artillery or pioneers to help clear the way. In the wake of this semi-debacle, Army Group South displayed that same capacity for selfcriticism that German units had shown following the Anschluss. It analysed where the attack on Warsaw had gone wrong, and devised a more effective combined-arms plan for a new assault. But armoured urban fighting was not the only respect in which the army fell short during the campaign: its infantry performed unevenly, and its logistical support and artillery left something to be desired. Furthermore, these defects would need remedying at the same time as Hitler sought to expand the army by another forty-nine divisions during the early months of the war.15 The 4th Panzer Division’s ordeal, and the German infantry’s less than consummate performance, also demonstrate how resiliently the Poles often fought. At least one German commander enjoined his men to recognize Polish soldiers’ ‘patriotism, exemplary soldierly conduct [and] bravery, which never failed even in the most desperate circumstances’, their ‘pitifully bad’ leadership notwithstanding.16 ‘Our losses of officers had been disproportionately heavy . . .,’ conceded Guderian in his memoirs, ‘for they had thrown themselves into battle with the greatest devotion to duty.’17 A German casualty was General von Fritsch, the army’s former commander-in-chief. Following his fall in 1938, Fritsch had asked for the command of a regiment. General von Brauchitsch had granted his request and placed him in charge of the 12th Artillery Regiment. Fritsch was fatally wounded in the thigh directing the assault on Praga on 22 September. His last words to his escort officer, who tried to bind his leg, were: ‘Ah, just leave it.’18 It is distinctly possible that Fritsch had gone looking for a bullet, so embittered was he by his abject treatment the previous year.

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The Poles could only delay their complete defeat. In mid-September, the Germans launched a concentrated attack on the Bzura and, by the 18th, they had reported taking 120,000 prisoners.19 The Fourteenth Army, with Luftwaffe support, cut the Poles’ route of retreat across the River San. Edmund N., an Unteroffizier with the 2nd Panzer Division, wrote on 19 September: ‘the Poles are so thoroughly encircled by German troops that they have nothing more to eat or drink. Today they tried to break out of our encirclement and suffered countless dead.’20 By that date, only Warsaw remained as a Polish holdout. *** The Poles lost 65,000 men killed and 144,000 wounded in the campaign. Eventually, 587,000 Polish troops would be taken prisoner. Though the Poles resisted valiantly and gave the Germans considerable trouble in places, the Germans themselves lost only eleven thousand killed and thirty thousand wounded. But the far higher casualties the Polish army suffered were not just inflicted in battle; about three thousand Polish soldiers died outside of it.21 The cause of these deaths lay partly in the conditioning German troops had undergone prior to the invasion. Not only were many receptive to the diet of Nazi propaganda they had been fed before and during their military service; anti-Slavism had long been a toxic presence in German society, particularly in Germany’s eastern regions. The ethnic Polish revolt within the German Empire’s upper Silesian region in 1918, not to mention Germany’s loss of territory to Poland following the Treaty of Versailles, had only intensified this feeling.22 ‘Action against Poland would be welcomed by the overwhelming mass of the German people,’ conceded a report for the SPD in exile shortly before the invasion. ‘The Poles are enormously hated among the masses for what they did at the end of the War.’ The report concluded that, even among the SPD’s former supporters in the working class, ‘if Hitler strikes out against the Poles, he will have a majority of the population behind him’.23 The Wehrmacht and the army directly exploited anti-Polish sentiment, issuing orders of the day at the start of the invasion stating that the Germans were invading Poland in order to ‘safeguard German ethnicity and German living space’.24 Though it is impossible to establish accurately how the mass of ordinary German soldiers regarded them, there is plenty to suggest that they widely perceived Poles as aggressive and brutish. For instance, Lance Corporal Josef B. of the 2nd Panzer Division wrote in Tarnow on 9 September: Yesterday and today I saw a load of Polish prisoners. They go around like gypsies with their carts. I wouldn’t want to be taken prisoner by them. They behave in an unEuropean and indeed un-human way. The Poles could never

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tell me that they’re real and pure Christians. Some of our men surrender to them for lack of ammunition, and the Poles simply do them in, or gruesomely mutilate them like the Reds did in Spain. And the civilians go to prayer, hiding themselves behind holy pictures and crosses, but then fire at our people again whenever they can. Who can blame our people for feeling bitter and using harsher methods?25

Lance Corporal Karl B., also with the 2nd Panzer Division, wrote after the campaign: ‘The Polish soldier is the most vile creature there ever was in war. They hardly ever took prisoners. Whoever fell into their hands was bumped off in the most gruesome way, and we gave the Polacks the same brotherly treatment.’26 The poorer areas the soldiers passed through seemed especially to justify their anti-Slavic attitudes further. ‘You can see the Poles never bother to repair anything,’ wrote Private Hans W. of the 73rd Infantry Division, a second-wave infantry division that was part of Army Group North’s reserves coming down from Pomerania.27 ‘You recently wrote to me about finding work here in Poland,’ wrote Franz F. to his fiancée. ‘Honestly – don’t bother. It’s literally filthy here. All modern conveniences like running water, electric light, gas and so on are missing entirely. A town like Łódź, with 600,000 inhabitants, doesn’t have a single sewer. In most streets you see all the human waste chucked out.’28 One should be mindful that German soldiers might have chosen to depict Poland as a human pigsty in order to impress their readers. And by no means all German soldiers held the Poles in contempt. On 9 September, just before crossing the River Weichsel, Captain Friedrich M., also of the 73rd Infantry Division, recorded in his diary: ‘Whole caravans of trucks with Polish prisoners are being brought back, and there’s also a continuous stream of returning civilians. Now they’ve seen that we aren’t barbarians, that we won’t do civilians any harm, they return home with their kids and with all their possessions in a pram.’29 Three days later, with the honesty a private diary allows, he bemoaned the damage German soldiers had inflicted upon the local school. ‘A microscope lay broken on the table, a projector screen lay cut up in the corner, the lovely library was torn asunder and cellos lay destroyed on the ground.’30 It is clear nonetheless that many German soldiers did regard Poles with contempt, and were accordingly more likely to handle them roughly, or worse. This alone was not enough to impel them to kill their prisoners. The fighting conditions they encountered during the campaign also played a role. It goes without saying that neither motive justifies killing prisoners, but when they fused together they help to explain the troops’ behaviour. For one thing, the vast majority of German soldiers were tasting combat for the first time. Their inexperience made them jumpy and excitable, but, above all, it made them

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more likely to react badly to losses. The temporary blows that the Poznan Army landed on the Germans riled them especially.31 Moreover, the Polish forces disintegrated so completely that the Germans captured more prisoners than they had expected or could provide for. For instance, on 8 September, VII Corps, serving under Army Group South, reported that more than six thousand of its prisoners and internees were without supplies. Given the derision many German soldiers felt towards Poles, nervous German guards faced with overwhelming numbers of Polish POWs were more likely to maltreat them, or in isolated cases shoot them. On the night of 5 September, for instance, German guards in the prison compound at Serock panicked and shot eighty-four prisoners. Allegedly the prisoners had been attempting to escape, though it is unclear whether this was the case.32 German soldiers advancing through the Polish Corridor felt further cause to despise Polish civilians and military personnel. Here, German troops came into contact with Poland’s ethnic German population. Ethnic Germans comprised 3 per cent of the country’s populace, and had suffered considerable discrimination and economic disadvantage during the interwar years. Then, on the outbreak of war, reports real or imagined of ethnic Germans carrying out sabotage against the Polish army led to many of them being arrested, deported, or shot out of hand. In the Polish Corridor, Polish troops killed around a thousand ethnic Germans.33 The same Captain Friedrich M. who was capable of sympathizing with Poles railed against the outrages to which ethnic Germans had been subjected. According to the father of an ethnic German family with whom he had been billeted, ‘the worst agitators’ were the Polish Catholic priests, ‘and thanks to their agitation many gruesome murders have been committed, the worst of which was in Bromberg where so many Germans have lost their lives. [He] then told me of the days of hardship, and I really saw what these people have had to endure. Then his father-in-law arrived and told me how the Poles had locked him up and wanted to use him as a hostage, before the Germans broke in and freed him.’34 Ethnic Germans greeted the arriving troops with enormous relief. ‘They were indescribably happy at our arrival,’ wrote Franz F., a purser with XIII corps, to his fiancée. ‘The Germans here have really suffered, but have held on wonderfully despite two hundred years of their culture being suppressed or persecuted. I have managed to find myself a really small girlfriend, a ten-year-old blonde called Irene. She is so good and well behaved that I share all my meals with her.’35 The exact number of ethnic Germans whom Poles killed is unknown, but probably runs into the low thousands. Appalling though these actions were, however, they were nothing like as massive and systematic as Nazi propaganda pretended. They were more spontaneous outbursts of brutality, inflicted in a dangerous, violent wartime situation against a section of the population that was suddenly being viewed, however rightly or wrongly, as a nest of fifth columnists.

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And while these circumstances did not justify the Poles’ behaviour towards the ethnic Germans, neither did that behaviour justify the infinitely larger, more methodical campaign of murder, terror and oppression to which the Germans subjected the Polish civilian population both during and after the invasion.36 On 16 September, General von Brauchitsch issued an order that saddled the entire Polish army with the blame for the atrocities against ethnic Germans: ‘The behaviour of the Polish army against defenceless ethnic Germans is to be made known. Such an enemy is capable of any perfidy and deserves no consideration.’37 *** Thus did the Germans direct their ferocity not just at Polish POWs, but also at Polish civilians; among other things, they often plundered with impunity. For instance, VII Corps reported a case of armed robbery in which more than five thousand zlotys’ worth of jewellery was stolen.38 On 20 September, General von Rundstedt entreated his troops to rein themselves in: ‘I know that you will agree with me that every means must be used to prevent the great achievements of our troops being soiled by the behaviour of irresponsible elements.’39 Polish civilians, anxious to resist the mercilessly swift invasion of their country, frequently took up arms against the Germans. ‘The most we’ve had to deal with are underhand, cowardly attacks by civilians, or rather soldiers dressed as civilians,’ wrote Josef B. on 9 September. ‘At the beginning, the plague of sharpshooters in trees was rather irksome. But now we get stuck in energetically against such riff-raff.’40 A month later, Karl B. recounted: ‘we suffered a lot at the hands of civilians. They would shoot us in the back. An old lady of between sixty and seventy cut the throats of two of our soldiers during the night. I could give you plenty of examples of how vile the Polish people are.’41 Even though the details may sometimes have been luridly exaggerated, attacks on German troops by Polish civilians undeniably took place. However, although these attacks clearly flouted the rules of war as stipulated in the 1907 Hague Convention, the ferocious German reprisals were severely disproportionate. The wording of the convention did leave the Germans some leeway for harsh reprisals. Article 43 stated that an occupying force must ensure public order and safety, and respect the laws of the land, unless absolutely prevented from doing so. On the other hand, Article 50 stipulated that victims of any reprisal must be shown to have some connection with the attack. Yet here the convention was ambiguous, because it depended upon a commander’s view as to whether there was a connection. More ambiguous still was the 1929 Geneva Convention, which forbade collective reprisals against POWs but said nothing about civilians. During the interwar years, most military establishments regarded reprisals as a last resort, but not as something that was prohibited.42

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In August 1939, however, Hitler issued a much more emphatic directive, circumventing international law and identifying four offences by occupied civilians that were to be punishable by death: espionage, hostile acts committed by civilians, violations of German military regulations and undermining of German military power. The German military also paid markedly less attention than the military establishments of Britain, France, and the United States to non-lethal alternatives to hostage executions.43 Over the course of the war, different commanders across Germany’s occupied territories would inflict reprisals with varying degrees of ruthlessness or restraint. In Poland, however, the stress was definitely on the former. This was due not just to anti-Slavism, to the army’s belief that pacifying occupied territory was vital militarily, or to the deep aversion to guerrilla warfare that generally characterizes conventional armies. German military thinking was particularly vehement in its view that campaigns were fought and won by the clean-cut, decisive method of destroying an enemy’s conventional army through skilful manoeuvres and open combat. By definition, then, civilians who continued to fight outside of conventional hostilities, or supported efforts to do so, were heinous transgressors. German commanders had employed unusually harsh counterinsurgency measures since their experience of ‘sharpshooters’ (francs-tireurs) during the FrancoPrussian War of 1870–71. This was an approach that their experience of irregular warfare in more recent wars had reinforced. Most infamously, German troops had suppressed the Herero uprising in German southwest Africa with a ferocity that historians have frequently described as genocidal. During their invasion of Belgium and northern France in August 1914, German units were seized by ‘franc-tireur psychosis,’ retaliating against irksome resistance from retreating Allied troops and isolated pot shots from civilians – many instances of which were actually ‘friendly fire’ from other German troops – by committing grandscale arson and killing around six thousand noncombatants. The fact that Austrian troops invading Serbia and Russian troops invading East Prussia that same month acted with comparable abandon does not diminish the appalling nature of the Germans’ conduct. There were more measured precedents on which the Germans in Poland could draw in 1939: in the German-occupied Ukraine in 1918, for instance, some officers recognized that winning the population’s hearts and minds was a better way to defeat insurgents.44 But in Poland in 1939, Nazi ideology and anti-Slavism led the German army to invoke harsher precedents. Thus, for instance, Army Group North decreed: ‘if there is shooting from a village behind the front and if it proves impossible to identify the house from which the shots came, then the whole village is to be burnt to the ground.’45 Its troops went on indiscriminately to torch villages in the Polish Corridor. Army Group South’s Eighth Army also exacted indiscriminate collective reprisals.

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Often, a few shots fired by Polish soldiers defending a hamlet was all it took to push edgy German troops into committing brutal reprisals against civilians.46 One of the harshest proponents of counterterror was Lieutenant General Max von Schenckendorff, commander of XXXV Corps. General von Reichenau, Schenckendorff ’s immediate superior, ordered his units to shoot three Polish hostages for every German soldier killed by civilians, and three for every act of sabotage. Harsh as this order already was, Schenckendorff radicalized it on his own initiative, ordering ten hostages shot for every German soldier killed. Overall, sixteen thousand Polish civilians had lost their lives to German reprisals by the campaign’s end.47 Even on 10 October, after the campaign had ended, the new office of the Oberbefehlshaber Ost (senior commander in the east) declared: ‘The land has in no way been fully pacified. Countless former Polish soldiers who have avoided capture roam around the land and could become a serious danger for the security and order of the land, particularly under fanatical officers. Weapons lie in abundance around the forests. Every attempt at sabotage or defiance is to be suppressed with the harshest measures.’48 The army’s efforts to pacify its newly won territory also led it extensively to condone, indeed approve of, the even more pitiless measures the SS employed to bring the Polish population to heel. The SS dealt out these measures in the cause not of security in the conventional sense, but of decapitating all potential sources of future Polish resistance. Thus, while fighting on the front line was ongoing, the SS conducted a shadow campaign of selective killing behind the lines called Operation Tannenberg. Five Einsatzgruppen (task forces) of the Security Police and SD were each allocated to one of the field armies. They targeted and murdered members of specific ‘leadership’ groups within the Polish population, particularly the intelligentsia. They also targeted and murdered large numbers of Polish Jews. For this task in particular, they enlisted the eager help of ethnic German auxiliaries. Then, on 17 September, the Red Army invaded eastern Poland, seizing that portion of the country to which the terms of the Nazi–Soviet pact entitled them. The German army was happy to see the SS expel Jews along the German–Soviet demarcation line, pushing them into the Soviet-occupied Polish zone and thus enabling the German authorities to wash their hands of them.49 *** The Red Army’s attack left the Germans with little more to do in a campaign that they had virtually won already. Only Warsaw remained. With callously utilitarian calculation, General von Rundstedt decided to spare his troops a prolonged urban battle and instead ordered the Luftwaffe to bomb the capital into submission.50 Rundstedt’s actions displayed two things that aligned the

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officer corps with Nazi thinking: racial contempt for the Poles and the technocratic ruthlessness that had characterized the officer corps since the First World War. The Polish campaign ended, a few stubborn pockets of resistance aside, when Warsaw surrendered unconditionally on 28 September. ‘It’s emphatically over in Poland,’ wrote Lance Corporal Heinrich G. of the 73rd Infantry Division. ‘This campaign was carried out at such breathtaking pace that one can scarcely believe it was possible. It also clearly went too quickly for the English and French. You really have to take your hat off to the active troops.’51 Karl B. of the 2nd Panzer Division concurred, recording on 7 October: ‘We had days when we advanced 50 to 100 kilometres [30 to 60 miles]. . . . We were so dusty that we no longer recognized ourselves.’52 There was also euphoria among the generals, several of whom were promoted, and several of whom, including Guderian and Hoepner, were decorated.53 General of Cavalry von Weichs wrote that the exhilaration of knowing ‘that we actually have the best armed forces in the world’ had banished all his doubts about the new army’s quality. Lieutenant General Hans-Georg Reinhardt, who commanded the 4th Panzer Division in Poland and would go on to army- and army group-level command on the eastern front, described the campaign as the ‘crowning glory of my life as a soldier’.54 All this was to ignore the many flaws in the German army’s performance, not least that of Reinhardt’s own 4th Panzer Division. Nevertheless, the bulk of the Germans’ wider operational manoeuvres had been successful.55 Over the following months, the German army would set about the task of addressing the defects that the campaign had exposed; this would markedly improve the army’s performance during its triumphant campaign in the west, against opponents far more formidable than the Poles. *** Equally far-reaching for the German army’s future development was what happened behind the front lines, both during the campaign and in its immediate aftermath. Around seven thousand Polish Jews were murdered during SS operations in 1939. By December, the SS and its ethnic German auxiliaries had also murdered over forty thousand non-Jewish Poles.56 Such actions were increasingly assuming the character of a full-blown campaign of ethnic cleansing, all in the cause of Hitler’s blueprint for an enslaved Poland under German racial domination. However, killing on the scale that was now unfolding transgressed the limits of what many German army officers were prepared to condone. Numerous senior commanders protested to General von Brauchitsch. One protest came from an army group commander, General von Bock. General von Schenckendorff, who had readily executed civilians in reprisal for guerrilla

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attacks, was appalled when he witnessed the SS murdering Jewish women and children. The most prominent protests came from Colonel General Blaskowitz, freshly arrived from the Protectorate as the newly appointed Oberbefehlshaber Ost. The deeply religious Blaskowitz was revolted by what was taking place, and initially refused to believe that Hitler was aware of it. He tried to open channels to the Führer in an effort to bring the atrocities to his attention.57 In the event, Blaskowitz’s temerity not only failed in its objective, but also ignited an explosive response from Hitler, who castigated the army for its ‘Salvation Army’ methods.58 Blaskowitz then went for broke, and issued an impassioned and prophetic condemnation: ‘When high officials of the SS and the police call for atrocities and brutalities and publicly praise them, then within the shortest spell of time only the brutal will rule. With astonishing speed, men of the same sick leanings and character will come together, in order to give full vent to their beastly and pathological instinct.’59 Other officers tried pragmatic arguments; whether they were only thinking pragmatically, or just arguing pragmatically because they expected their superiors to ignore their moral objections, is impossible to know. In any case, officers expressed their fear that the killings might affect the image of the German army in the Polish population’s eyes, and that witnessing the killings might affect the discipline of its troops.60 That German army officers were concerned about the Polish population’s feelings may seem surprising. But however much disdain many of them may have felt towards the Poles, officers did distinguish between harsh pacification measures to cow the population, and wanton brutality that could only alienate the people and rekindle resistance. Thus for instance did the 10th Infantry Division order that ‘all cruelty against the population is to be avoided, but all means of rapidly breaking resistance are to be ruthlessly employed’.61 As for the troops’ discipline, this was something officers had good reason to fear. For one thing, anti-Semitism unsurprisingly found fertile ground among the German army’s rank-and-file troops. It is impossible to know how many soldiers were involved in humiliating and tormenting Polish Jews during and immediately after the campaign, but there was certainly enough going on for commanders to become concerned. For soldiers already infused with antiSemitism, the distinctive dress and hairstyles of eastern Jews made them particularly visible targets. One soldier from a mountain troop unit, which fought in Galicia during the military campaign, later recalled the following scene: ‘It was a Saturday, and they presented themselves in front of us with kaftans and little round hats. Many of them had shaggy beards. But it was their bad luck, for a schoolhouse in which we were quartered needed cleaning.’62 Favourite methods of humiliation included forcing Jews to scrub the streets on their hands and knees, and cutting off their beards. In Radomyśl Wielki, soldiers

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of VII Corps put Jewish and Polish inhabitants in the church. The Jews were forced to spend the night there, while the German soldiers enjoyed themselves tormenting them by standing outside and repeatedly firing off shots into the air. Two days later, the Jewish men had their beards shaved or cut off by German soldiers in the marketplace. They were also forced to chew the grass between the paving stones and pick up rubbish with their hands, while German soldiers beat them constantly.63 Such behaviour was by no means universal. Younger soldiers had been through particularly intensive anti-Semitic conditioning through the Hitler Youth and the RAD as well as the army. Moreover, as far as governmental systems went, the Third Reich was all they knew. So it was hardly surprising if many of them accepted its tenets and acted accordingly. Their taste for tormenting Jews (or worse) was likely, therefore, to be stronger than that of their older comrades. One Polish eyewitness reported after the war that German army soldiers had behaved well towards Jews and that, although they had not generally mingled, he did know a case of Jews inviting German soldiers to a wedding.64 Unusual as this example was, it demonstrates the danger of overgeneralizing about the treatment ordinary German soldiers dealt out to Polish Jews. Yet while some senior army officers tried to intervene against the killing of Jews, and of non-Jewish Poles, others, such as Fourth Army rear area commander Major General Walter Braemer, actively supported the campaign, believing it would help keep Polish territory pacified. Brauchitsch, supine as ever, failed to respond to such protests as were made. The most he was prepared to do was issue a directive in December ordering German soldiers to safeguard their discipline by maintaining a ‘proper bearing’ towards the occupied population.65 When it came to what constituted indiscipline, Brauchitsch grotesquely placed needless sadism towards civilians on the same level as more mundane vices: ‘lack of activity and quiet times lead to the temptations of alcohol misuse. Drunken officers are as unacceptable in war as in peace.’66 But the most important lines were crossed during the first week of October. On the 4th, Hitler pardoned all ‘excesses’ that German personnel had committed during the campaign. Three days later, he appointed Himmler to the post of Settlement Commissar for the East. This assured the SS the central role in reordering Poland along Nazi racial lines, and prompted Himmler to reveal that the Führer himself had ordered the killing of Jews and other elements. Invoking Hitler’s name was a sure way of stifling army opposition to the killings, for in the political power play of the Third Reich no career-minded participant was likely to condemn publicly measures sanctioned by the Führer himself. Senior army commanders were also likely to limit their criticism for fear of sullying a

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military triumph in which they had been so instrumental. Then, on 17 October, Hitler removed the SS and Police from the army’s jurisdiction.67 *** Nine days later, the transitional military administration was replaced by a permanent territorial arrangement. Two western Polish areas were converted into provinces and directly incorporated into the Reich, together with individual smaller parts of western Polish territory. The rest of German-occupied Poland was renamed the ‘General Government of the Occupied Polish Areas’. Over the course of the next four and a half years, German-occupied Poland became both laboratory and graveyard due to the Nazis’ efforts to reorder their newly conquered territory according to a racial grand design. Poland would undergo colonization by German settlers. Its native Polish population would endure terror, deportation, and exploitation on a scale greater than any other European country the Germans conquered; among other things, Poles resident in the territory newly incorporated into the Reich were shunted into the General Government to make way for ethnic German settlers from other parts of Europe. The General Government also became the location of overcrowded, insanitary ghettoized areas into which Polish Jews were crammed en masse. By 1939, the Reich’s official preferred solution for dealing with the Jews in its realm was to get them to emigrate. But the war’s outbreak rendered mass emigration unfeasible. Meanwhile, the spate of conquests that commenced with Poland brought more Jews into the Reich’s fold. In other words, the scale of the Nazis’ Jewish ‘problem’ grew just as their preferred solution was closed to them. Nor was it possible, as the Nazis were about to learn in occupied Poland, to ghettoize Jews for any duration. The manpower needed to pen them in was not available, and chronic overcrowding within the ghettos threatened not only outbreaks of starvation within them, but also outbreaks of disease that might reach beyond their boundaries. From 1942, a series of extermination camps would be established on Polish soil, and Poland would thus become the main setting for the ‘Final Solution’ of the ‘Jewish problem’ in occupied Europe. Under the occupation arrangements of October 1939, the army was empowered merely to conduct military operations in the interests of security.68 It therefore lost any remaining chance it might have had to curb SS actions in Poland. In one respect, however, the army itself was active in Poland’s racial reordering, as it devised plans to settle German veterans and their families as armed farmers along an ‘Eastern Wall’ in Poland. Brauchitsch used the idea as something over which the army and SS might cooperate and thereby repair the damage that had been caused by the confrontation over the SS killings. Himmler

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was receptive to the idea of some kind of security zone. He suggested an enormous tank ditch, to be built using Polish Jews as forced labour; he believed he could sell the idea of the ditch as a policing measure against smugglers and spies, and also use the need for Jewish labour as a further argument for the Jews’ mass deportation. However, in February 1940, Hans Frank, the head of the General Government, who wanted to be saddled with as few deported Jews as possible, prevailed upon Hitler to water down the plans.69 *** The German army did not wholeheartedly support Nazi crimes during and immediately following the Polish campaign. However, its leadership failed to support the protests that numerous officers made. As for the army’s rank and file, decades of anti-Polish animosity and a barrage of Nazi propaganda and army instruction – not to mention a heady sense of triumph at the army’s first victorious campaign – made many soldiers, if by no means all, regard Poles and eastern Jews with derision or worse. This atmosphere made it easier for Nazi propaganda, and for the army’s own orders, to exaggerate the outrages ethnic Germans suffered at Polish hands, and to decry the attacks armed Polish civilians made on Wehrmacht troops. The resulting contempt that the troops felt extended both to Polish military personnel and to ‘enemy’ civilians; Polish POWs and civilian reprisal victims perished as a result. All this took place against the backdrop of a German campaign that was ideological as well as military. It aimed not just to defeat the enemy’s forces in the field but also to subjugate, oppress and exploit an entire ‘racially inferior’ civilian population. The SS, not the army, was the main instrument of this endeavour. However, so preoccupied was the army with its own security needs, and so spineless the posturing of its commander-in-chief, that it largely complied with it – a course of action further eased, of course, by the anti-Polish sentiment that permeated the army. Thus in all these respects did the Polish campaign lower the moral threshold of what the army leadership, and many other officers and soldiers, were prepared to acquiesce or indeed participate in. Not all officers and soldiers embraced this development as readily as one another; how readily could be determined by such things as their age, and whether or not their ancestral home lay within Polish territory. But admirable cases of outright opposition, most prominently that of the conservative Christian General Blaskowitz, were too few to be effective. Militarily, the Polish campaign showcased the superiority of the German army’s tactics and training, particularly in mechanized warfare, and its solid grasp of operations. Nevertheless, it was not the sternest test of the German army’s capabilities. In Poland, the German army faced an isolated, outnumbered

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opponent with nowhere to run, trained and equipped to standards markedly lower than its own. Even then, pugnacious Polish defenders managed to expose the German army’s ongoing shortcomings. The spring of 1940 would present the German army with a much more formidable challenge. However, the aftermath of the Polish campaign would enable it to scrutinize its performance afresh, augment its strength and surmount the military challenges of 1940 to spectacular effect.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘ SITZKRIEG’ , 1939–40

T

he seven months between the outbreak of war and early April 1940 saw the Allies and the Germans steadily build up their forces along the frontiers in the west without any aggressive action. For the troops, it was a static and tedious period experienced under the grim conditions of the north-west European winter of 1939–40. The British called it the Phoney War (or alternatively the Bore War), the French the Drôle de Guerre (the ‘Funny War’), and the Germans the Sitzkrieg, meaning the ‘Sitting War’. As far as the German army was concerned, however, these months can be viewed another way. They saw the army undergo a vital upgrade in which it augmented its strength and intensified its training. The army, together with the Luftwaffe, also united around a plan that in May and June 1940 would knock France out of the war and Britain out of the continent. Before that, in April 1940, the army would participate with both the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine in an operation in Scandinavia that would see them totally outclass the Allies there. *** The Franco-German frontier was lined by the forts of the Westwall on the German side, and by the Maginot Line on the French side. The Maginot Line extended in strength from the Swiss frontier to just south of the frontier with Luxembourg, whereupon it became a string of weaker fortifications running just south of the Franco-Belgian border. North of that, the British and French aimed to support and coordinate with Belgian and Dutch armed forces. For, while Belgium and the Netherlands were still neutral, that would of course change should the Germans attack France through the Low Countries. Such was the apparent ease with which the Germans scythed through the Allied opposition in May and June 1940 that it is all too easy to overlook how evenly matched the two sides were on paper, and the trepidation with which

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the Germans viewed the prospect of attacking in the west. Hitler held the French in lower regard than his generals did. He wanted to attack in November 1939, and suspected that Brauchitsch and Halder were bellyaching merely to delay an offensive. This was indeed what Brauchitsch and Halder were about, though they felt they had good reason: after all, the memory of the Germany army’s previous attempt to defeat France hardly inspired confidence. They considered their regular active divisions superior to those of the French, and were unconcerned about the amount of resistance the Dutch army might offer against any attack the Germans made towards France through the Netherlands. However, they also considered the French army’s artillery superior to their own; that the small, freshly assembled British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was of high quality; and that the Belgian army would offer ultimately ineffective but initially ferocious resistance.1 Nor did assessing the state of their own troops ease the generals’ state of mind. Among other things, Brauchitsch and Halder fretted over the shortage of regular officers for the newly activated divisions, and Brauchitsch bemoaned the serious indiscipline and lack of offensive spirit displayed by a number of infantry units in Poland. Both men were concerned about the lack of training of a number of specialist technical personnel. They were also right to fear that the autumn mud and winter snow would nullify the Germans’ mobility if they attacked too soon, miring them in a replay of the trench warfare of 1914–18.2 At this particular stage in the war, Hitler was not sufficiently confident in his military abilities to assert himself uncompromisingly, and he accepted the generals’ advice to postpone the offensive until the spring. The agreement that Brauchitsch and Halder won from Hitler was the sole occasion on which Brauchitsch actually stood up to his Führer. Such was the potential fallout that Brauchitsch directed army officers to avoid nourishing rumours of enmity between Hitler and the party, on the one hand, and the Wehrmacht, particularly the army, on the other.3 But the delay enabled the German army to make the vital advances on three fronts – material, operational and tactical – that would enable it, together with the Luftwaffe, to overwhelm its opponents come the spring. *** The German army grew conspicuously larger during the months after September 1939. Drafting four million factory workers into the army at the war’s beginning, and diverting railway transport from coal deliveries to troop movements, inevitably hit arms production during the war’s early months. By May, however, German arms production was undergoing its single greatest increase for the whole war. The efforts of the Army Procurement Office ensured that civilians’ needs were subordinated to those of the Wehrmacht. This was not enough to save

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the Army Procurement Office from being swallowed up by the new Ministry for Ammunition, established under Dr Fritz Todt in March 1940. The new ministry, headed by a man more heedful of the needs of business than of those of the Wehrmacht, was a serious new rival to Lieutenant General Thomas’s Office of Economics and Armaments at the OKW. But the Army Procurement Office had already laid the groundwork for the expanded armament drive. Among other things, the increase in Panzer manufacture enabled the army to double the number of Panzer divisions. The number of infantry divisions increased by 60 per cent.4 The single most pressing armaments-related concern during the war’s first months was ammunition. Hitler gave particular priority to howitzers and heavy mortars, ordering a rise in production by the autumn of 1940 to three million light howitzer shells, 650,000 rounds of heavy howitzer ammunition and more than fifty thousand mortar bombs. The main suppliers of ammunition were Krupp, Klockner, Vereinigte Stahlwerke and the state-owned Reichswerke Hermann Göring. The heavy focus on artillery ammunition suggests that, confident though he was of his troops’ superiority, Hitler was not envisaging a lightning victory in the spring either.5 The initial aims of the OKH planners certainly fell far short of defeating France outright. They merely wanted to drive downwards through the Low Countries, threaten Britain by capturing the Channel ports and neutralize large numbers of Allied troops. The plan was shelved, partly because Belgium and the Netherlands were stepping up their mobilization, partly because of poor weather, and partly because a German officer crash-landed over Belgian territory carrying a briefcase stuffed full of staff maps outlining the plans. The plan Hitler eventually selected out of all the other replacement plans proffered has various names: the most famous is the Sickle Cut Plan. It has also been named after the officer who took the most plaudits for devising it, Lieutenant General von Manstein. Manstein can plausibly lay claim to having been Germany’s most operationally gifted general of the Second World War. He was also another practised self-publicist, who later inflated his role in devising the plan. He should in fact share credit with several other officers, such as Major General Kurt von Tippelskirch of army intelligence.6 The plan found favour with Hitler because of its imagination and daring – qualities, of course, that the German officer corps had long sought to nurture among its members. The first phase of the plan entailed General von Bock’s Army Group B, which comprised twenty-nine divisions including three Panzer and two motorized infantry divisions, attacking through the Netherlands and Belgium. To a large extent, this thrust would be retracing the steps of the German attack through Belgium in August 1914. Manstein and his fellow planners anticipated the Allies advancing northwards to meet it. But this attack was to be a feint; the main effort was to come from General von Rundstedt’s considerably stronger

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Army Group A, with its thirty-five infantry divisions, seven Panzer divisions and four motorized infantry divisions. It was to attack in the sector that Allied high command had overlooked the most – the Ardennes region of eastern Belgium and Luxembourg. The Ardennes comprises hilly, forested terrain of a sort the Allied high command did not believe the Panzers could penetrate. It therefore paid no serious attention to the danger of attack from that direction. That said, the Sickle Cut Plan was undoubtedly an immense gamble, for successfully moving a large armoured force through such terrain demanded exceptionally effective logistical planning. Furthermore, to ensure a realistic chance of a breakthrough, such a formidable Panzer force was needed that the plan’s final form did not leave a single Panzer division in reserve.7 The officers who devised the plan believed that, risky though it was, a breakthrough was possible if surprise could be achieved and the Panzer divisions’ movement and supply properly coordinated. This would enable the Wehrmacht to start cutting across the rear of the Allied armies advancing northwards into Belgium to counter Army Group B. The main Panzer thrust would be in the direction of Sedan. At the very start of the offensive, the Luftwaffe would strike at Allied organization on the ground, then support the ground offensive by targeting Allied reinforcements and fortifications, and by supporting river crossings. Once a breakthrough was achieved, a follow-up phase would see the weight of the German offensive switched back to a reinforced Army Group B, which would then break through north of the rivers Meuse and Sambre. The Sickle Cut Plan received strong support from General von Rundstedt. Rundstedt’s enthusiasm reflected not just his own army group’s allotted starring role, but also his appreciation that Panzers had great potential if used in the right way.8 In February, the plan also received strong support from Hitler. Hitler’s backing signified not just the sound strategic insight he sometimes displayed, but also his gambler’s instinct. Later that month, the OKH drafted an operational directive based on the Sickle Cut Plan, codenamed Case Yellow. Yet neither the Sickle Cut Plan itself, nor its follow-up phase, was devised with total victory in mind. The best the Germans hoped to achieve was to secure the Low Countries, northeast France and the northern coast of the English Channel, destroying a significant portion of the Allied armies in the process. Even Manstein and his fellow planners did not expect the attack to be as decisive as it was. That it eventually defeated the Allies so emphatically was due to a multitude of Allied weaknesses as well as German strengths. *** The Allies’ strategy during the months before the campaign in the west did have some sense behind it. The French had their reasons for not extending the

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Maginot Line along the Franco-Belgian border to the English Channel: the soft ground along the border was ill-suited to deep fortifications; north-east France was a major industrial region, over which the French did not want to have to wage a pitched defensive battle; and it would hardly help French efforts to cultivate Belgium if an enormous line of fortifications separated the two countries. For Belgium, though officially neutral since 1936, figured prominently in French war plans.9 The Allies expected the Germans to come through the Low Countries. The Germans – so Allied military planners surmised – would view the Low Countries as a potential route into France unhindered by the Maginot Line, and as a potential site for coastal bases from which they could threaten southern England. The French hoped not only that any German invasion through the Low Countries would propel Belgium and the Netherlands firmly into the Allied camp, but also, most crucially, that the Belgians would be able to hold it along the fortified line of the Albert Canal and Dyle River. This would enable the French to bring up reinforcements, including strong motorized forces, to support the Belgians and halt the German attack. With the Germans firmly held, the Allies could then marshal their superior resources, aided by the United States, for the kind of long war that the Germans would be unable to withstand.10 In many ways this was a reasonable plan. But while a German invasion through the Low Countries was an obvious possibility, Allied planners’ fixation on it blinded them to less obvious, more dangerous possibilities elsewhere. General Gamelin made matters worse in the wake of the capture of the German staff maps in Belgium, which seemed further to confirm that the Germans were planning exactly the kind of northern offensive the Allies were anticipating. As it was, the Germans were still undecided over the direction their offensive should take, before deciding on the Sickle Cut plan soon after. Oblivious to this, Gamelin decided to take the Allied Dyle plan to its logical extreme, by committing the French Seventh Army to an advance as far as Breda, just north of the DutchBelgian border. This, Gamelin reasoned, would reassure the British that the entire Channel coast was secure, and would enable the French to control the Belgian and Dutch armies more closely. The Seventh Army contained a large number of motorized units – units that were now being committed even further away from the sector where they would be needed most.11 As for that sector, the Allies also missed warning signs of German intentions in and west of the Ardennes. Allied – particularly French – intelligence officers failed to convey details of the unusually high number of reconnaissance flights the Germans made over the area west of Sedan, just east of the Ardennes, during the weeks prior to the offensive. Much of the blame for this lay in a French military culture that isolated and undervalued intelligence officers, failed to heed their warnings, and discouraged them from making

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such warnings more loudly. Then again, assessing the Germans competently would have been breaking an Allied habit, for both British and French intelligence services had also consistently overestimated the strength of the Wehrmacht during the late 1930s. Among other things, the intelligence chief for General Alphonse-Joseph Georges, French commander of the northeastern sector of front, believed the Germans had somewhere between seven and ten thousand tanks, well in excess of the 2,400 the Germans actually possessed.12 The fear such miscalculations created could only make Allied generals even more cautious once the Germans attacked. Misreading the Germans’ intentions, while a lamentable error, was not necessarily sufficient to seal the Allies’ fate in the coming campaign. But Allied high command, and the forces it led, all suffered further debilitating flaws. Though there was friction between the OKH and the OKW, at least both bodies were of the same nationality. The inter-Allied command, however, was disfunctional. For example, Lord Gort, commander of the BEF, was not only operationally subordinate to General Georges, but politically subordinate to the British government in London. The problems were not just organizational. Lord Gort, his many admirable qualities notwithstanding, had been promoted beyond his abilities. General Gamelin, was a not especially robust sixty-eight-year-old who, as well as concocting the misconceived Dyle–Breda plan, would prove ineffective almost to the point of passivity during the course of the campaign. More generally, senior officers in the French army were on average eight to ten years older than their German counterparts. Both the French and British armies suffered from an overly rigid, inflexible command system, which allowed subordinates far less discretion to react quickly to events than German subordinate commanders enjoyed. British command also suffered from the painful effects of the transformation the British army was undergoing from a small peacetime force, whose combat experience since 1918 had consisted almost entirely of suppressing colonial revolts, to a much larger wartime one. Of the British army’s three staff colleges, only one was in the UK. There was no senior staff college or combined services college, and the need to build up a body of staff officers quickly for war work compelled staff colleges to teach only the essentials.13 The contrast with German general staff training, whatever its own flaws, was immense. It is little wonder that the operational doctrine that emerged from this professional environment fell far short of the challenges the German invasion would present. The staggering death tolls the British and French armies had suffered in their offensives on the western front between 1915 and 1917 had impelled both military establishments towards defensive warfare. In 1940, the French high command believed that the key to success on the battlefield was to control operations rigidly and deploy unassailable defensive firepower. An attacking force, it believed, would break against such an obstacle. French

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generals were so convinced of this that they gave little thought to what they would do if the enemy did break through. The most they did was to place strong points behind the main defence line. They did not consider the possibility that the enemy might bypass and isolate these also.14 A similarly sclerotic defensive mentality hobbled British military thinking. During the interwar years, moreover, economic woes and a backlash against militarism had hit investment in the British armed forces. And such was Britain’s need to defend the Empire that such investment as it did commit to rearmament was channelled predominantly into the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy. The British military as a whole considered the First World War to have been a traumatic event, but that there was no need to heed the lessons it had generated as to how a major continental European war might be fought in the future. A deferential culture within the British army discouraged officers from criticizing the conventional wisdom.15 On this score, as on others, the contrast with the German army’s approach could not have been plainer. Tank for tank, British and French armoured forces in the spring of 1940 outnumbered those of the Germans. Indeed, the French alone had more tanks than the Germans, with about three thousand to the Germans’ 2,400. The German Mark Is and Mark IIs, comprising about five-eighths of the Panzer force, were already obsolescent. The Germans’ main workhorse during the western campaign would be the Mark III, but even this was less well protected than the British Mark II and the French SOMUA, the latter of which was an outstanding medium tank. The most formidable tank that would be employed by either side during the campaign was the French Char B; only the German Mark IV could match this. At least the Germans had narrowed the numerical gap by the spring of 1940, however. The number of Mark IIIs had risen from 151 in September 1939 to 785 in May 1940, the number of Mark IVs from 247 to 381.16 Where the Germans clearly outdid the Allies was not in the size of their armoured force, but in how they organized and deployed it. Only a few French officers, such as Colonel Charles de Gaulle, gave proper thought to armouredwarfare doctrine. The French army lacked proper armoured (i.e. tank) divisions, until early 1940, and even then only two would be fully operational by the time the Germans invaded in May. The French army did possess motorized divisions and light mechanized divisions. However, the motorized divisions’ allotted role was simply to proceed swiftly to the front line should the Germans attack through Belgium. The light mechanized divisions were merely equipped to fan out and provide cover for defending or attacking infantry, as cavalry had done in wars past. Neither type of division had anything remotely approaching the kind of armoured punch needed for a heavy attack and a sustained advance.17 The BEF, meanwhile, contained only one armoured division, and little clue how to use it. British military planners failed to grasp the importance of

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combined-arms operations in the way the Germans did; they saw tanks as a separate weapon rather than one that could be integrated with other arms branches. The British army’s parochial regimental system did not help matters. Moreover, the British viewed tanks from a cavalryman’s perspective, and like cavalry they developed light tanks for raiding and reconnaissance, and heavier tanks for counterattacking. What the British lacked, and what the Germans increasingly did not lack, was a quality all-purpose tank. British military intelligence also assumed, wrongly, that the Germans would deploy their Panzers in penny packets, just as they had deployed their storm troops during the First World War.18 The state of the Allied infantry also provided little comfort. The BEF was mainly an infantry force lacking supporting arms and, its 25-pounder guns aside, saddled with too much obsolescent artillery. Moreover, as it sought to expand its strength to ten divisions with new formations hurriedly shipped over from Britain, it became heavily reliant upon reservist territorial divisions. By the time the Germans attacked, these divisions had still not completed their training, and the BEF as a whole had had no time to practise combined-arms training or properly examine the reasons for German victory in Poland. Moreover, tactical training was much more centralized, and therefore much more rigorous, in the German army than in the British; among other things, British officer cadets did not learn platoon tactics anything like as thoroughly as their German counterparts.19 At least the BEF was making an effort, however hurried and flawed, to train up its infantry. The French army, however, did not set about this particular task with anything like the necessary urgency. It allotted the infantry a centrally important role, but did not allot the new infantry recruits the training to match: the year’s training a French infantry conscript usually received was not enough for him to master all the necessary skills. During the Drôle de Guerre, the French failed to address this defect, and the troops grew lethargic as a result. One German officer visiting the front even wrote of the fraternization he witnessed in certain sectors: ‘I once drove along the West Wall from Karlsruhe all the way to the bend of the river Rhine river at Basel, and in front of various positions I witnessed how German and French soldiers were chatting like buddies across the river.’20 The French army leadership justified its slackness with the argument that it need only hold the Germans’ initial attack, and thereby give the French government enough time to mobilize the entire nation.21 But while the French infantry alternately fraternized and ossified, the Germans interspersed their fraternizing with intensive retraining. After its infantry’s uneven performance in Poland, the German army embarked upon a massive retraining programme. The army contained 4.5 million men in 1939, but only 1.3 million were in active-duty units, and only

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647,000 of the army’s reservists were fully trained. After the Polish campaign, however, the army initiated crash courses that placed particular stress on crossing rivers and attacking fortifications. Further such courses for officers were run at Königsberg, passing out three hundred officers a time at three- to four-week intervals.22 The German army also received an injection of younger personnel following the Polish campaign. These men were transferred from industry in exchange for older army personnel to spread the burden of military service across age groups.23 Not all the results of this training programme were satisfactory: among other things, the solitary Waffen-SS unit that had fought in the Polish campaign, the LAH, had not distinguished itself especially, and the training of Waffen-SS units for the upcoming campaign in the west made an ominous impression. In April 1940, an officer from Army Group B visited the SS motorized regiment at Sennelager. He reported that, despite the regiment’s undoubtedly high-quality manpower, ‘the combat training of the non-commissioned officers and men of the SS is inadequate; it will cost a lot of blood!’24 Perhaps the most glaring contrast of all was in the two sides’ air forces. The French Armée de l’Air was in a belated state of transition in the spring of 1940. What this meant practically was that it lacked enough new aircraft and enough trained pilots to fly them when the Germans attacked. The RAF had benefited from greater investment than its French counterpart during the previous two years, but it denied the BEF a great deal of air cover in order to ensure that Britain itself was defended. Against this paltry opposition, the Germans could commit technically advanced aircraft, and crews with a high level of training and, now, experience. The Allies had no equivalent to the Stuka – an aircraft that, while not infallible, was formidable when it had the first-rate Messerschmitt Me 109 fighter protecting it. Furthermore, Luftwaffe and German army commanders felt far more unity of purpose than their Allied counterparts. This was partly because of the interservice cooperation they had been practising since the Spanish Civil War, and partly because several topmost Luftwaffe commanders, such as General Albert Kesselring, originally hailed from the army. The OKH also sought to tighten up air-ground coordination following the Polish campaign. It placed particular importance on aerial reconnaissance against fortifications and roadblocks, and on concentrated and coordinated anti-aircraft fire. It also placed special value on the Fieseler Storch aircraft as a reconnaissance tool.25 *** The first grievous blow the Germans landed upon the Allies in 1940 came not in France and the Low Countries, but in Norway. Both the Allies and the Germans had an interest in this country. Germany relied heavily upon iron ore from neutral Sweden, and Hitler sought to secure its supply by forestalling any

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Allied attempt to occupy Norway. This would also bring further economic resources and coastal bases under German control. To secure Norway, the Germans would also need to seize Denmark so that the Luftwaffe could conduct operations over Norway from Danish airbases.26 Operation Weserübung (Weser Exercise), the invasion of Denmark and Norway, commenced on 9 April. Though the OKH had largely planned the invasion of Poland, the invasion of Denmark and Norway was an interservice, triphibious operation under the aegis of the OKW. The OKW gave a decidedly mixed account of itself before and during the campaign, yet its performance proved far superior to that of the British and French forces. The invasion of Denmark went smoothly: German troops landed at Copenhagen and other cities, and paratroop formations of the Luftwaffe seized Danish airfields. Swiftly, grudgingly and rather understandably – considering the impossible odds it faced – the Danish government acquiesced in German demands to occupy the country. Its decision was considerably expedited by German promises to allow the Danish government a degree of freedom that would prove unique by the standards of Nazi-occupied Europe. Invading Norway with a triphibious operation, however, was a complex challenge. Transporting, supplying and protecting a force of even modest size required virtually all of Germany’s still diminutive fleet of surface warships. It was also an undertaking under serious threat from the Royal Navy.27 Weserübung aimed to land troops at five different points along the Norwegian coast, where they would seize key population centres and port facilities. Such was the country’s geography, however, that the landings had to be made at disparate points that the troops would be unable mutually to reinforce. Nor did the German onslaught cow the Norwegians in the way the OKW had hoped; indeed, Norwegian troops put up spirited resistance in places. However, once the Germans had secured all major population centres, military headquarters and supply bases, the Norwegians could only half-mobilize; central Norway was the one area where they were able to stand and fight for any length of time. Though the forces the Germans landed were not especially formidable, the twelve thousand-strong force the British and French sent to aid the Norwegians proved unequal to them. Among other things, the Allies failed to commit effective air support to the campaign. Allied naval and land forces were thus perilously exposed to bombardment from the Luftwaffe, and soon had to evacuate at a number of points. At Narvik, one place where the Allies had a real chance of success against the Germans, troops were landed at the mouth of the fjord and fought their way overland. This enabled the German mountain troops who landed at Narvik to dig in and withstand the Allied assault. Moreover, the Allies’ stunning failure to equip their troops with anti-tank weaponry was a gift to the Germans’ otherwise obsolescent Mark I and II Panzers. The Norwegian terrain

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did challenge the Germans: for instance, if the Allies blocked narrow valley floors, then the Germans had no room for manoeuvre and had to attack in crude frontal assaults under cover of darkness. Yet this too exemplified the ability of German troops to adapt.28 Dicey as the OKW’s plan of campaign had been, the troops on the ground were resourceful enough to best, or at least withstand, their opponents. Moreover, in a further demonstration of the German military’s ability to think on its feet, the OKW was able to improvise when things went awry. For instance, when British submarines assailed German cargo ships sent to resupply forces in Bergen, Trondheim and Stavanger, the OKW assigned lighter, faster vessels that were less vulnerable to submarine attack.29 There is no doubt that the Allied high command’s bumbling organization of the Norway campaign assisted the Germans immensely. The Allies’ efforts in Norway ended when they precipitately had to withdraw their remaining forces following the German invasion of France and the Low Countries. *** Paradoxically, the Norway campaign would ultimately prove much more ruinous to the Germans than to the Allies. Such was the damage that the campaign’s naval fighting wrought upon the Kriegsmarine that Germany’s surface fleet was effectively written off for months. This eventually crippled German hopes of invading England in 1940. In London, meanwhile, the shambolic handling of the campaign helped precipitate Neville Chamberlain’s resignation on 10 May, and his replacement with Winston Churchill. But on 10 May, the full import of all this remained hidden to both sides. For that same day, the Wehrmacht launched Operation Yellow. The German army still suffered weaknesses at this stage, but it had gone a considerable way towards rectifying them. The army leadership had engendered a daring operational conception of this campaign, born of the principles of Auftragstaktik, and backed fully by Hitler as he sought further to find his feet militarily. Together, the operational plan, and the superior state of the Wehrmacht’s tactics, training and essential military mind-frame, were about to secure the German army’s greatest victory of the war.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE GREATEST VICTORY, 1940

T

he germans’ total defeat of France in the spring and early summer of 1940 was rendered even more dramatic by the speed with which they achieved it. On 6 July, a fortnight after the campaign had ended, Berliners euphorically welcomed Hitler as he headed the Wehrmacht’s victory parade through their city. The Führer was at the height of his popularity, and the German army had achieved its most astounding success. Victory over France transformed the course and character of the entire war. It also infused the leadership of the German army, and of the Reich itself, with a new and eventually fatal degree of hubris. *** The German invasion of the Low Countries and France commenced on 10 May when paratroopers seized bridges and other objectives in the Netherlands and Belgium, breaching Dutch and – for the second time in just over a quarter of a century – Belgian neutrality. Glider-borne troops also spectacularly captured the Belgian fortress of Eben Emael. This major commitment by the Luftwaffe fed the Allies’ belief that Army Group B’s thrust through the Netherlands towards Belgium was indeed the main point of the German advance. Lance Corporal H.’s diary entry for 10 May described the division attacking a series of canalside bunkers, in an operation that exemplified the Wehrmacht’s skill in interservice combined arms. The fire falls right onto our advance guard. Anti-tank fire bellows on it. Fear and uncertainty show in our faces. The fire gets even stronger, now it includes grenade launchers. Heavy machine-gun fire pours out of the firing slits in the grey concrete bunkers. Stukas strike down at them with howling sirens, throwing their obliterating bombs at the bastions that brought us to

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a halt. At 10.50, the first line of resistance falls. Lieutenant Schneider, NCO Saam, Corporals Weinmann and Scherer are the first to put their boots on the other side of the canal. Our pioneers did exemplary work and have earned our thanks.1

Five days after the German attack began, the Dutch surrendered. A late chapter in this brief opening phase of the campaign was the bombing of Rotterdam, in which eight hundred civilians perished. The bombing was carried out by order of the Eighteenth Army: ‘resistance in Rotterdam is to be broken by all means, if necessary by threatening and carrying out the extermination of the town.’2 In fact, the Dutch had commenced surrender negotiations before the bombing went ahead, but the Eighteenth Army’s countermanding order came too late to reach the first wave of bombers. Nevertheless, like the bombing of Warsaw, the fact that the attack was ordered in the first place demonstrates that the German army was prepared to terrorize civilians in order to achieve its operational goals. By the time the Dutch surrendered completely, the Allied high command had swallowed the Germans’ ruse, propelling its forces northwards to meet Army Group B’s advance. By 14 May, the British and French had established themselves on the Dyle Line in Belgium, well north of the Ardennes. Had Allied bombers managed to penetrate the German fighter screen over the Ardennes sooner, they might yet have wrought havoc upon the German columns. For so tightly packed were those columns that gridlock was only avoided because the Germans had placed petrol tankers at the forefront of the advance, and because motorcycle-borne officers were carrying out frantic if dexterous feats of traffic management.3 The air attacks the Allies did direct against the Ardennes sector were sluggish and ineffective. The Allies also ignored the danger that the Luftwaffe would seek to destroy aircraft on their airfields as it had done in Poland. Lance Corporal Lothar M. of the 25th Infantry Division, a first-wave infantry division advancing south of the 35th across the Luxembourg border, wrote on 14 May: ‘no sign of war can be seen or felt apart from [our] soldiers. I haven’t seen one French aircraft yet. They’ve had the breath knocked out of them.’4 The ‘Jericho trumpet’, a wailing siren that accompanied the bombing dive of the Ju 87, heightened the panic a German air attack could induce. ‘Our Stukas are roaring ahead over us again,’ wrote Karl G., with Ambulance Train 1/25, later in the campaign. ‘Their effect must be awful. We just saw one of their attacks from afar. In no time at all you saw nothing but clouds of smoke and darkness. It’s a fabulous picture, when you see one, two or three of them hurtling down from two or three kilometres [one or two miles] up with their unbelievable wailing.’5 Even more crucially, Allied air power was hamstrung by the Allied high command’s complete misreading of German intentions. Allied bombers were

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sent in ever greater numbers against Army Group B rather than Army Group A. Yet even here they made little impact. The Allies had only mobilized part of their air forces at the campaign’s start, believing it was the last encounter that would be decisive.6 Neither French nor British air commanders were keen to assign fighters to escorting bomber missions, and as Allied bombers suffered mounting losses against Army Group B’s fighter cover, their commanders also began avoiding ground-support missions.7 The Luftwaffe, by contrast, was dynamically involved in the battle from the start, particularly through its attacks on Allied airfields. It benefited immensely from the extensive reconnaissance it had undertaken in the run-up to the attack, which enabled it all the more easily to eliminate Allied anti-aircraft defences over the Low Countries, the Channel coast and eastern France. The Luftwaffe also rapidly brought forward ground crews and their facilities; Ju 52 transport aircraft flew in men and equipment because advancing German ground forces were filling the roads. Coordination between the Luftwaffe and advancing ground units was excellent; in Army Group A’s sector in particular, the Luftwaffe’s sustained support compelled French artillery and infantry to keep their heads down.8 The Luftwaffe also profited from the Allies’ failure to put it under any pressure in the skies over Germany. The Ruhr, Germany’s western industrial powerhouse, was an open target, but the French lacked the capacity to bomb it, and the British lacked the inclination. British air chiefs preferred to direct such effort as they did make against German forces advancing through Belgium. Even this was for the sake of defending Britain itself, for air chiefs feared what the Germans might do with Belgium as a base from which to launch air attacks across the English Channel. The British eventually carried out one desultory raid on the Ruhr on 15 May.9 That same day was the ‘high point’ of the Allied air forces’ effort against the German advance. By now, however, the Germans had achieved air superiority, and Allied aircraft flying that day suffered more than 50 per cent losses. After that, Allied air activity petered out.10 Thus had the Luftwaffe provided a crucial precondition for the German army’s victory on the ground. And on the ground, having now fully penetrated the Ardennes, the next major natural obstacle facing the advancing Germans was the River Meuse. They reached it at Sedan, a sector poorly defended by French reservists. The Germans crossed the Meuse on 12 May. Major General Erwin Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division was aided in its crossing by an intact weir it found north of Sedan. Rommel’s engineers laid pontoons across the river while his Panzers destroyed French bunkers on the other side. Elsewhere, assault pioneers of the 1st, 2nd and 10th infantry divisions crossed the river in dinghies under French fire. Then, supported by the Luftwaffe and in the face of half-hearted counterefforts by French armour and

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artillery, Army Group A’s major Panzer formations broke through after deploying on the open floodplain west of the river. The French might still have launched an effective armoured counterattack as late as 14 May. This did not happen, partly because the French believed the Germans would swing south to cut behind the Maginot Line, and partly because the French army’s reserve armoured divisions were still only half-assembled.11 Lack of effective communication further blighted all attempts to coordinate an Allied response. The Germans had twelve times as many trained radio operators as the French, and their command units moved around in special-purpose vehicles equipped with long-range radio. The Allies, by contrast, relied heavily upon motorcycle despatch riders; these generally needed at least forty-eight hours, choking columns of refugees permitting, to reach the front. Carrier pigeons would have been preferable, but the Allies did not use them either. Orders were too complicated, particularly French orders, as French headquarters characteristically tried to plan everything in advance. Senior French officers not only lacked radio, but also situated their command posts too far behind the front line. This they did not out of cowardice, but because they naïvely hoped to be able to analyse the situation calmly while out of range of German artillery fire. All this meant in reality was that they were isolated from events in a battlefield situation that was changing by the hour if not the minute. Thus were French commanders also unable to lead from the front and steady their men in the way numerous German commanders did.12 A particularly dramatic example of a German commander who readily exposed himself to danger was General Rommel. Hence his hair-raising brush with death at the River Meuse: ‘the French battery now opened fire on our wood, and at any moment we could expect their fire to be aimed at our tank, which was in full view. I therefore decided to abandon it as fast as I could, taking the crew with me. At that moment the subaltern in command of the tanks escorting the infantry reported himself seriously wounded, with the words: “Herr General, my left arm has been shot off ”. ’13 The Allies, then, were failing to launch a strong, genuinely coordinated armoured counterattack. This enabled the Panzers’ concentrated thrusts to overwhelm a French armoured force that, though it might be superior tank for tank, had dissipated its strength across too many divisions and too many types of division. The Panzers concentrated their forces at the Allied line’s weak points. They combined a focused armoured punch with an effective combined-arms organization. Panzer divisions were tank-heavy, but their supporting mechanized infantry, reconnaissance, engineers, artillery and supply troops enabled them to operate as flexible, self-supporting mini-armies in a way that Allied mechanized divisions could not. They could also operate more independently because they were directly subordinate to the headquarters of the separate Panzer corps.

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Furthermore, following the Polish campaign, the Germans had learned to size and equip their different Panzer divisions for specialized tasks. Army Group B got the bulk of the army’s Mark Is and IIs. These Panzer types were of little use in the rugged, forested terrain through which Army Group A was advancing, and even less use against the French Somuas and Char Bs. But in the flat, open terrain of the Low Countries, against the much weaker opposition of the Dutch and Belgian armies, they, too, were unstoppable. Army Group A, meanwhile, got the formidable mass of Mark IIIs and IVs.14 In battle itself, the Panzers possessed tactical strengths that further cancelled out any Allied technical superiority. Their radios enabled them to communicate on the battlefield far more effectively. Panzer crews also profited in combat from the flexibility and independence they had imbibed in training, and from the experience many had gained in previous campaigns. Panzer drivers had the added, if double-edged, benefit of the amphetamine Pervitin, euphemistically called ‘tank chocolate’, issued to them so they could keep pressing on relentlessly for three days and nights.15 Indeed, some German soldiers felt so giddy with both success and exhaustion that, when their supplies of Pervitin ran out, they wrote home asking their families to buy them the amphetamines over the counter.16 Lance Corporal Karl R. of the 5th Panzer Division described the rapid German advance and the poor showing of the French armour in a letter of 16 May. We’re in the vicinity of Eupen-Malmedy. . . . Our company had the task, together with the pioneers, of clearing mines and such, so that the mass could advance. We achieved this nicely and then hurtled forward, through the high water of the River L’Hourde. . . . Then it was on to the Maas, which we crossed at night, after the bridge had been blown twice by the French. Yesterday we had our first big get-together with French tanks. They were stronger in numbers and weapons than us. Despite that, we attacked and were able to knock out a good number of them. The battle lasted from 2pm until 7.45, and then the French pulled back.17

The following day, he wrote: We are constantly at the forefront, sometimes 20 to 30 kilometres [13 to 19 miles] ahead of all the other troops. During the night, infantry, artillery and so on move up and occupy the areas. We could really do with a rest, but that’s just not on. Tonight for instance we drove until midnight, refuelled, cleaned our weapons, and it was already two o’clock. At six o’clock everything got going again. Every morning of the past few days, a huge stream of refugees has gone past us heading east. Perhaps those who first fled west hoped to find safety there. But they’re better off behind the German front, and they’re gradually starting to realize it.18

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Indeed, those columns of refugees that did pour westwards, retreating Allied soldiers mixed in among them, snarled up the Allied counterattacks further. Luftwaffe attacks on refugee columns added to the panic; the aim was not to kill civilians but to add to the mayhem. ‘We’ve hardly seen any enemy aircraft, and the people are terrified of German aircraft,’ wrote Feldwebel Helmut D. of the 25th Infantry Division as his unit neared the River Maas on 17 May. ‘The air is full of them.’19 At the end of the month, a diary entry by Lance Corporal H. of the 35th Infantry Division described Belgian refugees returning to their homes upon their country’s capitulation. ‘Old dears, little kids, frightened women, everything that has legs, pour back into their dwellings in their halfdestroyed settlements and look for bread, sausages and other food. Their feet are weak, their faces hard and filthy. For days they haven’t seen any water or received any warm soup, perhaps not even eaten a piece of bread.’20 On the whole, the German army conducted itself very correctly towards civilians during the campaign. There were blemishes: for instance, commanders like generals Ernst Busch and Gottard Heinrici had to intervene against numerous cases of plunder.21 Far worse than a blemish were the actions of a regiment of the 267th Infantry Division; on 28 May, in an extreme case of franc-tireur psychosis among troops undergoing their first experience of combat, soldiers of the 487th Infantry Regiment killed a total of 114 civilians at Oignies and Courrières on the Pas-de-Calais.22 Yet this dreadful instance aside, there was nothing to approach the Germans’ murderous rampage across Belgium and northern France in August 1914. German commanders were generally at pains to order correct behaviour towards civilians during the 1940 campaign. The 35th Infantry Division exemplified this approach. During the fighting along the Albert Canal in Belgium, the division’s intelligence section reported: ‘a certain nervousness among the troops – explained by the events of the world war – leads to every individual random shot by a fugitive Belgian soldier being seen as coming from a sniper. This nervousness did not take long to gather strength.’ The division did not even execute civilians suspected of firing upon them or cutting their communications, unless it could find proper evidence and eyewitnesses.23 However, German soldiers also restrained themselves because they did not despise French, Belgian or Dutch civilians as they did the Poles. By the time it dawned on Allied commanders that Army Group A’s advance was indeed the main German attack, they could no longer assemble and redeploy enough troops to stem it decisively. General Charles Huntziger, commander of the French Second Army, attempted to do so at Stonne, just south of Sedan, between 15 and 18 May, but assembly and communication problems blighted his attempts to attack more swiftly, when his armoured units suffered grievously against the anti-tank guns of the motorized ‘Grossdeutschland’ Regiment.

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Writing later, General of Infantry Hermann Hoth, commander of XV Motorized Corps, asserted that the French ‘missed a favourable occasion; this counterattack, conducted in a resolute manner, would have transformed defeat into victory.’24 On 17 May, General Maurice Weygand replaced General Gamelin. Weygand, more vigorous than his predecessor albeit five years older, could not salvage the situation. He wanted the Allied forces north and south of the westward German armoured thrust to launch a simultaneous, coordinated counterattack, but his predecessor’s failure to form a proper strategic reserve made only sporadic local counterattacks possible. By the following day, a 100-kilometre (63-mile) gap had split the French Ninth Army in half, and the French possessed no reserves with which to hold ground. From 18 May onward, Allied units might stall the Germans’ momentum in places, but they could not halt it. Many French units did not lack pugnacity, however. The war diary of the 25th Infantry Division for 20 May recorded: ‘the French were very attentive on the canal and observed all movements on the German side; they used the landscape well (observers in trees, snipers in trees, etc); this was above all apparent in the way they had fortified the villages. In general, the enemy was judged as well trained and courageous, something that was borne out by our later attack.’25 The French artillery also impressed the 25th.26 But too many French units collapsed, dazed by the speed of the German onslaught. On 19 May, Unteroffizier Erich N. of the 25th Infantry Division wrote: ‘Everything has gone excellently so far. The French red wine and white bread are magnificent. Yesterday, seven thousand captured French and blacks came over to us. The French were throwing away their weapons like they were spoons.’27 XXVIII Corps, to which the 35th Infantry Division was subordinate, judged the French soldier as ‘courageous and obstinate . . . but destabilized by the recent fighting and by deficient organization of munitions and other supplies. He is also suffering from inconsistent orders.’28 Perhaps understandably, General Georges responded to the unfolding chaos by having a nervous breakdown. In this first, most decisive phase of the campaign, the Germans had triumphed beyond their expectations. There was now nothing to prevent Army Group A from reaching the Channel and then, with Army Group B, cutting off and rolling up a large portion of the Allied armies in giant pincers. This would give the Germans a decisive numerical advantage when they advanced south into France proper during the campaign’s final phase. *** Yet the Germans needed not only to cut off a large portion of Allied troops, but also to destroy it. And in this second phase of the campaign, the Germans stumbled. Though the Allies failed to launch a decisive, coordinated

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counterattack following the initial shock of the Germans’ crossing of the Meuse, not all the Allies’ sporadic, local counterattacks were feckless. The jitters they created among senior field commanders began to inject caution into the German advance. The events of this pivotal phase of the campaign would eventually have strategic consequences so far-reaching that their background deserves substantial attention. A little over a week into Operation Yellow, both Hitler and some senior commanders were already concerned at the almost reckless pace of the forward Panzer formations. Heinz Guderian was now a general of Panzer troops. On 20 May, his XIX Motorized Corps achieved its biggest one-day advance of the whole campaign, covering 56 kilometres (35 miles) in twenty-four hours. It reached the Channel coast at Abbeville and split the Allied armies in two, with substantial Allied forces, including the BEF, cut off in the north. The Germans now needed to reorientate their forces to turn more of them northwards, and not until the following day was Guderian allowed to resume his advance on Boulogne and Calais. Guderian, rattled beforehand by intermittent French counterattacks – one of which had got within a couple of kilometres of his tactical headquarters – now eschewed caution entirely, scoffing at subordinate commanders’ complaints that they were running low on fuel and ordering them to use captured stocks instead.29 Rommel was equally brash. General Hoth, Rommel’s corps commander, ordered him not to advance too far too soon, and was driven to distraction when his commands fell on deaf ears: hence a revealing photo of the two men taken during the campaign, for which they presumably had been asked to smile – Rommel is looking unusually sheepish while Hoth glowers at his back.30 With his especially pronounced penchant for leading audaciously from the front, Rommel fancied himself a master of probing the enemy’s weak spots, but this ability could cause him to lose sight of the overall picture. The trouble Rommel encountered at Arras on 21 May exemplified the dangers of pushing ahead so vigorously. Rommel failed to reconnoitre the area properly, and then his Panzers and rifle regiment were counterattacked by two British tank battalions flanked by French light armour. The bulk of Allied tanks at Arras were British Mark II Matildas. Despite its considerable defects, the Matilda was formidably armoured by 1940 standards. With its 80mm armour, it was even better protected than the Char B, and the short-barrelled model of Panzer could only dent its side.31 The attack was tactically inept and the Allied tanks and infantry got separated early on in the fight, but they still gave the Germans a nasty shock. Among other things, the attack overcame Rommel’s anti-tank guns.32 Rommel later described how he managed to achieve salvation in the face of potential disaster: ‘It was an extremely tight spot, for there were also several enemy tanks very close to Wailly on its northern side. The Kruger howitzer

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battery . . . now left their guns, swept along by the retreating infantry. With [Lieutenant] Most’s help, I brought every available gun into action at top speed against the tanks. Every gun, both anti-tank and anti-aircraft, was ordered to open rapid fire immediately and I personally gave each gun its target.’33 Despite Rommel’s quick thinking, this was largely a case of Auftragstaktik gone wrong – of what happened when a commander showed ample aggression but poor judgment. And Arras was not the only Allied counterattack that threw the Germans off-balance; among others, French armoured units including the 3rd DCR (Division Cuirassée de Réserve, or reserve armoured division) made several such attacks at Stonne, southeast of Sedan, between 15 and 25 May.34 The Panzers also suffered against Allied artillery. Above all, the British 25-pounder could exact a heavy toll on German light and medium tanks in open country at distances below 1,100 metres (1,200 yards).35 On 25 May, Corporal Karl R. of the 5th Panzer Division wrote from Arras: ‘the English directly ahead of us are pretty tenacious, but we hope we’ll be getting going again soon. The motorcycle regiment belonging to our division has been pulled back completely. It had terrible losses, the poor devils.’36 On 23 May, Corporal H. described the strength of the British defences the 35th Infantry Division had eventually overcome in a battle that had begun at Tournai the previous day. The fire continues relentlessly, even though the German artillery is now negating it. . . . A murderous battle. . . . At 3pm the enemy fire weakens. Then it is still, almost worryingly still. . . . A gruesome picture of destruction lies before us. . . . Tommy had dug himself in well deep into his hinterland. Individual houses had been fortified in the briefest of times. Light and heavy machine guns from the windows of cellars. Sandbags piled high at the various street junctions. Trenches and foxholes had been dug in the fields to the left and right. The enemy must have dug and worked furiously during the pauses in the fighting; what he achieved was astonishing.37

Allied defenders also used cunning. On 1 June, the OKH reported: ‘In the fighting of previous weeks the enemy has consistently employed the measure of allowing the attacker to come forward often to fifty or thirty paces, without firing, and then mowing him down at close range. The enemy then gets away with such duplicity by raising his hands as soon as our attack makes contact.’38 Meanwhile, the punishing pace of the advance affected Panzers and infantry alike. Corporal H. wrote in his diary: ‘the march is getting ever harder and the burdens more pressuring, and the sweat runs in streams. Anyone who still has water or tea in his field flask takes a very quick swig and moistens his lips. Several of us have put a small stone in our mouths so we don’t feel as thirsty, for the more one drinks the worse the thirst gets.’39

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As reports of sporadic Allied counterattacks, of plucky if uneven Allied resistance and of the wearying pace of the German advance emanated upwards, senior field commanders, and then Hitler himself, grew increasingly agitated about the potential dangers. Some of Rundstedt’s subordinate commanders in Army Group A were soon requesting a let-up in operations. For instance, General of Panzer Troops Ewald von Kleist, commander of XXII (Motorized) Corps, reported that his divisions had been advancing without rest for a fortnight and that half his tanks were no longer battle-worthy. Colonel General Gunther von Kluge, who commanded the Fourth Army, requested that the Panzers halt so that his infantry could catch up with them.40 Rundstedt heeded such concerns, as did Hitler when Rundstedt apprized him of them. Indeed, according to General Halder, Hitler had been increasingly nervous from a week into the campaign.41 The Führer was especially anxious that the Allies might launch a concerted counterattack against the Panzers’ northern flank. Such fears were hardly assuaged when Rommel managed to spin away the ignominy of his setback at Arras by vastly exaggerating the size of the Allied force that had attacked him.42 Yet the Allies’ overall position was dire. The French Ninth Army had collapsed, and the French First Army and the BEF had been pushed against the southern Belgian and northernmost French coasts. They were bereft of air cover, and the speed of their retreat had compelled them to abandon their antitank weapons. On 26 May, Churchill gave the order to evacuate the BEF, and such French forces as could be saved, from the beaches of Dunkirk. Two days later, Belgium surrendered. The German army almost had a great opportunity to roll on and crush the Allied troops gathering at Dunkirk, but its newfound caution was causing it to dither. Already the turn to the north had cost a day’s advance, time the Allies were able to use to strengthen the defences of Dunkirk and other evacuation ports along the Channel coast.43 Now, the generals’ fear of the Allies’ potential strength, their concerns for the Panzers’ maintenance and supply, the painful memory of the heavy losses sustained in urban fighting in Warsaw and Hitler’s residual hesitancy as supreme commander all culminated in the Führer issuing an order on 24 May that the Panzers halt short of Dunkirk itself. ‘We were utterly speechless,’ Guderian pithily recalled after the war.44 Seeking to stifle any remote suspicion that he might have lost his nerve, Hitler maintained that armoured assault was not the best way to deal with the Allied troops at Dunkirk. The reason he gave was that the canals crisscrossing the approaches to Dunkirk made it unsuitable Panzer country, and that the Panzers would find the going difficult in the town itself.45 He ordered Army Group B’s infantry to execute the main land-based attack on Dunkirk, even though most of these troops were lagging 80 kilometres (50 miles) behind.46 But Hitler may also have had a political motive for issuing the halt order: not wanting the army to receive full credit for annihilating the Allies at Dunkirk, he

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may instead have wished to give Göring’s Luftwaffe a chance to shine and put the army in its place.47 If so, this was not a groundless motive, for although General Halder had long abandoned the idea of a coup, he did believe that the army’s triumph in the west would enable it to assert itself.48 On 26 May, Hitler realized the halt order had been a mistake, and the following day the Panzers’ advance resumed. It was already too late: the Allies had used the two-day respite to organize the withdrawal and evacuation properly.49 Pugnacious resistance by French forces, particularly in ferocious urban fighting in Lille, held up enough German troops to enable the majority of the BEF and the French First Army to reach the Dunkirk bridgehead.50 The Luftwaffe also fumbled its Dunkirk moment. The aircraft it committed over Dunkirk took off from distant bases – sometimes as far afield as Germany itself – lacked fighter escort, and suffered against Spitfires and anti-aircraft batteries. Nightfall, and sometimes bad weather also, halted Luftwaffe operations altogether. The Luftwaffe still inflicted heavy losses on men and particularly materiel, but nothing like as much as it might have done. In any case, on 3 June, Göring called off the Luftwaffe over Dunkirk and turned it instead against French ground forces and against aircraft factories on the outskirts of Paris.51 Realizing the full extent of his misstep shortly thereafter, Hitler was soon spinning it as a goodwill gesture intended to preserve the British army and encourage the British to negotiate. The Germans’ failure to prevent the Allied evacuation at Dunkirk did indeed preserve the core of the British army, but that had certainly not been intentional. The army’s survival would prove a major point in Churchill’s favour when he succeeded in persuading the British Cabinet to continue the war. After the war, the self-exculpatory memoirs of numerous German generals would castigate Hitler for his caution over Dunkirk. Such generals were conveniently forgetting that the halt order had also been the result of pleas for caution that several of their own number had made. During the Dunkirk operation, army generals were confronted with new SS atrocities. This time the Einsatzgruppen were not the perpetrators; indeed, General von Brauchitsch, anxious to ensure the army’s reputation did not suffer any damage of the kind it had suffered due to SS actions in Poland, had managed to bar Allgemeine-SS units from entering France. He was also able to keep Waffen-SS units under army control during the campaign.52 By the time of the French campaign, the Waffen-SS comprised three motorized infantry formations: the LAH had been expanded to the size of a brigade and the SS-VT and Death’s Head units were at full divisional strength.53 On the battlefield, some Waffen-SS units did not exactly distinguish themselves – unsurprisingly, given the army’s pre-campaign assessment of their training.54 Off the battlefield, however, some distinguished themselves with murderous brutality. During the advance on Dunkirk, the LAH massacred eighty British

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POWs, and the Death’s Head almost a hundred more, as well as killing a total of 185 civilians over the course of the campaign. The LAH belonged to Guderian’s XIX Panzer Corps. There is no evidence that Guderian was perturbed by the SS men’s conduct; his misgivings about the Waffen-SS were due entirely to the quality of its commanders and its still nascent fighting power. For their part, here as later in the Soviet Union, Waffen-SS troops idolized Guderian.55 The only general who spoke out was Hoepner, commander of XVIII Panzer Corps, to which the Death’s Head Division was subordinate. Hoepner wrote on 29 May: ‘I have at the moment an SS division under my command that, in the current conditions, is apparently more disinclined than inclined to fight. These are the people who watch over concentration camps in peacetime. They are organized marauders and murderers, who plunder towns, burn down houses and shoot defenceless prisoners, but then run away when the enemy opens fire.’ But after the campaign was over, Hoepner did not follow his words with actions, for in its triumphant aftermath no general wished to make a fuss over such things.56 *** Following a period of reorganization and recharging, the final phase of the battle of France, Operation Red, commenced on 5 June. No longer was there any hesitancy in the German advance. After their losses in the north, which included their best-equipped units, the French now had just sixty-six divisions; the Germans had 104, with another nineteen in reserve.57 But it was during this final phase that some army units, echoing the frequent practice in Poland, began to shoot prisoners themselves. This time, the victims were black soldiers from France’s West African colonies. Up to three thousand captured black soldiers may have perished, not to mention those who tried to surrender but were shot out of hand.58 Neither the army nor the Wehrmacht issued a blanket order to shoot captured black troops, but at the beginning of June, Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry embarked on an intensive anti-French propaganda campaign to encourage the German troops to make the final effort towards victory. After that, shooting of prisoners frequently took place. Black soldiers were more likely to be killed after capture if they had been fighting in ‘hedgehog positions’. During this final phase of the campaign, the French constructed many such fortified positions in farmhouses and other buildings, from which their troops fired upon the rear or flanks of the advancing Germans. Hedgehog positions were a legitimate defensive measure, but the Germans, anxious for the fighting to end as quickly as possible, considered them an underhand way of prolonging resistance.59 On the other hand, only a very small minority of units recorded killing black prisoners. These included the 7th Panzer Division (though there is no evidence

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Rommel sanctioned it), the 10th Panzer Division and the ‘Grossdeutschland’ Motorized Infantry Division.60 All three were high-quality mechanized formations, and this was perhaps no coincidence. Conscious of their elite fighting status, and weary after weeks of intense fighting and high-speed advance, soldiers in these divisions may have been particularly contemptuous of any fighting method that could be considered remotely duplicitous. Even so, no British, French, or indeed French North African troops were massacred after capture for fighting in hedgehog positions. It does seem, then, that it was racism and Nazi propaganda that pushed some German units the extra distance from abhorring their opponents’ fighting methods to murdering them after capture.61 The roots of this brutality lay not just in the racial derision with which many Europeans still regarded ‘colonial peoples’. More specifically, they lay in the German army’s pre-1914 colonial counterinsurgencies, and also in German encounters with ‘savage’ black colonial troops in French service during the First World War and the French occupation of the Ruhr in the 1920s. In view of all this, the racism that peppered many soldiers’ accounts of the French army’s black troops is unsurprising. In a letter of 22 June 1940, for example, Private Alfons H. of the 35th Infantry Division described black Africans as ‘a swine race; it is men like these the enemy has been putting up to fight us’.62 Another soldier described them simply as ‘dogs’.63 Manstein’s postwar recollections of the German army’s French opponents acknowledged black troops’ bravery, but still described them as ‘negroes with their characteristic bloodthirstiness and contempt for human life’. Manstein contrasted them directly with prisoners from Alsace, a region of long-disputed ownership that had belonged to the German Empire before its return to France in 1919: ‘Alsatians with the toughness one had to expect from this Alemannic people, who had furnished Germany with so many good soldiers in World War One.’64 Dreadful as it was, the German army’s killing of black prisoners was too sporadic to constitute a policy. Nevertheless, it shows what a certain type of unit was capable of when it captured ‘racially inferior’ opponents whose methods delayed its victory and affronted its sense of ‘proper’ warfare. This was not the first time German army units had been brutalized by Nazi ideology combined with what they considered to be ‘military necessity’, and it would not be the last. In the wake of their immense exertions during the campaign’s first weeks, the Panzers were allotted a less central role in Operation Red. This, then, was more an infantryman’s and artilleryman’s battle. For this reason, and because they were fighting for their heartlands, the remaining French formations now put up a more tenacious fight. Franz M., a medical NCO with the 268th Infantry Division, wrote to his father on 15 June: ‘according to pioneers who were at the storming of the famous forts of Eben Emael and Liège, the fighting here at Vaux was harder and more bitter. . . . Our battalion has fought its hardest and

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bitterest battle so far.’65 But, French resistance collapsed completely when the French military and civilian leadership retreated to the River Loire. Captain Dr. Walter Menningen, of the 8th Panzer Division, described ‘thousands of prisoners streaming out of every nook and cranny . . . It was a familiar scene of complete disintegration.’66 On 13 June, the Germans entered Paris. Five days later, the French government opened negotiations, anxious to secure a peace deal while its forces were still relatively intact, the better to secure more palatable surrender terms. The last few months of France’s war had seen prime minister Paul Reynaud stack his cabinet with technocrats and military men in an effort to reinvigorate the war effort. As the prospect of France’s military defeat loomed, Reynaud sought to continue the struggle by some other means, for instance by transporting France’s remaining troops to French North Africa and regrouping there. It was the new intake in Reynaud’s cabinet, men whose professional abilities were matched by their antipathy towards democratic republican ideals, who instead manoeuvred for an armistice, and who, in its aftermath, would seek to exploit the traumatized condition of France in order to transform the country according to their own agenda. The terms of the armistice itself were less humiliating than they might have been. Among other things, the country’s southern half remained a supposedly independent ‘free zone,’ under the new French administration, based in the city of Vichy and headed by the aged Marshal Philippe Pétain. In the Germanoccupied northern half, meanwhile, the arrangement was supposedly one of cooperation between the French and German authorities. Thus, while the goverments of other vanquished nations, including that of Belgium, went into exile in London on the cessation of hostiliies, the newly reconstituted French government remained in place. Under the aegis of the Reich, it would seek to transform France into an authoritarian state dominated by the French military, the clergy, and the political right. By such means, it believed, it could achieve a rebirth of France in which the old republican virtues of liberty, equality, and fraternity would be replaced by adherence to God, country, family, and labour.67 It would not take much time for public disillusionment with the Vichy regime to set in, but that lay in the future. The Germans had lost seventy thousand dead or missing during the campaign in the west, nearly fifty thousand of whom were listed killed or missing during Operation Red. Allied dead and missing amounted to about 135,000. Total British losses, including those captured, rose to seventy thousand, those of the French close to a million. The fact that the French also lost 99,000 killed shows that they did not roll over meekly.68 Writing in his diary on 17 June, Corporal H. of the 35th Infantry Division recorded: ‘in the chapel the bells begin to ring, and we fall into an unprecedented feeling of victory. The wine flows in torrents, the accommodation is

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better than ever before. . . . What happened after that is impossible to tell in detail. The delight of victory was simply too great.’69 Unteroffizier Erich N. and his comrades in the 25th Infantry Division went so far as to start wet shaving with French champagne.70 That said, many soldiers of the army’s reserve divisions, who were older in years and had played less of a role in the campaign, may have felt not so much triumphant as relieved. ‘Thank God the war with France is over,’ wrote Private Richard Z. of the 198th Infantry Division on 26 June, ‘and England will soon be dealt with too. Then we will be released, victorious, back into the homeland, and then it’s back to work and everyday life.’71 The OKW attributed the victory to the ‘revolutionary dynamism of the Third Reich and its National Socialist leadership’.72 Nazi propaganda buttressed the Hitler myth by lauding the Führer as, in Colonel General Keitel’s words, ‘the greatest warlord of all time’.73 Hitler had shown undoubted strategic insight in the run-up to the campaign; in the Sickle Cut Plan, he had backed a winner. However, the drive on Dunkirk had exposed Hitler’s less than steady nerve, a trait that, paradoxically, would reveal itself again even as the dictator grew ever more convinced of his military genius. It was the campaign’s triumphant conclusion that would dangerously encourage this new sense of infallibility. The drive on Dunkirk had also exposed another of Hitler’s traits, one that would, again, resurface ever more frequently and detrimentally – his penchant for micromanaging operations down to the minutest detail. Hitler exploited the victory by binding the generals to him even more emphatically. In particular, he promoted a dozen generals to the rank of field marshal – including Bock, Keitel, Kluge, Reichenau and Rundstedt – and another twelve to the rank of colonel general.74 With these promotions came considerable financial rewards. Hitler’s calculated show of generosity went even further towards stifling any remaining disquiet in the army’s most senior ranks. Ulrich von Hassel, the German diplomat who became a leading figure in the anti-Nazi resistance, observed scornfully: ‘the majority of generals see their careers, their winnings and their field marshal’s staff as more important than their professional viewpoints and moral values.’75 *** At the end of the campaign, General Gottard Heinrici, whose XXXXIII Corps had only been committed to the fight during Operation Red, expressed his astonishment at the swiftness of the French collapse. ‘It is beyond comprehension how this army with a great tradition should fail so much,’ he wrote.76 The reasons for the Allies’ failure in 1940 were legion: poor intelligence, which prevented them from spotting the direction of the main German attack sooner; misconceived views of armoured warfare; poor inter-Allied cooperation; and an excessively

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rigid French command system. At the lower levels, the defeat had been due to poor battlefield communication, toothless air support and the substandard training of many infantry divisions. The Allied armies’ greatest overall failing was their thoroughly outdated approach to tactics and operations. Yet it was the Germans’ own strengths that enabled them to triumph so spectacularly. Among other things, they profited from an imaginative and daring operational plan. But if one single, overall reason for the German army’s triumph in the west can be pinpointed, it is that its doctrinal approach to tactics and operations far outclassed that of its opponents. At all levels, it possessed qualities of daring and adaptability, and a capacity to react to the rapidly changing battlefield situation – all hallmarks of Auftragstaktik. The army sustained its initial success thanks to high levels of training, cohesion and morale among its troops, and thanks also to excellent coordination with the Luftwaffe. On the other hand, all these qualities and technologies were employed with the aim of achieving what was, for the German military, a triedand-tested operational goal: breaking through, encircling and defeating the enemy by concentrating overwhelming power against his weakest spot. As one French general commented after the campaign, the French had used their three thousand tanks in a thousand packs of three, whereas the Germans had used their three thousand tanks in three packs of a thousand.77 The campaign did, however, display some of the German army’s ongoing weaknesses. In particular, there were fissures between self-styled dynamic ‘thrusters’ and more cautious commanders fearful of the possible consequences of pressing forward recklessly. This was not a clash between forward-looking armoured warfare specialists and blinkered reactionaries blind to the full potential of such warfare. The latter legitimately feared that, against an opponent who knew what he was doing, their overextended armoured units might eventually hit the wall. Clearly, the Allies in the west in 1940 were not such opponents, but the Germans could not rely upon this being always thus. The campaign also further exposed the army’s moral defects. Among other things, senior commanders tolerated the killing of Allied prisoners by the Waffen-SS, and troops from some elite units were inclined to kill a certain type of Allied prisoner themselves. These were signs of the same pitiless military calculation and racist ideology that the army and many of its troops had displayed in Poland. Generally, some dreadful instances aside, the campaign in the west exposed such tendencies markedly less severely or extensively than the campaign in Poland. Among other things, the vast majority of German soldiers behaved correctly towards French civilians. But as the triumph in the west infused Hitler, the Nazi leadership and the army leadership with an immense amount of hubris, so was it likely to stifle moral qualms and intensify harsher traits. It is also telling that the French campaign’s conclusion finally ended all

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army protests about SS conduct in Poland. On 22 July, for example, the newly promoted Colonel General Georg von Küchler, whose Eighteenth Army had been transferred eastward following the conclusion of the French campaign, forbade his officers and men to criticise ‘the struggle being waged with the population in the General Government, for example the treatment of the Polish minorities, the Jews, and church matters. The achievement of the final solution of this ethnic struggle, which has been raging for centuries along our eastern frontier, requires particularly tough measures.’78 France had been crushed and Britain expelled from continental Europe, and virtually all western and central Europe now lay under German domination. Yet the damage the Kriegsmarine had suffered in Norway, and the Wehrmacht’s failure to destroy the Allied forces at Dunkirk, would together help to prevent Germany from bringing Britain to heel in 1940. In 1941, with their new hubristic swagger, Hitler and the Wehrmacht leadership would seek to eliminate Britain from the war by destroying her only potential ally in continental Europe: the Soviet Union.

CHAPTER SIX

OCCUPYING THE WEST, 1940–41

W

ith its triumphs in western and northwest Europe during the spring and early summer of 1940, the Reich greatly expanded its European empire. Each country’s experience of German occupation depended partly upon where Nazi ideology placed a country’s population within its racial hierarchy. Occupied western European peoples, particularly the ‘Germanic’ populations of Denmark and Norway, could expect markedly less brutal, exploitative treatment than the population of Poland. Less than a week after Germany’s bloodless invasion of Denmark, Private Willi F. of the 198th Infantry Division described the country as ‘a land of milk and honey. . . . The locals marvelled at us. . . . The Danish garrisons gave themselves up without resistance. . . . The population are much friendlier than in Bohemia and above all really clean, their houses comfortably laid out. There are wonders to behold in the shops – wonderful stuff, splendid goods in the bakeries. Cream cakes and real coffee.’1 The contrast with the views many German soldiers held about Poland hardly needs stressing. Yet despite some rhetoric to the contrary, the Nazi leadership generally felt no interest in any meaningful economic and political partnership with conquered western European territories. Hitler was far more interested in exploiting the economies of the Reich’s newly won territories. Goebbels gave succinct voice to Hitler’s view in a speech he made to Nazi leaders in Vienna in October 1940: ‘When this war is over we want to be masters of Europe. . . . Then at last we will belong to the “have” nations.’2 The German army’s own role in occupation varied. It depended above all on the different ways in which Hitler and the Nazi leadership regarded the various occupied territories. *** The behaviour of German troops in the newly conquered territories of western Europe was to be dictated by the ‘Guidelines for Service of the Troops in

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Occupied Areas Following Cessation of Operations’ which Field Marshal von Brauchitsch issued in July 1940. The section on discipline stated: The German soldier is the representative of the German people in occupied territory. . . . The soldier’s conduct towards the civilian population should be self-confident, not arrogant. The duty of restraint applies no less to the female population than to the male. Readiness to help in cases of need and distress is a self-evident duty, as long as it is appropriately restrained. It is self-evident, indeed mandatory, that business dealings are conducted with honesty. Unauthorized seizure of booty, plunder, malicious and pointless damage or destruction of property in the occupied areas, together with oppression of the inhabitants, are dishonourable and punishable.3

Over time, the German army in the west would begin to depart from these instructions. However, the fact that Brauchitsch bothered to issue them exemplifies how differently the army regarded the newly subjugated populations of the west, compared with the ‘inferior’ population of Poland. By the summer of 1940, vast swathes of territory in eastern and southern Europe had still to fall to the Reich’s forces. But the areas it had conquered up until then were already being organized into the four types of occupied territory that together encompassed the basic structure of the Nazi Empire. The first three were the Incorporated Territories, directly absorbed into the Greater German Reich; territories under a chief of civil administration, which the Reich never formally annexed, but which it did integrate administratively and assimilate culturally; and Appended Territories, earmarked for similar integration into the Reich at a later stage. The latter were larger than the first two categories of territory, and more geographically far-flung. Generally, the army kept garrisons within them, but they were under civilian rather than military administration. Within each appended territory, a senior officer usually with the title of Wehrmachtbefehlshaber (Wehrmacht commander) attended to purely military matters, and represented Wehrmacht interests in discussion with the German civilian administration and other German occupation agencies. Wehrmacht commanders were directly subordinate to the OKW. The German army had a stronger presence in the fourth type of territory, the Occupied Territories. After the fall of France, these comprised France herself, Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Finally, there was Denmark. Due to the circumstances of its subjugation, the country enjoyed a relatively favourable status among the occupied nations. As a reward for its cooperation – however grudging – in Germany’s smooth takeover of its territory in April 1940, Hitler declared Denmark a sovereign state under German protection, with its government, parliament, and even army allowed to continue existing.

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Among the Occupied Territories, the army’s presence was strongest in France and Belgium, for it occupied both countries under the auspices of full military government. A major reason for this was that, from the moment the Germans conquered them, France and Belgium became not just important sources of economic wealth for the Reich, but also its western military frontier. In 1940 and 1941, this was a frontier on the offensive: France and Belgium provided bases from which the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine conducted operations against Britain. Norway and the Netherlands also belonged to this frontier, but although the army occupied them, it did not govern them. Instead, Hitler put a civilian Reich commissioner in charge of each. For such was the ‘Germanic’ character of their populations that Hitler did not want their future in the hands of an army whose commitment to Nazi ideology he still considered less than wholesale. This says much not only about Hitler, but also about elements of the army. The officers who governed France and Belgium were generally somewhat older and more conservative, and less admiring of National Socialism, than many of their frontline colleagues. A number were also Francophile in their outlook. They harboured unmistakable anti-Communist and anti-Semitic views, and their administration of France and Belgium was not a benign one: it occupied, exploited, and oppressed both countries in the service of the Reich. It also became deeply implicated in the deportation and murder of Jews from French and Belgian territory. But there were several ways in which the military governments administered their territories in a relatively measured, discriminating manner – if less for moral reasons than for the practical one of seeking relatively peaceable, manageable relations with the occupied population. Overall, while any impression of a ‘gentlemanly’ occupation should be firmly resisted by the reader, so too should any assumption that the bulk of either country’s population suffered anything approaching the levels of terror and rapacity to which Poland and several other occupied territories were subjected. In France and Belgium, then, the army not only played a particularly central role in occupation, but also acted with more moderation than elsewhere. Given the centrality of the army’s role within them, this chapter, like later chapters also examining the German occupation of north-west Europe, focuses primarily on the German army’s occupation of Belgium, and above all – by virtue of its greater size and the larger literature concerning it – of France. *** A Militärbefehlshaber (military governor) with his headquarters in Paris was made responsible for the bulk of German-occupied northern France, together with the English-speaking Channel Islands.4 For a fortnight in June 1940,

2. German/Axis conquests in Europe by November 1942

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General Blaskowitz held the post, before making way for General Alfred Streccius. General of Infantry Otto von Stülpnagel, the first commander to hold the governorship for any duration, took over in October. The northernmost, industrialized part of the country was separated from the rest of Germanoccupied France. This region was the responsibility of the military governor in Brussels, General of Infantry Alexander von Falkenhausen, as were Belgium and, temporarily, Luxembourg. Within France, the Vichy government, despite its nominal independence, was required to prevent economic assets from leaving France and to bear the financial costs of German occupation. The Military Government in Paris contained a military administration staff, with a section overseeing the Vichy government and ensuring it acted according to German wishes.5 As well as being responsible for military matters within their territories, military governors exercised power over the economic and administrative life of the occupied population. Both military governors were directly answerable to the commander-in-chief of the army, Field Marshal von Brauchitsch. Generally, the administrative structure of each of the military governments was divided into various levels of Kommandanturen (regional and local headquarters), the most important of which was the regional Feldkommandantur (field headquarters). In France, there was also an intermediate level of administration, the Chef des Militärverwaltungsbezirks (chief of military administration district). Until 1942, the jurisdictions at this intermediate level were named A, B, C, and Bordeaux. The German army did not embrace its occupation responsibilities enthusiastically, but its occupation officials often fancied themselves more efficient than civilian administrators. ‘After us, the rabble,’ army administrators in Luxembourg were heard to remark, after Hitler transferred the country from military to civilian authority in September 1940.6 Within the Military Government in Paris, there was tension between Colonel Hans Speidel’s command staff, which comprised proper army officers, and the military administration staff ’s government subsection. This subsection mainly comprised civil servants who had received an equivalent army rank and been put into uniform.7 Its chief, Werner Best, was a lawyer by profession. He also held the rank of Brigadeführer in the SS. Eggert Reeder, the head of military administration in the Military Government of Belgium and Northern France, was likewise a lawyer who held honorary SS rank. Despite their SS membership, pragmatism rather than ideology tended to govern their actions – even though, particularly in Best’s case, the two traits merged together in a ruthlessly calculating mind. When it came to running the occupation, military governors were assisted in internal policing by the Wehrmacht’s own Secret Field Police (Geheime Feldpolizei, or GFP). The GFP was under overall command of the chief of army police within the OKH, Wilhelm Krichbaum. It investigated resistance, real or potential, across

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occupied Europe; its duties included detecting enemy agents, collecting inflammatory material, taking precautionary measures against sabotage and interrogating suspects. Although the GFP was officially a Wehrmacht organization, its personnel had been transferred from the Gestapo, and Krichbaum himself was a member of the SS.8 But over time, as resistance to the occupation grew, the military governors increasingly came to rely upon the SS and Police itself to investigate resistance and to provide additional manpower for internal security. The Military Government in Paris also had to reckon with the machinations of Otto Abetz, the German Foreign Ministry’s representative.9 Military governors were also responsible for economic policy within their territories, a duty they exercised through the economics subsection of their military administration sections. But they often clashed with officials from central economic agencies, particularly Göring’s Office of the Four-Year Plan. Such clashes usually ensued because the military governor, on one side, and central economic agencies, on the other, had conflicting agendas. Both sides were out to exploit the occupied territories, and how far the population consequently suffered was of secondary concern. But the military governors’ approach was less indiscriminately acquisitive than Göring’s. Particularly during the occupation’s early years, they were concerned most specifically with the economic needs of the military in the occupied territories. Even here, the military governors sought to keep the population quiescent, and maintain their territory’s long-term viability, by ensuring that those territories were not exploited any more than necessary. General Jodl, in a rare flash of political insight, voiced this attitude when he declared: ‘one must give a cow fodder in order to get milk’.10 But for Göring’s men, the primary economic aims were to meet the central needs of Germany’s war economy and to keep its civilian population satisfied. As the war continued, they stood increasingly ready to exploit occupied territory to the hilt in order to meet these objectives. Military governors, answerable to the OKH, could also fall foul of contradictory directives from the OKW, and clash with field commanders of any branch of the Wehrmacht whose forces were stationed in their territory. One of the greatest bones of contention between military governors and field commanders was unrestrained plunder. Military governors were more concerned than field commanders about keeping the population pacified, while field commanders had fewer qualms about seizing supplies from occupied civilians if they felt their own men needed them. It did not help that military governors, like German army generals more widely, were not political animals. They lacked the close contact with the Nazi political leadership enjoyed by their counterparts in the SS and Police and in the Reich’s economic agencies. Furthermore, such was their pragmatic view that occupation administration was simply a job that needed doing, they lacked

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the ambition that animated many senior civilian administrators and that might have led them to push their own agenda more forcefully. Moreover, military governors lacked a vocal champion in the OKH, someone who might have had Hitler’s ear. Field Marshal von Brauchitsch was not assertive enough, General Quartermaster Wagner was not senior enough and General Halder, focused as he was on military operations, could hardly be bothered. Nor did military administrations command huge numbers of German personnel. For instance, at the beginning of November 1942, there were only fifteen thousand officers, NCOs and men active in military administration headquarters across the whole of occupied France.11 Military administrations therefore tried to maintain a minimal supervisory presence, relying primarily upon large, cooperative native administrations. However, the enthusiasm these administrations felt for the Nazi ‘New Order’ varied, and none of them matched that of Vidkun Quisling’s quasi-Nazi administration in Norway. More often, collaborationist native administrators were motivated by calculating opportunism, or – more usually still – because they grudgingly recognized that cooperating with the Germans was the best way to preserve a tolerable wartime existence for the majority of their people. The army-supervised indigenous administration in Belgium harboured all three motives to some extent. General von Falkenhausen was not a straightforward old-school conservative, but a well-educated, well-travelled individual who had even flirted with Buddhism. He did not always observe the highest moral standards; his role in the fate of Belgium’s Jews would demonstrate that. But he was a private critic of the Nazi regime and eventually would become involved in the anti-Nazi military resistance. He was also sensible enough to seek tranquil conditions for the Military Government by treating both the Belgian administration and the bulk of the Belgian population fairly leniently. Many Belgians would have felt relieved at this, given the ravages to which the Kaiser’s army had subjected their country during the First World War. Indeed, with the major exception of the country’s Jews, most Belgian civilians would have viewed the German occupation of the Second World War as being preferable to that of the First.12 Reeder in particular was interested not just in occupying Belgium, but also in transforming its economic and political structure into that of a corporatist, technocratic state. His main motive was political: knowing Hitler was lukewarm to the idea of prolonging the life of the Military Government, Reeder believed he was much more likely to preserve it if it could show itself to be proactive and dynamic. For instance, in August 1940, the Military Government arranged the Belgian agricultural sector into a combined organization called the Foodstuffs and Agricultural Union.13 Although this particular endeavour was only partially successful, many Belgians from across the political spectrum

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liked the idea of root-and-branch reform of their country’s political and economic structures. For, during the interwar years, they had lost much of their faith in parliamentary democracy. The Military Government had little trouble coopting much of the Belgian establishment, including civil servants, industrialists and the Church. It augmented its influence through extensive media censorship and press ownership.14 Lance Corporal Alfred M. of the 35th Infantry Division, writing in his diary in August 1940, described the Walloons as ‘filthy, work-shy, deceitful and perfidious, shifty and pernicious’, but the Flemings as ‘clean and industrious, friendly and open, hearty and good-natured’.15 It is unclear how widely German occupation troops in Belgium harboured such views. But at policy level, while Hitler empowered the Military Government to run the country to Germany’s maximum economic benefit with the minimum German military commitment, he also consciously favoured the Flemings, whom he considered a lost Germanic tribe. The Military Government’s favoured Flemish collaborating partner was the mainstream political party, the Vlaams National Verbond (Flemish National Union, or VNV). It had far less time for the Walloon Fascist ‘Rex’ movement of Léon Degrelle; the Rexists were not to the taste of conservative-minded military administrators, and Reeder scorned them as disruptive extremists.16 On the whole, the indigenous Belgian administration itself hoped above all simply to carry out its day-to-day functions with minimal German interference. *** The case of occupied France, which until November 1942 comprised the northern half of the country, provides the greatest opportunity to observe the nuanced relationship between occupier and occupied as it played out on the ground. Here as in Belgium, during the first two years of occupation the demands of the German war economy and the damage they wrought upon occupier-occupied relations were markedly less severe than they would later become. Relations between occupier and occupied were therefore characterized by considerable give-and-take. French administrative officials in Germanoccupied France could not communicate directly with the Vichy government, and thus needed to invoke the authority of the German occupiers in order to get anything done. But the Germans needed the French authorities to ensure that the population adhered to the rules, regulations, and requirements of the occupation. The Feldkommandantur in Nantes, for instance, informed the local French authorities that ‘passive resistance, act of violence, sabotage, or work stoppage must be prevented with the utmost rigour, and the guilty parties arrested and

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punished’. The crimes it subjected to martial law included ‘1. assistance given to non-German soldiers in occupied territory, 2. transmission of information to detriment of the German army and Reich, 3. assistance to French POWs, 4. offences against the German army and its commanders’ together with ‘street gatherings, distribution of leaflets, public meetings and demonstrations, and any other active hostility to Germany.’17 These were all standard obligations for an indigenous administration under occupation, laid down in the 1907 Hague Convention and incorporated into the terms of the 1940 Armistice. As long as the French accepted defeat and acted obediently, the German authorities assured them of the sanctity of their lives, property and religion. Yet where there was a conflict of interests, the French would soon find that those of the occupier took precedence. This would become increasingly clear as time went by, but even in the early days of occupation the process of giveand-take was often a tense one. Thus, in the words of Robert Gildea, ‘as well as . . . declarations of cordiality . . . there were veritable wars of nerves, feinting and fencing, threats and blandishments, bluff and counter bluff, claims to more power or resources than were actually to hand’.18 But the age and outlook of numerous German military administrators helped ease the process. Though France’s military reputation had taken a drubbing during the 1940 campaign, many military administrators were old enough to hold personal memories of the 1914–18 war and of France’s valiant efforts during the course of it. With the degree of respect they thus afforded the French people came a broader perspective on the country more generally. The personality of a German occupation administrator and his relationship with French civilian officials played a major role in shaping the occupation regime in a particular locality. In the Angers region in north-west France, for example, the relatively amiable Feldkommandant Colonel Kloss was well-received by French officials following his harsh and abrasive predecessor, Captain Marloh.19 West of Angers, the coastal port of Nantes benefited from having Lieutenant-Colonel Karl Hotz as its Feldkommandant. Hotz spoke fluent French, had worked in Nantes during the early 1930s, and was described by a local interpreter as ‘an old man, dry, short, dressed in artillery officer’s uniform, with a broad smile and kindly expression’.20 Soldiers stationed in France expressed mixed views about the country. ‘The inhabitants look wretched, the houses look dirty and the public amenities are built haphazardly,’ wrote Lance Corporal Arnold N. of the 96th Infantry Division, a fifth-wave formation, in July 1940.21 Lance Corporal Alfred M. was even more graphic, a diary entry of early August recounting: ‘what’s presented before our eyes here in northern France is beyond poverty. Words like squalor and neglect can’t convey it.’22 On the other hand, German occupation troops stationed in many parts of France enjoyed perhaps the most comfortable

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existence of any Germany occupier. Not all appreciated it; Captain Paul K., serving on patrol duty in Paris, wrote: ‘the French bars are unwelcoming and the famous pleasure palaces with their cabaret, etc are ridiculously expensive’.23 But Arnold N., who was transferred from the 96th Infantry Division to serve on the staff of the Military Government in Paris, became one of the many German soldiers more thankful to serve in France, as he made clear writing from his office in June 1941: ‘Barely 300 metres [330 yards] from the Arc de Triomphe, I spend my days in a wonderful building with carpet-bedecked corridors, staircases, paintings and mirrors everywhere throwing back the movements of soldiers and officers carrying files around.’24 As for the city itself, ‘the charm of Paris is difficult to deny,’ wrote another soldier posted to the city. ‘It bewitches even those least sensitive to it.’25 Others still used a posting in Paris as an opportunity to live it up. Hans von Luck had commanded Rommel’s reconnaissance battalion during the French campaign, and spent several weeks in Paris following the armistice. He later recalled his embarrassment ‘when drunken members of the military administration sang Nazi songs in the bars, while the French customers would have liked to hear chansons. Once, when it became too much for me and physical violence threatened to break out, I called the military police and had the place cleared of rowdy Germans.’26 There was plenty of hedonism to be had in the provinces, too. For instance, drunken brawls were widespread in the Loire region; after one particularly heavy night in September 1941, two German soldiers were injured, prompting investigations by both the German and French police. ‘Incidents often happen in these places,’ the French police commissioner observed, ‘because of the mingling of males and females and above all because of the abuse of alcohol.’27 An altogether more genteel appreciation of French hospitality was displayed by Hans Albring, who spent his free time in Poitiers visiting local churches, then celebrating his promotion to sergeant by visiting Rouen and striking up a good relationship with a bookseller who sold him several rare books with valuable woodcuts.28 But between German soldiers, and French civilians having to come to terms with their country’s defeat, relations were not generally cordial. Where troops were stationed played an important role here. In thinly populated rural areas, it was possible to put names to faces and break down barriers somewhat. The Breton novelist Louis Guilloux provided several examples, as Julian Jackson recounts: ‘The French policeman raises his hat in greeting to the German policeman standing on the step; a friend whom Guilloux visits is giving a young German officer a French lesson which is interrupted for a friendly argument about the outcome of the war; a beach in July is so crowded with swimmers that it is impossible to distinguish French swimmers from German ones; French children know which Germans are likely to be a soft touch for

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sweets.’29 But cities provided few such opportunities. Paris, for instance, might be replete with fleshpots, art, and culture, but it was also a vast, impersonal posting in which to be stationed, where French citizens regarded their occupiers frostily or sought to ignore them altogether. Thus did Jean-Paul Sartre describe his experience of travelling on the Paris Metro: ‘At the start, the sight of the Germans was offensive to us, and then, little by little, we learnt not to notice them. . . . They were more like the furniture than they were like men.’30 And as early as 1940, the French were already being reminded that, relatively restrained though the Military Government’s policies might be, they remained a vanquished people vulnerable to the oppression and avarice of their occupiers. As yet the reminders were small, but noticeable nonetheless. Among the petty regulations the Germans brought in, people were fined for not crossing the road at the proper point, cyclists were stopped for riding three abreast, and pedestrians had to step off pavements to let Germans pass.31 Suffering serial minor humiliations on a daily basis, it is little wonder that many French civilians failed to appreciate the generally correct behaviour of German soldiers. An August 1940 German army report on public opinion in three départements noted that the ‘exemplary, amiable and helpful behaviour of the German soldiers towards the population has aroused little sympathy’.32 *** Two contexts which, however nuanced, regularly saw German conduct cross over into exploitation territory, were sex and shopping. The occupation’s early months saw a mushrooming of sexual encounters between occupier and occupied. France, after all, was a country from which 1.5 million Frenchmen had just been removed as fatalities, casualties, and most numerously prisoners of war, and in which German soldiers now strutted around with ready cash and the glow of victors. Encounters ran the spectrum from rape cases to courtly wooing, with all variations sordid or otherwise in between.33 It is unsurprising that, in the words of Robert Gildea, ‘it has been calculated that Germans did their bit to tackle France’s demographic deficit by fathering between 50,000 and 70,000 children’.34 Field Marshal von Brauchitsch called for units stationed in the west to keep their troops occupied with sports, including team games, athletics and swimming.35 Yet he also perceived that the troops needed ‘a necessary outlet for their sexual energies’, and to this end the Military Government in Paris authorized a series of Wehrmacht-run brothels.36 The Military Government did not order the press-ganging of women and girls from the general population, something German commands would habitually go on to do in the occupied Soviet Union.

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But it did use other forms of coercion, dragooning women and girls who were already prostitutes, regardless of whether or not they wished to work independently. Herein lay a second motive for establishing Wehrmacht-run brothels: the Military Government believed they were a means of stamping out unregulated prostitution, and with it sexually transmitted diseases – concerns the Vichy authorities also shared. Soldiers were acutely aware of the risks too. ‘Every second house is a café bar, and there’s a knocking shop above every one of them,’ wrote Georg Dammel to his sister.‘The girls here are lovely in face and figure, but they’re unbelievably perfumed and made-up. And a lot of them have got the clap, according to our doctor.’37 Private Willy P. of the 167th Infantry Division wrote in July 1940: ‘today it was announced at roll call that we “master soldiers” are forbidden to go walking or hang out with the French Fräuleins’.38 Three months later, after being promoted to Lance Corporal, he was aghast: ‘yesterday the first woman from here arrived in hospital with a venereal disease! Three of our soldiers too! What’s striking is the different ways in which this topic is discussed. When you listen to civilians, the story is that we infected them, though among ourselves of course it’s the opposite story.’39 The Sanitätsdienst (Sanitation Office), the Wehrmacht’s central health and medical body, also firmly believed that controlled brothels would prevent the troops from catching STDs.40 Anti-Semitic prejudice played a role too, if a secondary one, for Nazi propaganda depicted pimps as Jews, as well as linking prostitution to crime. The Military Government combined its policy of regulated brothels with a crackdown on unregulated prostitution, ordering the internment of unregistered prostitutes and raids on dockside bars in major ports.41 When it came to shopping, the larger French cities, above all Paris, proved a paradise for German soldiers from the occupation’s earliest days. Alois Scheuer recounted to his wife ‘a four-day trip to Paris which I just returned from safe and sound. It was a wonderful trip; Paris really is a one-off. I spent a fortune, but saw and bought all sorts for it. I hope you’ll like what I’ve got you.’42 Scheuer was writing in June 1942, but borderline shopaholic German soldiers were swarming through French high streets as early as the summer of 1940. It was then, shortly after hostilities ended, that German soldiers in France were given leave to purchase goods on credit. In the colossal spending spree that followed, they stripped shops of most of their consumer goods. Their appetite for clothes, which they packed off to wives and girlfriends in Germany, was particularly prodigious. Parisians nicknamed them potato beetles.43 In Nantes, after the city’s department stores had been ransacked, the prefect described how the Germans had taken ‘radios, refrigerators, champagne, flowers, expensive antique or modern furniture, carpets, drapes, luxurious dinner services, watches, chandeliers, bicycles, cars, and even pleasure boats’.44 Belgium

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experienced something similar; a joke going the rounds there in 1941 went: ‘Two Englishmen dressed as German officers were arrested in Belgium as spies. The Germans did not pick them up, but the Belgians did because they were not carrying suitcases.’45 The soldiers’ consumer binge did have one benign, if short-lived, economic effect: it temporarily pre-empted the deflation that often afflicts post-conflict economies. But the long-term effect, save in Scandinavia where the military authorities restricted their troops’ spending power, was to drive up inflation to dangerous levels. And this was only the uncontrolled aspects of an enormous requisitioning programme that the Germans, finally able to ease the shortages that had plagued their own economy during the 1930s, now unleashed upon occupied Europe. In western Europe, the occupiers were nominally constrained by the Hague Convention, which forbade the seizure of private property unless it was militarily necessary.46 But Field Marshal von Brauchitsch made sure to employ a wide definition of military necessity, confiscating raw materials and semifinished and finished goods of military importance.47 From the outset of the occupation, the agency that carried out the most forensic, wide-ranging exploitation of the French economy was the Central Purchasing Office, headed by General of Infantry Georg Thomas. This was a hybrid civilian-military grouping, comprising personnel from the three armed services, the Office of the Four-Year Plan and Todt’s Munitions Ministry. Initially, Göring himself had the power to arbitrate in disputes between the Central Purchasing Office and the Military Government in Paris.48 By late 1940, the Military Government of Belgium and Northern France at least perceived that wildly seizing raw materials threatened law and order, as well as economic order, because it fuelled unemployment and, with it, social resentment. It also sought to ensure sufficient food supplies for the working portion of the population at least, reasoning that it made no sense to ‘bleed them white, as has at times been proposed’.49 Among other things, the Germans needed to consider the impact the British naval blockade was having upon the populations and economies of occupied Europe and, by extension, upon how far the occupiers could exploit them. The Germans also imposed shortages across occupied western Europe with ‘clearing agreements’. These arrangements compelled occupied countries to divert huge amounts of their exports to Germany, with the empty promise that they would be paid for at a later date. The Germans also confiscated or bought up huge reserves of raw materials. Given the immediate capitulation of Denmark, the almost immediate capitulation of the Netherlands and the ‘favoured racial status’ of the two peoples, the Nazi leadership was inclined, for now, to allow them relatively privileged economic conditions. For instance, while the Germans had extracted 2,700 tons of metals from the Netherlands by the end of 1940, they had extracted 9,500 from Belgium. It is worth mentioning

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that the Norwegians, despite their supposed racial similarities to the Danes and the Dutch, were hit much harder than either. For the Norwegians had had the temerity to resist the German invasion for several weeks, and Göring was eager to exploit Norway for its mining, smelting, shipyards, hydroelectricity, and chemicals. Meanwhile, the Wehrmacht itself imposed immense demands for construction materials, earmarked for defences, naval bases and other military installations along the Norwegian coast.50 The shortages that resulted from all this, as well as from soldiers’ uncontrolled private spending, inevitably drove up inflation. So too did the Germans’ demand that all occupied territories, save Denmark, pay for the costs of occupation themselves. In Belgium, the Military Government issued loans, treasury bonds and new banknotes to meet the monthly occupation costs. The French occupation zone was forced to make daily instalment payments of twenty million Reichsmarks, as well as ten million each day for quartering the German troops.51 Inflation resulted because the Germans paid for the costs by taking over occupied territories’ banks and using them to print more money. In turn, inflation fuelled a thriving black market. The latter flourished not just because of wartime shortages, but also because the Germans had introduced price controls. Furthermore, German soldiers themselves were often among the black market’s best customers. Military authorities in the affected parts of Europe invoked harsh punishments against black marketeers. But this was the height of hypocrisy, for they were in on the act – the military authorities, together with the SS, the Abwehr (Wehrmacht intelligence service) and the German and indigenous civilian authorities, all ran black-market firms themselves. They did so partly because infiltrating the black market made it easier to investigate it, but also for the more venal motive of buying up as many available goods and raw materials as possible. Nor did they have qualms about colluding with criminal elements in the process, though the military authorities at least eventually cleaned up their act on this front.52 *** Yet it was partly because economic conditions did not nose-dive straight away that resistance to the German occupation was slow to develop. There were many further reasons for this. Denmark and Norway lacked any tradition of resistance to foreign occupiers. France and Belgium did possess such a tradition, but their societies were more urbanized and their populations too concentrated for a large-scale guerrilla campaign of the kind that partisans in occupied southern and eastern Europe would wage during the Second World War. But the most fundamental reason why resistance did not emerge on any great scale during 1940 and 1941 was also the most mundane. Most occupied

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civilians, while not actively collaborating with the Germans, elected to accept the tolerable if austere conditions of occupation and adopt an attitude of attentisme (wait-and-see). Nevertheless, there was visible if sporadic resentment of German occupation from its earliest months, and embryonic resistance, across all of occupied western Europe save Denmark. In Belgium, for instance, Germany’s failure to invade Britain and Italian defeats in southeast Europe and North Africa during the autumn of 1940 led many civilians to realize that the war was far from over.53 Generally, however, western European resistance groups recognized that full-scale uprisings were out of the question: they lacked numbers, organization and equipment, not least because the British were as yet in no position to support, coordinate and supply them effectively. European resistance movements aimed instead to build ‘secret armies’ that would eventually be activated shortly before invasion by liberating Allied troops. Thus would they be able to participate in liberation, while sparing their compatriots the misery of harsh German reprisals. Meanwhile, resistance groups would carry out covert activities such as producing clandestine newspapers and propaganda, providing escape routes for fugitive Allied servicemen, and sabotaging German supply and communication lines. If they felt particularly daring, they would launch individual strikes and assassination attempts on German and collaborationist personnel. The German army itself seriously contemplated the danger of at least low-level resistance as early as the winter of 1940–41, when Field Marshal von Brauchitsch’s office declared: ‘the situation of the population in the occupied western territories may become harder in the course of the winter months. Local unrest cannot be ruled out. In the first instance it is the job of the military administration to observe these developments sharply.’54 In July 1940, Churchill sought some means of hitting back at the Germans in mainland Europe following the British army’s recent forcible ejection from it. He accordingly set up Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) with instructions to, in his famous phrase, ‘set Europe ablaze’,55 by supporting resistance and subversion throughout the occupied lands. Yet despite Churchill’s hopes and the Germans’ fears, there was little real resistance or subversion to support between the summers of 1940 and 1941. Nor, therefore, was there yet any need for the German occupiers to respond to resistance with a hard line. A measure of the leniency with which the Military Government in Paris conducted itself was an incident that took place in October 1940, in which three members of the SS Police Division, then stationed in France, carried out a ‘black flag’ operation. They deliberately cut a cable in several places and tried to make it look like the work of the resistance, hoping – in vain, as it turned out – to provoke the army authorities into retaliating harshly against the population.56

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That the Military Government in Brussels also took a relatively low-key approach to resistance was clear in a report that Reeder issued in April 1941, when he commented: ‘the military administration has tried . . . not to provoke the heroism of the masses’.57 The Military Government even stopped short of preventing people from listening to the BBC by confiscating their radios, so concerned was it about looking too provocative. It did threaten the death penalty for offences including sabotage, espionage and unauthorized possession of firearms, but this was intended as a deterrent, and proved an effective one at that.58 Generally, such acts of resistance, whether real or perceived, as did take place were sporadic, largely ineffective, and sometimes tragicomic. In August and September 1940 in Bordeaux, for example, a gendarme was arrested for saying it was ‘painful to have to salute these German pigs’,59 and a sailor found slashing German posters was sentenced to three months in prison for sabotage. In Nantes, the twenty-three-year-old son of a magistrate was arrested when he drew a caricature of the Führer on the wall of a café frequented by German soldiers. The Germans eventually released him when the local French authorities persuaded them to take it as a joke.60 Yet the Germans were not all about leniency even at this early stage, and their response to resistance could be unpredictably harsh. On 19 June 1940 for instance, at a time before the armistice had been signed, an agricultural worker cut the telephone lines linking the German command in Rouen in Normandy to the local Luftwaffe air base. He was executed; so too was a teenager found guilty of cutting telephone cables to Royan on the south-west French coast. Various types of defiance particularly incensed the German authorities in France. One was the booing of German newsreels in the cinemas. A second was public demonstrations, in which ordinary French people participated not to resist the Germans practically, but to assert their own dignity. Thus, for example, the Germans brutishly met a demonstration on Remembrance Day 1940 with stun grenades, fixed bayonets, and shots fired into the air. A third was strikes; a particularly large-scale strike broke out in Calais in May 1941 in response to German efforts to extract more coal from the area. The Germans reacted by arresting strikers en masse; closing down cafés, restaurants, and cinemas; and banning the sale of alcohol and tobacco. When these measures too failed, partly due to the reluctance of local gendarmes to enforce them, the Germans eventually broke the strike by withholding food and wages from the strikers. The Vichy regime eventually granted the strikers concessions, but 270 were deported to the Reich, half of whom eventually died there.61 Finally, there was the widespread, clandestine tuning into the radio programmes of the BBC, which French people viewed not just as the voice of freedom but also as a source of quality entertainment.

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Hence a joke that was going the rounds in French Jewish circles by the autumn of 1942: ‘ “Do you know what happened recently? 9:20 PM and you killed a German soldier, cut him open and ate his heart.” “Impossible. For three reasons. The German has no heart. The Jew eats no pork. And 9:20 PM everyone is listening to the BBC.” ’

*** Well might Jews have particular cause to fear the German occupation, of course, and from its earliest days. In the Belgian port of Antwerp in July 1940, for instance, the deputy police commissioner recounted reports from Jews that they had been beaten up in the marketplace by German soldiers: ‘ “We were stepped on, beaten up, mishandled, pulled by our beards . . . and when we were threatened with a revolver, we had to flee the marketplace.” ’62 Yet even this kind of thuggery was a trifle compared with the systematically murderous fate that would eventually befall many of the Jews of France and Belgium. Overall, however, the Military Government in Brussels did not persecute Jews with particular alacrity during the first year of occupation. Reeder and Falkenhausen were certainly anti-Semitic, but, particularly in Falkenhausen’s case, to an extent that fell short of Nazi standards. They therefore did not initially consider implementing anti-Semitic measures to be a particular priority. The Military Government in Paris, however, saw things differently, even though Otto von Stülpnagel was no anti-Semitic ideologue himself. During the autumn of 1940, the Military Government in Paris began discriminating against Jews in a way that the Military Government in Brussels did not. An immediate wellspring for this was the Madagascar Plan. The French island colony of Madagascar seemed to offer the prospect of a massive reservation for European Jews. Franz Rademacher, an official in the German Foreign Ministry, developed the idea for the Madagascar Plan in a memorandum of July 1940; Hitler was so taken with it that he informed Abetz at the beginning of August that ‘he intended to evacuate all Jews from Europe after the war’.63 By autumn, it was clear that the logistical challenges involved in the plan were colossal. Moreover, as long as the war against Britain continued and the Royal Navy dominated the high seas, the plan was a nonstarter. But in the meantime, its existence had spurred Nazi agencies to expedite the Jews’ persecution and eventual removal from Germany and occupied Europe. Just as hatred of Jews and the number of Jews in German-occupied territory both grew, the Nazi regime’s inhibitions about disposing of them in the most conclusive way possible were beginning to diminish. In 1939, the regime had

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initiated a ‘euthanasia’ programme directed against the Reich’s ‘undesirable’ disabled. Unusually, there was a public outcry within Germany as news of the killings leaked out, and the Nazi leadership abandoned the programme. But having sanctioned the mass murder of one particular group, it would be less of a leap to sanction it again for a larger group. It was even less of a leap considering that dumping Jews in crowded, insanitary Polish ghettos, or on an island in the Indian Ocean that could not sustainably accommodate them all,64 would in itself reduce their numbers anyway. A trailblazer for the persecution of Jews in France was the Einsatzstab Rosenberg, a ‘special action staff ’ headed by the Nazi ‘ideological theorist’ Alfred Rosenberg. This agency, which began operations in France in July 1940, was ostensibly charged with repossessing property that Jews had allegedly stolen from Germany. Abetz and the Military Government initially feared that these measures would damage their efforts at collaboration. Then Hitler backed the Einsatzstab. Abetz, whom Hitler had personally apprized of his intention to expel the Jews from Europe, changed his tune over the repossessions, and placated the French authorities by placing them on a ‘legal’ footing.65 He saw a means of gaining further approval from Berlin by pushing for the registration of Jews and their businesses. By the start of September, Group I, the internal government subsection of Best’s department, also saw which way the wind was blowing and argued that the Military Government itself could not now passively stand by over Jewish affairs in France.66 On 26 August 1940, Best’s administrative section issued a directive that emphasized the purported link between Jews and anti-German activity: ‘There is the danger that the Jews, with their anti-German attitude and their multifaceted connections to the unoccupied part of France and to other countries, are carrying out anti-German espionage or anti-German activities, or are at least supporting them. A consequence of this is the presence of Jews at public disturbances, as the demonstration on 20 August in Paris showed.’ The directive also ordered ‘neutralising Jewish business people . . . for to allow them to remain in their positions of economic power is to endanger the German conduct of the war’.67 Moreover, figures within the Military Government believed that the Vichy regime, itself keen to exploit the anti-Semitism in French society, could be brought into the process. The Military Government’s economic chief, Dr Elmar Michel, declared: ‘First, we must do what is necessary to eliminate Jews even after the occupation. More important, we cannot from our side provide sufficient manpower to deal with the great number of Jewish enterprises. These two factors oblige us to have the French authorities participate in the elimination of Jews. We thereby share responsibility with the French, and have at our disposal the French administrative apparatus.’68 On 27 September, the

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Military Government announced measures to count the number of Jews in the occupied zone and mark out Jewish businesses, and in November, Brauchitsch instructed the Military Government to focus on taking over Jewish businesses.69 There were limits to what Stülpnagel himself was prepared to countenance: in January 1941, he informed Brauchitsch that he approved of registering Jewish businesses, but that there was no legal precedent for confiscating them.70 Now, however, the Vichy regime pushed the process along. In March 1941, it created a General Secretariat for Jewish Affairs, charged with proposing legislative measures against Jews, fixing dates for liquidating Jewish property and designating trustees for the purpose.71 Between the ‘liberation’ and the end of the war, one former Military Government official estimated, German and French officials together ‘Aryanized’ 43 per cent of Jewish businesses and another twelve to eighteen months would have enabled them to finish the job.72 The autumn of 1940 brought a further ominous portent for the Jews in France, when Brauchitsch officially lifted his ban on keeping Allgemeine-SS units out of the country. Shortly after the fall of France, Himmler had covertly installed twenty SD men in Paris. The existence of this supposedly clandestine group had, however, been an open secret, and Brauchitsch now acknowledged and approved its presence. Himmler had provided the final push by claiming that the Einsatzstab Rosenberg needed the help of his men in gathering art treasures. Brauchitsch now also authorized Security Police and SD agents to investigate anti-German activities carried out by Jews, immigrants, Communists, and church groups in the occupied zone. The Security Police and SD were also granted leeway not only to investigate Jews, but also to arrest them. The SS and Police wasted little time in exploiting the freedom of open action that Brauchitsch had granted it: in January 1941, Obersturmbannführer Helmut Knochen, commander of the Security Police and SD in Paris, declared that Jews who were not of French nationality must be removed from the occupied zone.73 In the Military Government of Belgium and Northern France, the SS and Police similarly used the military administration’s security needs as a way of wedging themselves into a position of greater power. The Military Government needed a contingent of the Security Police; initially this contingent only had investigative authority and had to leave the actual arrests to the GFP. But Himmler was playing a double game: he employed officers in the Brussels branch who were moderate by SS standards, but saw to it that their power became ever more unbridled as time went on. In February 1941, the GFP’s powers were downgraded as the Security Police contingent in Belgium was granted full authority to act as a political police. Falkenhausen himself

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inadvertently played into Himmler’s hands: in February 1941, he introduced preventive custody for local inhabitants against whom no offence could be proved but whom the occupation authorities considered dangerous nevertheless. He tried to see to it that this method was only used selectively, but it was a tool the SS and Police within his jurisdiction were themselves able to take up and eventually employ wholesale. They eventually set up a brutal detention camp for the purpose, at Breendonk.74 *** The great majority of the peoples populating German-occupied western Europe were not victimized by Nazi racial policy in the way those in the east were. Senior officers and officials within the military governments that administered France and Belgium displayed some of the more beneficent characteristics of the conservatism that characterized many of the officer corps’s older members. That, or they came from the kind of professional background that gave them a relatively clear-headed view of what sustaining a viable occupation regime involved. This did not make them paragons. It did, however, give them the sense not to antagonize the population needlessly. This was good politics: it smoothed the administration of the occupied territories, and it minimized the sort of resistance that could overburden their own, already stretched forces. Relations between German soldiers and occupied civilians ranged from the cool to the (relatively) convivial, but were smoothed to an extent by the relative Francophilia of the occupiers or, in the case of Belgium, by the relatively favoured status accorded to the Flemish population. And just as both military governments treated their occupied populations with relative restraint, so too did native administrators cooperate with, and native populations largely accept, the austere but bearable realities of life under the occupation. On the other hand, there were already ways in which the army’s presence harmed civilians, particularly when it came to the economic life of the occupied territories. Driving this was what the Reich, and the army, considered practically necessary for satisfying either their economic needs or, on a smaller scale, the sexual appetite of the troops. Thus far, the army countered such resistance as it faced with considerable restraint, if also with sometimes thuggish severity, and the overall level of resistance it faced was low. But as the German war effort’s needs eventually grew more acute, so its exploitation of the Reich’s occupied western territory would grow more severe and further fuel resistance in the process. The first year of occupation in the west certainly provided no reason to overstate the moderation of the Military Government in Paris, at least, for it was already victimizing the Jewish population of its jurisdiction. It did so due

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to a mixture of the anti-Semitism of leading figures within in it, such as Werner Best, and of the political calculations involved in the power play between the Vichy regime, the SS and Police, the army high command, and the Military Government itself. Otto von Stülpnagel was not the main driving force behind this initiative, but neither was he the significant brake on it that he might have been. Then in June 1941, all developments with German-occupied western Europe were suddenly eclipsed by events in the east.

CHAPTER SEVEN

PLANNING OPERATION BARBAROSSA, 1940–41

D

estroying the soviet Union had long been Hitler’s paramount concrete foreign-policy aim. There were several reasons why he chose 1941 as the year in which to attempt it. The OKH would be instrumental in drawing up not only an operational plan, but also a series of immensely ruthless directives, rightfully dubbed the ‘criminal orders’ by historians, designed to shape the conduct of the troops during the campaign. A number of senior commanders voiced concerns about the operational plan and the criminal orders, but none objected fundamentally. Thus did the German army unite around an invasion plan characterized by colossal hubris and immorality. ***

Germany invaded the Soviet Union at a time when the army was not fully ready for such a challenge. The eventual consequences would prove calamitous. Because the invasion turned out to be such a turning point in the fortunes of the German army, indeed in the fortunes of the Reich itself, it is important to consider what lay behind Hitler’s decision to commence it when he did. After the fall of France, much to Hitler’s frustration, Britain refused to make peace. An attempt to bludgeon her to the negotiating table by defeating her air force in the battle of Britain came to nothing. A lack of suitable invasion craft, the mauled state of the Kriegsmarine following the Norway campaign, and the Royal Navy’s domination of the English Channel all rendered a seaborne invasion impossible. For Hitler, forcing Britain to come to terms was not just desirable in itself; it would also reduce the odds in Germany’s favour in a future war for global domination. Hitler expected to take on the United States at some point; when he did so, it would be better to have taken Britain out of the equation. Hitler believed that the British viewed the Soviet Union, despite the existence of the Nazi–Soviet pact, as their only potential ally in mainland Europe.

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Thus, by removing the Soviet Union from the equation, he hoped to demoralize Britain into making peace. Superficial reading of the flat topography and vast size of the European Soviet Union suggested immense opportunities for the German army to execute a campaign of manoeuvre on a grand scale. Hitler first voiced his intention to invade the Soviet Union in a meeting of 31 July 1940, well before the climax of the battle of Britain in September. According to General Halder’s diary, Hitler declared that ‘with Russia smashed, Britain’s last hope would be shattered’.1 In other words, Hitler’s vexation at Britain’s refusal to make peace was already propelling him towards the solution that chimed most closely with his ideological goals. His resolve to finish off the Soviet Union sooner rather than later was strengthened by his conviction that there was no chance of the Soviet Union accepting German domination of Europe, and by the Reich’s failure to degrade Britain by knocking away her props in the Mediterranean and Middle East. That such a ‘peripheral’ strategy never seriously evolved was partly because the only service branch that advocated it was the Kriegsmarine, and partly because the Germans could not secure the necessary agreement between Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain and Vichy France.2 There were pressing economic reasons to invade the Soviet Union. That country’s grain, oil, and other resources promised a far greater economic bonanza than occupied western Europe could provide. Moreover, though the resource base of occupied western Europe prevented Britain’s naval blockade from hurting Germany as much as it had during the First World War, the blockade did shut off Germany from world markets. It also enabled Britain to import far more in the way of raw materials than Germany could. Then there was food; while Germany could escape direct privation by seizing foodstuffs from across occupied Europe, occupied Europe had to be able to produce such foodstuffs in the first place – and the blockade deprived French, Danish, and Dutch farmers of vital agricultural supplies.3 Further, there was a thin line between benefiting from the Nazi–Soviet pact’s economic provisions and being economically dependent on the Soviet Union. In December 1940, General Halder remarked in his diary: ‘Every weakness in the position of the Axis brings a push by the Russians. They cannot prescribe the rules of transactions, but they utilize every opportunity to weaken the Axis position.’4 In January 1941, with Stalin anxious to keep Hitler placated, the Soviets changed their tune and doubled their deliveries.5 This probably additionally encouraged Hitler to invade, partly because it further demonstrated the full extent of the economic bounty a conquered Soviet Union could yield, and partly because it showed Stalin was frightened. ***

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German military intelligence’s buoyant assessments of Soviet fighting power also emboldened Hitler. Unfortunately for him, he took no heed of how unreliable its assessments were. For, just as the German army had long been less proficient at strategy than at tactics and operations, so German military intelligence provided rather less valuable information about the big strategic picture than it did about tactical and operational-level matters such as troop dispositions. The centre of German military intelligence’s efforts to process and evaluate information concerning the Soviet Union’s fighting power was Foreign Armies East (Fremde Heere Ost, or FHO). The FHO was small and underresourced; it defined ‘East’ as broadly as could be imagined, with southeast Europe, Turkey, Iran, the Soviet Union, Scandinavia, and the Far East all covered by just fifteen officers. It received information about the Soviet Union from the German military attaché in Moscow, and from the Finns, Estonians, Italians, Romanians, and Japanese, but it suffered from a lack of German agents within high Soviet circles. Nor could the Germans decipher Soviet radio traffic; in any case, Soviet troops in the border regions usually communicated by telephone. Agents generally were extremely difficult to infiltrate across the border because of the Soviets’ intense security effort along the frontiers and main transport routes.6 The Soviet Union was also too large for effective aerial reconnaissance. However, the FHO’s commanding officer, Colonel Eberhard Kinzel, could not be bothered with aerial reconnaissance anyway, because producing maps from it would take several weeks.7 This cavalier attitude typified an officer who, though he was talented and popular, was also too much the optimist and bon viveur. ‘He was very popular with us,’ recalled one subordinate, ‘not just professionally, but also like a carouser in a casino.’8 After the fall of France, the FHO assessed the East from the less than ideally placed location of the château at Fontainebleau, just outside Paris, where Kinzel’s joie de vivre seems to have rubbed off on his team. An OKH truck driver saw the FHO’s personnel at play: ‘In the casinos they didn’t just eat a lot but also drank a lot, the best champagne and the most expensive red and white. Hennessy, Biscay and other French varieties of cognac flowed in torrents. . . . At the general staffers’ celebrations there were always young French women around, who ate and drank freely before subsequently prostituting themselves. Thus was the greatly prized morality of the German officer corps trampled underfoot.’9 With the FHO partying vigorously, and having little useful information to go on in the first place, it is not surprising that many of its reports were vague and half-baked. Such, for instance, was its assessment of the Soviet armed forces’ high command structure: ‘At the top of the whole armed forces is probably the chairman of the Defence Committee (comparable to our OKW)[This figure is also] at a guess, chairman of the people’s commissars[. A]t present [this post is held by] Marshal Voroshilov, who until summer 1940 was people’s

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commissar for defence. He probably has an armed-forces general staff at his side. Details are unknown.’10 And neither the FHO nor German officers on the ground properly exploited opportunities to observe the Red Army at close quarters from across the partition line in Poland. Based on such observations as it did gather, the FHO described the Red Army as ‘a vast instrument of war’, but one that was not ‘organizationally complete’.11 It drew no firm conclusions as to the quality of its officer corps, and it trotted out timeworn clichés about the ‘good-natured, willing, resilient and unambitious’ character of the Red Army’s peasant soldiers.12 The FHO based other, equally vague assessments upon the Red Army’s admittedly dreadful military performance during its attack on Finland in the Winter War of 1939–40. It asserted that ‘the small, valiant, unflinching Finnish people has so far been able to show obdurate resistance. A large, modern army would prevent the Red Army from bringing the weight of its mass to bear.’13 *** When it came to numbers, the Wehrmacht had reason to feel confident: the Red Army outnumbered it, but not by much. The German field army at the start of 1941 stood at 3.8 million, together with 1.2 million in the Replacement Army, 150,000 in the Waffen-SS, 1.7 million in the Luftwaffe, and just over 400,000 in the navy. The Red Army, which comprised both land and air forces, together with the Soviet navy, consisted of almost 5.4 million personnel, of which almost 4.3 million were in the ground forces. Moreover, when the Germans invaded, the Red Army was massively hobbled by being only halfway through a major expansion and reorganization. It comprised 303 divisions in 1941, but of these a full 161 had been added since January 1939.14 A new establishment for its rifle (infantry) divisions, introduced in April 1941, was intended to enlarge them and augment their firepower, but by June few such divisions were anywhere near complete. Among other things, they had only received between 10 and 25 per cent of their allotted number of trucks, because truck allocations were targeted upon the Red Army’s new, expanding mechanized corps.15 By contrast, the German army too underwent an extensive reorganization during the period before the invasion, but one it managed to complete. Following a Führer Directive issued by Hitler at the end of September 1940, new divisions were raised and existing ones broken up to increase the German army’s total number of divisions to 180. This would enable the army to deploy a sizable number of divisions along the entire eastern front.16 The Wehrmacht could also consider itself superior to the Red Army on many further counts. Crucially, however, it did not surpass the Red Army’s fighting power as much as it needed to, or liked to believe.

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Red Army infantry recruits received only basic skills training, and little effective training in artillery or communications.17 German soldiers were both better trained and better educated, for the mainstay of Red Army manpower was peasant stock. Moreover, recruits from rural areas had ample reason to hate Stalin as a result of the horrors of the agricultural collectivization of the 1930s. On the other hand, Red Army soldiers from urban backgrounds had greater cause to thank Soviet economic policies. And even in rural areas, 24 million children were enrolled in primary schools, where they were saturated by a heavily ideological curriculum. Indeed, educational standards were rising across the Soviet Union, with around 800,000 young people enrolled each year in the country’s 817 colleges and universities. Organizations like the Society for Air and Chemical Defence, and training camps both military and civilian, schooled young people further in good Soviet citizenship.18 Nor should the Germans have felt too smug about the standard of their own personnel. The growing number of officers and the wartime pressure to get them into the field combined to reduce training times. New personnel within freshly established divisions were not being trained to the standards that the army had reached just before the campaign in the west. Nor was it possible any longer to call up soldiers from the youngest, fittest age groups. While the majority of combat personnel in Panzer divisions and motorized infantry divisions had been born in 1914 or after, the thirteenth- and fourteenth-wave divisions established in late 1940 mainly comprised fighting personnel born as far back as 1908.19 The German army’s replacement pool was beginning to dry up. German military intelligence overestimated the chaos that Stalin’s purges had inflicted upon the Red Army officer corps. Granted, the purges had hammered morale and stifled initiative, particularly at the officer corps’s highest levels. Excessive power resided in the figure of the people’s commissar, Marshal Voroshilov. Equivalent to a defence minister, Voroshilov was essentially a talentless yes-man.20 In total, fifty thousand officers had fallen victim to the purges. So massive was the turnover that far too many officers were overpromoted. By early 1941, the now expanding Red Army still suffered a shortfall of eighty thousand officers. On the eve of the German invasion, the Red Army was carrying out special training exercises in a frantic effort to bring its officers up to standard. But as the opening weeks of war in the east would show, too many still fell short.21 And while German army officers were schooled in Auftragstaktik, Red Army officers had far less incentive to show initiative in a system that awarded far too much influence to Communist apparatchiks – primarily the commissars, who were responsible for the troops’ political instruction.22 Yet despite all this, the fact that the Red Army did not end up disintegrating completely during the first phase of the campaign would signify that its officer corps was not a total write-off; junior officers of real talent

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could still prosper, and of the approximately twenty-one army group front commanders in 1940, nine were still front commanders by the end of the war.23 The Germans’ single biggest advantage was their air power. Like the Red Army, the Red Army air force (Voyenno-Vozdushnye Sily or VVS, translated directly as Military Air Forces) had been wracked by the purges and was in a painful state of transition. Aircraft models such as the Yak 1 and Mig 3 fighter and the Sturmovik ground attack plane were of excellent quality, but were only just coming into service when the Germans attacked. In the meantime, Soviet pilots continued to suffer from poor training and obsolescent aircraft. The Germans had superior fighters and bombers, whose well-trained crews had by now amassed valuable combat experience over a succession of campaigns. On the other hand, the Luftwaffe could not guarantee maintaining air superiority in a prolonged campaign; it was also committed to air operations against the British, and 1941 would already see the Soviets outdo the Germans in aircraft production.24 The Soviets also commanded vastly more artillery than the Germans: while the Germans would field about seven thousand guns at the start of the invasion, the Red Army possessed more than four times that number. The Germans would manage to narrow the gap with their versatile, high-quality 88mm antiaircraft gun, an artillery piece that would prove equally effective against tanks.25 However, although Soviet artillery personnel were poorly trained, particularly when it came to targeting enemy tanks, the sheer size of the Soviet artillery force would enable it to do the Germans serious damage.26 Finally, there were the two armies’ mechanized forces. Soviet armoured warfare had changed direction more than once during the years up to 1941. By early 1941, twenty-nine mechanized corps were in various stages of assembly, but were nowhere near full strength. Each corps was supposed to comprise a thousand tanks including 126 heavy KV-1s and 420 T-34s – tanks that could outmatch the Germans’ Mark III and Mark IV Panzers. But on 22 June 1941, the entire Red Army possessed fewer than 1,900 KV-1s and T-34s in total, and even these, like the Red Army’s tank force more generally, lacked proper communications equipment. The Panzer divisions, by contrast, were able to carry out their own complex reorganization before the invasion started. By June 1941, Hitler’s September 1940 directive had raised the number of Panzer divisions to twenty-one, nineteen of which would be deployed in the eastern campaign. The increase was brought about not just by greater Panzer production, but also by thinning out existing Panzer divisions, several of which had to relinquish one of their regiments. The result was more balanced, combined-arms mechanized formations that would prove better suited to the eastern campaign.27 As far as the armour itself was concerned, the vast majority of the Red Army’s tanks in June 1941 were T-26s, which were technically inferior to the

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Germans’ medium Mark III and Mark IV Panzers. And the German army’s strength in both of these types of Panzer, and also in half-tracked vehicles – for transporting the mechanized infantry to secure the ground that the Panzers took – had doubled between May 1940 and June 1941. A formidable new addition to the German army’s order of battle was the mobile Sturmgeschütz, or assault gun, which would prove a highly capable fire support vehicle for the infantry. Altogether, the Germans would deploy little short of 1,700 Marks IIIs, Mark IVs and Sturmgeschütze at the beginning of the invasion.28 Yet the balance between the two sides’ armoured forces did not wholly favour the Germans. In June 1941, 28 per cent of the Reich’s entire Panzer force – a total of 1,024 vehicles – still consisted of Mark Is and Mark IIs. The Germans would also assemble over eight hundred Czech light tanks for the invasion. On many counts these were high-quality tanks, but would prove vulnerable to fire from Soviet medium and heavy tanks, and from Soviet heavy artillery. Most ominously of all, the Germans were unaware that the T-34 tank even existed. Its appearance on the battlefield in 1941 would come as a particularly nasty shock to the German troops.29 The Wehrmacht, then, outmatched the Red Army on most counts, but not overwhelmingly so. A fundamental problem lay in the limited ability of the German war economy to equip and arm the forces earmarked for the invasion. This problem would grow rapidly more severe if the Germans failed to defeat the Soviet Union quickly, and thus also failed to prevent it from bringing its far greater economic resources to bear. The causes of this, in turn, were complex, and indeed historians continue to debate their relative importance. Three in particular stand out. Firstly, there were shortages in both industrial workers and crucial economic resources. Within two years of the war’s start, 60 per cent of Germany’s industrial workforce was working on orders for the Wehrmacht and its agencies. This proportion was higher than in Britain during this period. But even though Germany was employing a high proportion of its industrial workforce in war production, the absolute size of that workforce had shrunk: in May 1941, an additional 1.4 million industrial workers were serving in the army compared with a year earlier. Meanwhile, neither Germany nor the European territory it had conquered so far possessed sufficient fuel or rubber to produce enough motor vehicles to satisfy Germany’s wartime needs.30 Secondly, there was infighting over resources not only among the three branches of the Wehrmacht, but also among the Reich’s central economic agencies. The bodies involved included the procurement offices of the army, Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine, General Thomas’s Wehrmacht Office of Economics and Armaments, Walther Funk’s Economics Ministry, Todt’s Munitions Ministry and – in theory fulfilling a coordinating role, but in practice doing

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anything but – Göring’s Office of the Four-Year-Plan. Albert Speer, the Nazi armaments minister from March 1942, later described Göring’s tenure as head of the Four-Year-Plan as having been suffused with ‘incompetence, arrogance and egotism’.31 Among other things, the absence of any coordinating civilian body created a vacuum that gave the various Wehrmacht procurement offices more economic power than they could handle. Strangers to efficient, large-scale economic planning, they allowed their fixation with high-quality equipment to hinder output of the necessary quantity. As a War Academy lecture of 1936 put it: ‘armament is a question of quality in every sense, but particularly in the technical sense. . . . An army that overemphasizes quantity and speed of production is only to be achieved at the expense of material and individual quality.’32 The lack of a proper civilian coordinating body also exacerbated myriad further problems: for instance, the German economy had been bounced into war at short notice, with numerous projects such as the Westwall fortifications still unfinished on the war’s outbreak. And many businessmen did not want to commit too much production capacity to armament for fear that the war might end and burden them with excess spare capacity.33 Thirdly, Hitler wanted and indeed expected – given the manifold weaknesses from which the Red Army was supposedly suffering – a campaign against the Soviet Union that would be not just victorious, but also quick. There was therefore no need to ‘overresource’ the army for such a campaign. Instead, the economy would continue to prioritize the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine. Then, while the Red Army was collapsing, an expanded Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine could be used either to pressure Britain further into agreeing to peace, or to defeat her in the air and at sea if she continued fighting. If either objective could be achieved before the United States entered the war, then all the better.34 None of this automatically meant that the army had to brandish the begging bowl in advance of the eastern campaign. In addition to its greatly expanded complement of medium tanks and half-tracks, for instance, it received more light field howitzers, and was also able to replace all its remaining 1914–18 vintage machine guns with the MG 34. Although ammunition production was slashed, this was offset by the huge stockpiles the army had amassed by the summer of 1940.35 But the economic constraints upon the army could not fail to have an impact. Thus, for instance, though the Wehrmacht Office of Economics and Armaments aspired to fully equipping two hundred divisions by April 1941, the bulk of those divisions could not be equipped to anything like that degree. Indeed, General Thomas predicted that an eastern campaign lasting more than a month would exhaust the army’s reserves of weapons and equipment. And Army Group C, responsible for training units for the campaign, lacked enough fuel for the task.36 On 20 February, Army Group C also reported

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that all but four of the divisional formations it was training were short of manpower to the tune of one to two thousand men – a situation Halder blithely regarded as ‘on the whole quite satisfactory’.37 Indeed, only hours before the attack on the Soviet Union began, eighty divisions were reportedly still not ready for action.38 *** OKH planners were forced to acknowledge at least some of these constraints, particularly the limit to the number of medium Panzers, which compelled them to concentrate Panzer formations at particular points along the line. But this did not overcome the army’s mechanized shortfall, for German infantry divisions remained far more reliant upon horse-drawn transport for supply, and such mechanized transport as they did possess was often plundered from Germany’s conquered opponents. While such booty was not necessarily poor in quality, it could be immensely difficult to find spare parts and munitions for it.39 The infantry themselves, meanwhile, would be compelled to advance huge distances on foot. The Soviet Union’s vast size and still underdeveloped transport infrastructure made this a grim prospect, and also one that would prevent the army from advancing quickly enough. The force that invaded the Soviet Union would effectively be two armies, with two different levels of transportation – one at the technological cutting edge, the other reminiscent of the First World War. OKH planners did not discount these strictures, but they either failed to voice their doubts loudly enough, as was the case with Lieutenant General Friedrich Paulus, or they were largely ignored when they did, as was the case with Major General Erich Marcks.40 So large was the gap between the scale of the Wehrmacht’s ambitions and the logistical means at its disposal that one cannot fail to detect a destructive group-think at work. The generals had not fallen under Hitler’s spell unquestioningly. But the Führer’s aggrandized image, his material corruption of several generals, the rosy prognostications of German intelligence and, above all, the hubris now afflicting the senior officer corps combined to forge a mindset within the OKH that was predicated on the Wehrmacht’s ability to overcome any obstacle. The one senior planner whose calculations were discussed was General Wagner, the army’s chief quartermaster. In November 1940, Wagner sketched out the scale of the logistical mountain the Germans would face. He maintained that they would be able to advance up to 800 kilometres (500 miles) in three weeks while keeping two million men, 300,000 horses, and half a million motor vehicles supplied. After that, food and ammunition would run out.41 In the event, the size of the invasion force the Germans would assemble would surpass Wagner’s assumptions, and German economic output and the plunder amassed by German

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units during their advance would enable the invasion to continue beyond Wagner’s cut-off point. Yet this too could not close the gap entirely between the scale of the invasion’s ambition and the practical means of sustaining it. In any case, Wagner was ignored, for there was no room for questioning the institutional truth that now animated the OKH: that defeating the Soviet Union was well within the Wehrmacht’s capabilities. Hitler’s Führer Directive 21, which he issued on 18 December 1940, contained the blueprint for the invasion plan. The invasion was to be codenamed Operation Barbarossa, after the twelfth-century German king and Holy Roman emperor. Barbarossa was a plan of immense scale and ambition. It would be launched in May 1941, involve three army groups – North, Centre and South – and unfold in three phases. Firstly, the Soviet armies were to be encircled and destroyed before they could retreat further east. Then the Germans would advance to a line that was sufficiently easterly to prevent the Soviets from launching air attacks on German territory. Finally, the Germans would reach a line east of Moscow, from Archangel to the River Volga. From here, the Luftwaffe would bomb Soviet factories beyond the Urals. Two-thirds of German land forces would be withdrawn, the remaining third holding the frontier of Germany’s new eastern possessions.42 But Hitler was clear that the decisive phase would be the first one, during which, he asserted, ‘the bulk of the Russian army stationed in western Russia is to be destroyed in a series of daring operations spearheaded by armoured thrusts. The organized withdrawal of intact units into the vastness of interior Russia must be prevented.’43 He feared that, if the bulk of Red Army troops escaped into the interior, the Germans would at best need to spend months winkling out and destroying them. Above all, the Wehrmacht would need to defeat the Red Army and achieve its objectives before winter.44 General Wagner was now charged with ensuring the campaign’s supply. A single infantry division consumed about 170 tons of supplies per day; a Panzer division or motorized infantry division even more. During the first phase of the campaign the Germans would need to rely upon the Soviet Union’s debilitated road network. In the autumn of 1940, in order to help meet this logistical challenge, Field Marshal Keitel imposed strict controls on the army’s fuel consumption. Yet even then, by the spring of 1941, the army only had three months’ worth of fuel held in reserve. General Wagner also stripped infantry divisions’ motorized transport, such as it was, down to the bone. He pooled most of their motorized transport in a central reserve for each army group, which the latter was then to distribute across its formations. To compensate for this loss, the infantry divisions received around fifteen thousand Polish Panje horse-drawn wagons between them. In addition, Panzers were given trailers and extra fuel cans with which to carry more fuel and thus make themselves as self-sufficient as possible. Each army group was also allotted its own special

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centre for processing captured supplies taken from the land. But these arrangements were only intended to last for the first few weeks. After that, the distances involved would compel the army to rely upon the railways – even though the state of the Soviet Union’s railway network, and the amount of rolling stock the Germans would be able to seize, could not be predicted.45 The direct means of strategic victory, the OKH believed, was to harness the power of mechanized combined-arms doctrine to the full. The Polish and particularly French campaigns had showcased such doctrine to great effect. Now it was to be applied on an unprecedented scale in pursuit of an equally unprecedented strategic triumph. The army’s military manuals reflected the ever greater faith the Wehrmacht placed in it. For instance, the 1940 Richtlinien für Führung und Einsatz der Panzer-Division (‘Guidelines for Leadership and Deployment of the Panzer Division’) explicitly outlined how air power could be used to support Panzer operations.46 However, the need to concentrate the Panzers at particular points brought Hitler and the OKH into conflict over which strategic objectives the invasion plan should prioritize. Four Panzer groups were to be distributed across the three main army groups, and Hitler and the OKH agreed that two should be allocated to Army Group Centre for the initial breakthrough along the frontiers. Where they diverged was over what was to happen after that. Halder, with Brauchitsch following his lead, believed the key to success lay in concentrating as much armour as possible in Army Group Centre and using it to advance on Moscow. He thought that focusing on the Soviet Union’s political and administrative centre – not to mention Moscow’s status as a major transport hub – would compel the Red Army to defend it to the utmost and thereby enable the Germans to annihilate the Soviet forces. Hitler, however, wanted the Panzer groups redistributed between Army Group North and Army Group South as soon as the breakthrough on the frontiers was achieved. He believed the southern Soviet Union contained by far the greatest concentration of economically important targets – the breadbasket of the Ukraine, the vast industrial resources of the Donbass and the oil of the Caucasus. He was also certain that capturing Leningrad, named after the Soviet Union’s founder, would deal a body blow to Soviet morale.47 Halder, knowing that to oppose Hitler openly was pointless, decided his best course was to appear to accede to the Führer’s wishes, then to engineer operations surreptitiously once the invasion was under way so that the drive on Moscow would remain the priority.48 He went on to enjoin the staff chiefs of the three army groups simply to focus on their own major targets and ignore ‘objections from the stratosphere’.49 High command’s failure generally to agree the main objective would cause significant confusion during the campaign itself. But perhaps the most

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fundamental problem was that, however the Panzer groups were distributed, allocating no more than two of them to any one army group at a time meant that only that one army group at a time would be capable of achieving a colossal pincer movement. *** The circle of commanders who were to be informed of the operational plan was steadily widened: from the three army group commanders – field marshals von Leeb (North), von Bock (Centre) and von Rundstedt (South) on 31 January 1941; through army commanders, Panzer group leaders and their senior staff officers in mid-February; then down to corps and divisional commanders from April through to June. In late March, Hitler held two meetings with army group, army and Panzer group commanders in which he elaborated upon the plan for the invasion, why he considered it strategically and economically necessary, and the manner in which it was to be conducted. The latter was a key focus of the meeting of 30 March. Halder noted Hitler’s points in his diary: ‘Battle of two opposing worldviews. Devastating judgment of Bolshevism, equivalent to asocial criminality. Communism monstrous danger for the future. We have to move away from the standpoint of soldierly camaraderie. Communists are not comrades, before or after. This is a battle of annihilation. If we do not see it in those terms, then whilst we may beat the enemy, in 30 years we will be faced once more by the Communist foe. We do not wage war in order to preserve the enemy intact. Battle against Russia: annihilation of Bolshevist Commissars and of the Communist intelligentsia.’50 In a sign of how far Hitler’s stock had risen with the generals since the fall of France, there was no dissent of the sort that senior commanders had expressed prior to the attack in the west. That said, several high-level commanders were concerned about the operational plan for the invasion. The army group commanders were incredulous when Halder confessed that it was unclear whether the Red Army would indeed obligingly offer itself up for battle before the Dvina and Dnieper.51 The most sceptical senior commanders were the Panzer generals, who wanted clearer operational objectives and directions for their Panzer groups. Nor did they appreciate being burdened, as they saw it, by having to coordinate with much slower infantry divisions. Colonel General Hoth, allotted command of Panzer Group Three on the northern wing of Army Group Centre, preferred to go ‘fast and ruthlessly forwards!’52 Colonel General von Kleist, who commanded Army Group South’s Panzer Group One, feared that Red Army formations would wriggle out of the gaps that would inevitably appear between his Panzer group and the infantry formations of the Sixth Army coming up behind. Bock asked Hitler how he actually proposed to get the Soviet

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Union to surrender once the Red Army had been defeated, Hoth wondered how the war would ever be brought to an end, and Reichenau, commander of the Sixth Army, reportedly described the upcoming invasion as ‘the purest madness’.53 But the vast majority of generals failed to voice any doubts publicly, and none tried actively to persuade Hitler or the OKH to change the plan. This was probably partly because – though they would not have admitted it – the generals were now too in awe of Hitler to criticize him openly, and also partly because they themselves lacked better ideas for winning either the campaign or the war. This in itself reflects the strategic predicament in which Germany now found itself, a predicament to which invading the Soviet Union, however perilous a course of action it might be, seemed to provide the only possible solution. Among other things, the generals accepted Hitler’s argument that this was also to be a preventive war, necessary before the Red Army grew too powerful and began marching westwards a few years hence. Moreover, the generals broadly agreed not just with Hitler’s strategic assessment, but also with his ideological justification for the invasion. Both motives dovetailed in General Reinhardt’s declaration: ‘Stalin is friendly to us because he isn’t ready yet. As soon as he is armed, his Jewish masters will order him to begin a war against us, either with England or on England’s behalf. We can’t wait that long. . . . Therefore, fight against Bolshevism in Russia and hope for a quick victory!’54 When it came to the plausibility of the operational plan itself, the generals’ professional arrogance further enabled them to stifle their doubts. General Halder’s professional ego was immense, but field commanders too felt enormous self-confidence and superiority over the Red Army. For instance, Colonel General Guderian had written a series of lacerating reports on the Red Army based on his observations of it in partitioned Polish territory since 1939.55 Field Marshal von Kluge, commanding the Fourth Army, maintained: ‘if we deploy our forces correctly, we will certainly succeed, particularly against the stupefied psyche of the Russian.’56 Feeding such cocksure attitudes were memories not just of the German army’s recent triumphs, but also of its string of victories over the vast but backward armies of imperial Russia during the First World War. Anti-Slavism and, even more so, anti-Bolshevism remained pronounced within the senior officer corps. The Reichswehr’s ambivalent view of the Soviet Union during the 1920s had been forgotten since its accommodation with the Nazis, and since Stalin had turned the Soviet Union inwards.57 Hoth expressed his fear and revulsion at ‘the retreat by the Russians from European customs . . . and their sinking back into gruesome medieval methods, and finally Russia’s desire to expand’. He also believed the Stalinist state promoted Jewish Bolshevism like ‘an oil spill pouring over its neighbouring countries’.58 Further signifying how far they also subscribed to the invasion’s ideological tenets, generals were issuing ‘inspirational’ orders for their troops soon after

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they themselves had been informed of the invasion plan. For instance, Colonel General Hoepner, commander of Army Group North’s Panzer Group Four, declared on 2 May: ‘the war against the Soviet Union is an essential component of the German people’s struggle for existence. It is the old struggle of the Germans against the Slavs, the defence of European culture against the Muscovite-Asiatic flood, and the warding off of Judeo-Bolshevism.’59 General von Küchler, who commanded another Army Group North field formation, the Eighteenth Army, announced: ‘a deep chasm separates us ideologically and racially from Russia. Russia is from the very extent of land it occupies an Asiatic state. . . . The aim has to be to annihilate the European Russia, to dissolve the Russian European state.’60 Both generals had decried SS methods in earlier campaigns. Their statements of early 1941, then, signify just how far the army’s senior officer corps now subscribed to Hitler’s ideological vision. ‘The war against Russia,’ Hitler had proclaimed in 1940, ‘will be such that it cannot be conducted in a chivalrous fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, merciless, and unrelenting harshness.’61 A further sign of the generals’ agreement with the invasion’s ideological goals was how readily the OKH devised, and the field commanders endorsed, a stream of directives designed to put such ‘unprecedented, merciless, and unrelenting harshness’ into practice. The generals considered such directives justified for reasons not just of ideology, but also of ‘military necessity’. The Reich’s long-term plan was for the bulk of the subjugated Soviet Union to be divided into five Reich Commissariats. These would be under the charge of civilian rather than military administrators. Until the military campaign was over, however, huge swathes of the occupied Soviet Union would be under direct army control. The OKH devised four different types of military occupation jurisdiction. A traveller journeying from east to west would pass through the immediate combat zone, the adjacent operational area, one of the rear areas of the individual field armies and then finally one of the three large army group rear areas.62 Within the army rear areas and army group rear areas, which together would comprise by far the largest portion of army-administered territory in the occupied Soviet Union, administration would be the direct responsibility of a series of Feldkommandanturen (field headquarters) and more numerous Ortskommandanturen (local headquarters). With the exception of Estonians, however, none of the ethnic groups under the army’s administration was to be accorded favoured status within the Nazi racial hierarchy. But some occupied higher places than others. Lowest on the list were the Soviet Jews; then came Great Russians, followed by Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Latvians and Lithuanians. The demands of the military campaign imposed serious limits on the manpower the army was prepared to provide for security. It allocated nine

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security divisions and a larger number of Wachbataillone (static guard battalions) to the task. All these units lacked manpower of the quality and quantity needed to secure such vast territory on their own. Among other things, they would need support in policing tasks. They would receive assistance from the GFP, and from the Wehrmacht’s regular military police, the Feldgendarmerie, a unit of which was allocated to each individual field army. More ominously, OKH planners also concluded that the army’s occupation troops would need to rely upon the SS and Police. Thus did hatred of Bolshevism and the needs of security now outweigh concern about SS methods. An agreement was reached between General Wagner and Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD, on 26 March. This set out arrangements for combating ‘emigrants, saboteurs and terrorists’ in the occupied territories, and gave the SS full powers to deal with these threats within the army’s jurisdiction. SS units would have a free hand, though would also be beholden to the army for practical matters, such as their supply and accommodation.63 The agreement also directed that an SS and Police representative would be assigned to each field army, and would be required to ‘inform the Army commander in good time of the instructions which he has received from the Chief of the Security Police and SD.’ Field army commanders were also empowered to issue such representatives with directives intended to prevent SS and Police actions that might disrupt military operations. SS and Police representatives were also required to ‘maintain continuous and co-operation with the Ic . . . The Ic has the responsibility of coordinating the tasks of the special commandos with those of military intelligence and the Secret Field Police and with operational requirements.’64 These passages in particular demonstrate that army commands in the east would be kept thoroughly informed of SS and Police actions, but also that they had some leverage to restrain such actions – leverage that, in the event, very few of them would choose to exercise. Heydrich also drew up plans to incite pogroms in the more anti-Semitic Soviet regions, particularly the Baltic States, though it is unlikely that the OKH knew about this.65 Field Marshal von Brauchitsch approved the Heydrich-Wagner agreement a month after it was made. By early May, General Halder was noting in his diary that the army leadership was thoroughly on board in matters of cooperation with the SS. Now the details of that cooperation were fleshed out. In the army group rear areas, the army would be aided by units from one of four Einsatzgruppen, from A in the Baltic regions down to D in the Ukraine, including the Crimea. Each Einsatzgruppe comprised approximately 1,500 personnel, drawn primarily from the SD, Gestapo and Criminal Police. The subordinate units of each Einsatzgruppe were divided into Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos. The former would operate in the army group rear areas, the latter in the rear areas of the individual field armies.66

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On 21 May, Himmler earmarked further SS and Police units for service in the east: these included two infantry brigades and two cavalry regiments of the Waffen-SS, and units of the Order Police. Initially, these forces were to be subordinated to the rear areas of each army group, but they soon came under direct command of one of three senior SS and Police leaders (Höhere SS- und Polizeiführer, or HSSPF). The HSSPFs had first been activated on the outbreak of war. They were nominated personally by Himmler and were answerable directly to him. They were to command SS and Police units within a particular jurisdiction of the Reich or occupied Europe, and to coordinate with civilian and military authorities. One HSSPF was now assigned to the territory of each army group while remaining directly answerable to Himmler. Meanwhile, each of a further nine motorized Order Police battalions was committed to one of the army’s rear area security divisions.67 Together, these arrangements gave the SS even more power to widen its security remit. Einsatzgruppe and HSSPF units would come to exploit their free hand to the utmost. Within weeks of the invasion, they would be extending the definition of ‘emigrants, saboteurs and terrorists’ to include all Jews in German-occupied Soviet territory. *** By the terms of the Nazi grand design for the occupied Soviet Union, the civilian population would be not only terrorized, but also starved. The food production of the occupied Soviet Union, particularly its grain, was earmarked for the supply of a German-led Europe. Hitler considered it politically unacceptable to require the homeland to satisfy the foodstuff needs of the troops going into the Soviet Union. Moreover, General Wagner maintained that supplying troops with food from the homeland was practically as well as politically impossible, because the transport system in the captured territories would already be pushed to its limits conveying the German forces. He also feared that the summer heat of the Soviet Union would spoil meat deliveries coming from the rear.68 Rather than rely on domestic food stocks, then, the German troops invading the Soviet Union would need to live off the land, which was a euphemism for plundering the occupied population. Here, the army was to cooperate with units under Wirtschaftsstab Ost (Economic Staff East). Wirtschaftsstab Ost mixed military and civilian personnel, and was under the overall charge of Göring’s Office of the Four-Year Plan. Below it were various offices in the field. In the army rear areas, Armeewirtschaftsführer (army economic leaders) would be responsible for economic exploitation; in the larger army group rear areas, it was to be the task of the Wirtschaftsinspektionen (economic inspectorates) and their subordinate Wirtschaftskommandos (economic task forces).

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Wirtschaftsstab Ost and its subordinate offices were supposedly responsible not just for despoiling the country, but also for leaving the occupied population enough to survive on. But Herbert Backe, number two in the Reich Ministry for Food and Agriculture, declared that the great majority of the Soviet population must contemplate a reduced food supply. The German troops would be top priority, then further allocation would go to the Reich’s civilian population. The occupied Soviet population could keep the leftovers, but priority would go to regions whose populations were deemed more racially worthy, or whose territory was producing more of the agricultural yields Germany needed. This meant, for instance, that Balts and Ukrainians would benefit at the expense of Great Russians, and even more so of Jews. Those for whom there was little or nothing remaining would have to flee eastwards or starve to death. General Thomas regarded the prospect of millions of Soviet civilians starving to death as regrettable, but far less important than ensuring that the troops were supplied.69 A meeting on 2 May between him and the state secretaries responsible for the economic planning of Barbarossa concluded: ‘1. The war can only continue to be waged if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia during the third year of the war. 2. As a result, if what is necessary for us is extracted from the land, tens of millions of people will doubtlessly starve to death.’70 A follow-up directive of three weeks later extended this policy to the Soviet prisoners of war the Wehrmacht could expect to take. POWs were considered a particularly straightforward group from whom to withhold food, for unlike civilians nominally at liberty, they would be unable to respond to the prospect of starvation by resisting. The same directive also declared that between twenty and thirty million Soviet civilians would starve as a result of the Germans’ hunger policy.71 *** In further preparation for the campaign ahead, the OKH and OKW sought to indoctrinate the troops ever more extensively. ‘The Wehrmacht,’ declared the OKH in October 1940, ‘must apply itself more intensively to the task of inculcating the troops with a national-political worldview.’72 It introduced new lectures for the troops on basic Nazi principles, reading material including books and OKH and OKW publications, films and radio broadcasts, and the systematic ordering of the soldiers’ leisure time.73 But the centrepiece of efforts to embed the army’s own rank-and-file troops into the machinery of the ideological war in the east were the three general directives that the OKH issued – the Barbarossa Decree on 13 May, the Guidelines for the Conduct of the Troops on 19 May and the Commissar Order on 6 June.

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The most general of the three was the Guidelines. These were designed to inculcate the troops with a pitiless mentality: ‘Bolshevism is the mortal enemy of the National Socialist German people. . . . It is against this subversive worldview and its carriers that Germany is fighting. This battle demands ruthless and energetic measures against Bolshevik agitators, irregulars, saboteurs and Jews, and the total eradication of any active or passive resistance.’74 The Guidelines fused the Nazi principle of ‘charismatic leadership’ with the German army’s doctrine of Auftragstaktik. The key to personal advancement, this principle held, was being seen to implement the Führer’s will more ‘radically’ than one’s rivals, and showing initiative and resourcefulness in the process. In this respect, charismatic leadership fitted well with the German military’s own long-standing stress on flexible, independent-minded and aggressive action. The Wehrmacht Propaganda Department wedded the Guidelines to a broader appeal for the soldier to show strength of character, focus upon Germany’s final victory, and resist the influence of such unsoldierly types as ‘Uncle Weak-kneed’ or ‘Cousin Cautious’.75 The Barbarossa Decree was designed partly to shape the army’s pacification and security operations in the occupied areas. It ordered that hostages be taken, and shot in the event of attacks by partisans or saboteurs. Here, the Germans recognized that the terrain of the European Soviet Union, forested and swampy as much of it was, made ideal territory for mobile resistance groups, operating across country to sabotage the occupier’s communication and supply lines, attack his troops with hit-and-run strikes, and disrupt his efforts to administer and exploit the territory. While shooting hostages was not illegal under international law, there were two respects in which German troops in the Soviet Union would diverge from internationally recognized practice even more than they had in Poland. The first was the grossly disproportionate numbers of hostages they would often kill. The second was that the decree made no proper provision for putting irregulars on trial. Instead, the officer on the spot could act as judge and jury before ordering execution.76 The decree also gave any soldier a free hand by stipulating that ‘acts committed by Wehrmacht personnel or followers against enemy civilians, even if the act is a military crime or offence, may go unpunished’.77 The various field armies and army groups that comprised the German army of the east sought to reinforce the impact of the decree by demonizing the enemy’s fighting methods. A leaflet distributed to the Seventeenth Army, assigned to Army Group South, depicted the Soviet way of war as ‘treacherous and sadistic’.78 The German troops, the leaflet claimed, could expect the following from their enemy: attacks from behind, playing dead or raising their hands before suddenly opening fire again, outrages against prisoners, poison gas, poisoning of food and water supplies, and attacks from paratroops and

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saboteurs in civilian gear behind the front. Army Group Centre instructed its troops to ‘be hard and merciless when you experience such fighting methods – regardless of whether you are facing soldiers or civilians’.79 Some commanders were sceptical about the decree. Bock, for instance, asserted that it ‘gives practically every soldier the right to shoot at any Russian whom he considers an irregular, or behaves in such a way, from the front or from behind’.80 As in Poland, most commanders who did express concern stressed that the decree might endanger discipline rather than offend morality. They preferred to limit the rank or type of officer who could order collective reprisals. For instance, General Guderian ordered that cases be tried not by an officer but by a mobile military court.81 But measures such as this were intended to water down the decree, not reject it in principle. Lieutenant General Otto Stapf, commander of the 111th Infantry Division, seems to have been the only commander at divisional level or above who actually countermanded it. He ordered a proper procedure for identifying and executing the genuine culprits of an attack, decreeing that collective reprisals against villages should only take place if it could be proven that their civilian inhabitants had fired upon German troops.82 Guderian himself, his concerns notwithstanding, was one of at least several commanders who believed the decree could powerfully deter resistance. Field Marshal von Reichenau gave characteristically loud voice to this view, declaring: ‘should punishment measures prove necessary, then male inhabitants are to be arrested and shot, and left publicly hanging on trees. Word will get around.’83 Over the following weeks, the decree was passed down through the chain of command, with NCOs and rank-and-file soldiers receiving it just a few hours before the attack. It is not clear whether the decree was circulated wholesale, but it was certainly circulated widely.84 Finally, the Commissar Order directed that army units segregate Red Army commissars from other prisoners, and promptly execute them: ‘These commissars are not to be recognized as soldiers; the protection due to prisoners of war under international law does not apply to them. Once they have been separated out, they are to be finished off.’85 Nazi propaganda depicted the overwhelming majority of commissars as ‘Jew-Bolsheviks’. The order identified commissars as the most nefarious influence that would incite Red Army soldiers to resist bitterly, and as ‘originators of the barbaric, Asiatic fighting methods’ that the Red Army allegedly practised.86 To single out an entire group in this way for execution, not because of anything it had specifically done but because of its status, was the clearest breach of international law of which the criminal orders were guilty. The Commissar Order reached army groups, armies, and Panzer groups on 8 June, corps and divisions between the 12th and 19th, and regiments and battalions between the 14th and 21st. NCOs and rank-and-file soldiers received

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it the day before the invasion. Exactly how far the order was distributed is impossible to establish, but at the very least it reached 58 per cent, perhaps as much as 80 per cent, of all commands at divisional level and above. Because some written communications may have been filtered out, the actual number may have been higher.87 Many commanders further stressed the importance they placed on the Commissar Order by accompanying its announcement with a further reinforcing order of their own. For instance, Küchler told his divisional commanders that ‘the political commissars and GPU people are criminals. These are the people who tyrannize the population. . . . They are to be put on the spot before a field court and sentenced on the basis of the testimony of the inhabitants. . . . This will save us German blood and we will advance faster.’ At least Küchler contemplated some kind of judicial process; Hoepner’s order to Panzer Group Four merely declared: ‘there is to be no sparing the upholders of the current Russian-Bolshevik system’.88 That many commanders felt justified in prosecuting the Commissar Order was something they continued to stress even during their postwar trials.89 Like the Barbarossa Decree, the damage the Commissar Order might wreak upon soldierly discipline worried some commanders. ‘The soldiers are not hangman’s assistants!’ declared Lieutenant General Walter Keiner, the commander of the Ninth Army’s 62nd Infantry Division.90 But officers such as Keiner did not reject the Commissar Order in principle; they simply sought to reduce the troops’ exposure to it. Some units, the 62nd Infantry Division included, set a minimum limit on the rank of the officers permitted to order a commissar’s execution.91 Others would hand over commissars to high-level commands for interrogation and, ultimately, to the SS and Police, or to the GFP or Feldgendarmerie. For the commissars, of course, the end result was usually the same. Only occasionally, if they suitably ‘repented’ and, more to the point, had particularly useful information, would they be spared execution.92 Contrary to the postwar protestations of Guderian, Manstein and other former generals that the Commissar Order was rarely passed on within the army, only one written record exists of its not having been passed on; as with the Barbarossa Decree, it was the 111th Infantry Division’s General Stapf who was the honourable exception.93 By the same token, again as with the Barbarossa Decree, other units exploited their freedom of action to radicalize the order. For instance, the Sixteenth Army chose to widen the pool of victims to include not just commissars, but also lower-level Communist officials and auxiliaries.94 A handful of more sagacious commanders feared what directives like the Barbarossa Decree and the Commissar Order might do, not just to their own men, but also to the enemy’s. For instance, the intelligence officer of the 78th Infantry Division expressed the concern that ‘carrying out these orders would significantly strengthen Russian resistance, once the enemy knew about these

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measures. . . . The commissars would apply themselves to their tasks with much more energy.’95 It was a prescient comment, but one that neither Hitler, nor the vast majority of commanders, were willing to heed yet. *** In the spring of 1941, planning for Barbarossa was disrupted by developments in southeast Europe. In 1940, Mussolini had invaded Greece from Italianoccupied Albania, but the Greek army fought the Italians to a humiliating standstill. The standoff created the danger that Britain might send military aid to Greece. Thus might the British forge a new front in the rear of Barbarossa’s southern flank, and threaten Germany’s oil supply from Romania. Towards the end of 1940, then, Hitler resolved to conquer Greece before Barbarossa commenced. Then, events in Yugoslavia disrupted his plans further. In March 1941, a coup in Belgrade overthrew the pro-German Yugoslav government that had been about to enrol the country into the Tripartite Pact with Germany, Italy, and Japan. The new government pledged continuing good relations with Germany, but Hitler, blistering with rage at what he considered the Yugoslavs’ betrayal, vowed to smash the country in a lightning campaign. Fortifying his resolve were both the need to secure Germany’s southeastern flank fully, and concern for German prestige, as well as the anti-Serb bigotry he shared with many Austrian-born Wehrmacht commanders. This sentiment had been born of decades of antagonism between Serbs and Austrians, both before and during the First World War. Thus, on 6 April 1941, Axis forces, with the German Second and Twelfth armies at their head, prepared to invade Greece and Yugoslavia. The Second Army was to attack Yugoslavia from southern Austria and Hungary, with the Twelfth sending some units into Yugoslavia from Bulgaria while also attacking Greece. Although the operational plan was hastily improvised by the OKH, the attack itself would see the Germans themselves display their usual operational and tactical flair in swift, mobile, combined arms-based warfare. The Axis forces invading Yugoslavia were aided immensely by the fact that the Yugoslav army, ill-equipped and riven by ethnic division, was a shadow of the plucky Serbian army of 1914. Belgrade was bombarded by the Luftwaffe, in accordance with Hitler’s desire not just to defeat Yugoslavia militarily, but also to punish it for its temerity. Croat separatists broke away to declare a separate state, and Yugoslavia itself surrendered on 18 April. Lance Corporal G. wrote: ‘11th Panzer Division has proved itself splendidly. Seven enemy divisions destroyed in barely five days, immeasurable war material captured, thirty thousand prisoners taken, Belgrade compelled to capitulate. Own losses very light.’96 Second Lieutenant Helmut D. of the 4th Mountain Division, also under the

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Twelfth Army, declared: ‘our efforts were greater than in France, 600 kilometres [375 miles] over mountains. Through clever manoeuvre, two Serbian divisions were encircled and taken prisoner. Our own losses consisted of just one dead.’97 ‘From the German point of view,’ wrote Friedrich von Mellenthin, now intelligence officer with the Second Army, ‘the conquest of Yugoslavia was virtually a military parade.’98 If ever there was a campaign when the German army ‘romped’ to victory, Yugoslavia was it. When it came to Greece, the Germans first attacked their opponents’ main line of defence, the Metaxas Line. The Greeks, following their pugnacious performance against the Italians, were not to be underestimated; Colonel Hermann Balck, then commander of the 3rd Panzer Regiment, later described the Greek troops as ‘the toughest of all our adversaries so far’.99 Not to be underestimated either were the challenges that the mountainous terrain along the Greek-Bulgarian frontier, and in Greek Macedonia, presented to the Germans’ mechanized divisions. The Greeks also had support from three British (including British Commonwealth) infantry divisions, each of which equalled their German counterparts for equipment and firepower, and a British armoured brigade. Even so, Corporal Joseph B. of the 2nd Panzer Division was confident his formation would overcome the British: ‘They don’t shoot badly. You notice you have an opponent before you. Probably Tommies. But they really just want to re-embark again. We took a few prisoners. Proud lads. But we’ll soon cut them down to size.’100 The British were not helped by the pressure they were now under from the Axis in North Africa, which compelled them to commit only eighty aircraft to the Greek theatre. The Greek army, like the Yugoslav army, lacked anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns, and had also been weakened by its battles against the Italians.101 But Greece’s poor road system, its challenging terrain, and the Germans’ need for reinforcements all frustrated their overland pursuit of the British. Moreover, poor weather disrupted German air attacks. The Luftwaffe harried the British by day, but its attacks were blunted by fuel shortages, effective British camouflage and a skilfully dispersed British marching order that enabled at least some British units to move at night. Fierce resistance, particularly from the Australians and New Zealanders at Olympus and Thermopylae, delayed the Germans’ pursuit on the ground. When the Greeks surrendered on 23 April, the British were able to withdraw much of their sixty thousand-plus force, transferring some personnel to defend the island of Crete. While the latter remained in Allied hands, it could threaten Axis control of the eastern Mediterranean and Axis supply through the Corinth Canal. German army troops did not lead the assault on the island; that distinction went to the men of the Luftwaffe’s 7th Fallschirmjäger (Parachute) Division – though the startling losses the paratroopers suffered deterred Hitler from using airborne troops against other major targets in the future.

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Crete’s fall concluded the Balkan campaign. Emphatic as the German victory had been, the delay the campaign had caused did not help preparations for Operation Barbarossa. The Balkan campaign was also significant for another reason. The Heydrich-Wagner agreement of 26 March 1941 had authorized the SS to take all action necessary against emigrants, saboteurs and terrorists in the Soviet territories occupied by the army. An equivalent directive for the Balkan campaign, issued by General Halder on 2 April, actually widened the target groups to include Jews and Communists. This was not just a harbinger of what would follow in the Soviet Union; it also demonstrates how uninhibited the army leadership was becoming about the kind of campaign Barbarossa would be.102 The Balkan campaign also offered a glimpse of how soldiers might conduct themselves when faced with civilian resistance in the Soviet Union. On 21 April, a German officer was killed in the Serb village of Donji Donbric. Colonel General von Weichs, commander of the Second Army, proclaimed that, seeing as Serb men should be assumed guilty unless proven otherwise, all men in the vicinity capable of bearing arms should be seized and shot unless they could immediately and indisputably demonstrate their innocence. He also directed that, as an example to others, ‘all those shot are to be hanged, their corpses are to be left hanging’.103 *** Invading the Soviet Union in 1941 seemed to offer a chance, however precarious, of breaking the Reich’s strategic impasse with a spectacular land-based campaign of the kind at which the German army could excel. The army did not enjoy overwhelming superiority over its opponent, and its logistical grasp fell short of what the campaign demanded. But the practical misgivings numerous senior commanders held were outweighed by the professional arrogance felt by the bulk of the senior officer corps, their hubris swelling following the campaigns in the west and in the southeast, the welter of upbeat intelligence on the state of the Red Army, and commanders’ broad agreement with the invasion’s strategic, economic, and ideological goals. Further, the army leadership did not just agree when Hitler insisted that the practical challenges of campaigning in the Soviet Union, and the ‘bestial’ nature of the enemy the Germans faced, necessitated exceptionally harsh conduct. It implemented Hitler’s wishes diligently, particularly in the criminal orders it issued to the troops, and the great majority of senior field commanders endorsed its efforts. The motivation shared by the army leadership and by senior field commanders combined the ideological with the pragmatic, and was all the harsher for it. It included contempt for eastern peoples, deep aversion to Bolshevism, and the imperative of plundering the Soviet Union of its

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foodstuffs. It also included the need for SS manpower in pacifying the rear, in a campaign that the army’s own ruthless approach to irregular resistance would also help to drive. The potential for brutality in the corpus of measures that resulted was something a number of commanders would try to water down, but hardly any would try to challenge fundamentally. Thus was the German army committed to a campaign that would transform the scale, nature and direction of the war it was fighting.

CHAPTER EIGHT

BARBAROSSA UNLEASHED, 1941

G  

erman soldiers! you are now entering into a hard struggle, heavy with responsibility. For the fate of Europe, the future of the German Reich, the existence of our nation, are now in your hands alone.’1 Thus did Hitler address the troops when the Germans unleashed Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941. The German invasion of the Soviet Union propelled the Second World War into a six-month period that would eventually prove to be its most important turning point. The first stage, from late June to mid-August 1941, saw the Wehrmacht achieve astonishing operational triumphs against the Red Army. But, for the first time, it had taken on too much to enable it to achieve the early, decisive strategic triumph that was needed. Moreover, indoctrination, criminal orders, and extreme conditions in the field all combined to brutalize the conduct of the German army’s campaign.2 ‘

*** The opening hours of the German attack seemed to banish any apprehension the Germans might have felt hitherto. ‘The air roars,’ recounts the postwar history of the 17th Panzer Division’s 40th Rifle Regiment. ‘Commands can barely be understood. Our infantry guns fire 60 rounds per gun in ten minutes. Flak guns finish off the bunkers along the enemy bank. Soon, fires on the other side of the [River] Bug can be seen. At 03:40 hours, the bombs from the Stukas strike the enemy positions. From 04:15 hours, the transport (of troops and weapons) across the river begins.’3 When the Germans attacked, their aerial and artillery bombardment devastated the Soviet frontier armies’ uneven communication system. The mayhem that resulted was immediate: for instance, the war diary of the 129th Infantry Division, fighting with Panzer Group Three in Army Group Centre, recorded: ‘the prisoners give the impression of having been totally surprised by the attack. Some say they had neither weapons nor

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munitions to hand, others admit they were surprised while asleep (they appear to some extent without boots or socks)’.4 The Luftwaffe devastated Soviet air forces in the forward areas: for instance, the Baltic Military District lost more than nine hundred of its 1,080 aircraft in the campaign’s first three days. Inexperienced Soviet pilots who did get into the air could not catch the Luftwaffe’s bombers.5 Second Lieutenant Helmut D. of the 258th Infantry Division, a fourth-wave formation serving under Army Group Centre around Brest and Bialystok during the campaign’s opening days, wrote: ‘our march columns continue forward without interruption. . . . They often make wonderful targets for Russian planes. But the Russian air force is so weakened that it is nowhere to be seen.’6 Panzer Group Three reported: The teamwork with Eighth Air Corps was particularly close and lively. . . . Control of the air was almost totally achieved on the first day of the attack. . . . Higher-level [Russian] leadership did not make an appearance at all during the first days. Lower leadership was inert, mechanical, and lacked resolve in adapting to the situation as it developed. Orders were found which, despite knowing about German progress in the morning, demanded that a defensive line be occupied in the evening which we had already reached in the afternoon. . . . Their methodical training was no match for the huge impact of the surprise.7

The bedlam that engulfed much of the Soviet front line that day was largely the fault of Stalin and the Red Army leadership. It is commonly believed that the German attack caught Stalin completely by surprise. Stalin was not nearly that stupid, but he and the Red Army leadership did make several eventually calamitous misjudgments during the months before the invasion. Stalin believed Hitler would turn on the Soviet Union eventually, but did not think him mad enough to try it as early as 1941, with Britain still in the war. Stalin scorned British efforts to warn him otherwise, and accepted official assurances by Field Marshal von Brauchitsch in July 1940 that rumours of German–Soviet tensions were ‘first and foremost outpourings of English propaganda’.8 He was equally scathing about reports from his own intelligence services. Although Stalin accepted that a German attack was likely at some stage, he and the Red Army leadership badly misjudged the requirements of effective defence. The Red Army’s mobilization plan of October 1940 envisaged distributing 271 divisions in three successive defensive belts or operational echelons.9 Stalin could have made much more of the advantage of space that the Soviet Union possessed; however, instead of amassing still more reserves and contemplating strategic withdrawals, he wanted the Red Army to defend the entire Soviet frontier. In the fear-filled atmosphere of Stalin’s Soviet Union it would

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have been a brave soul indeed who highlighted the folly of these arrangements. The quality of the forward formations was weak; two-thirds of rank-and-file Soviet troops in the border military districts were in their first year of service, half of them having been drafted only that spring.10 The disastrous results of the Red Army’s January 1941 war games made Stalin desperate to stave off war with Germany for as long as possible.11 By April 1941, relations between the Soviet Union and Germany were visibly deteriorating, and Soviet intelligence was detecting a build-up in German offensive preparations that Stalin could not ignore. The latter hoped that dissuading Hitler with active diplomacy would at least buy another year in which to complete the Soviet Union’s defensive preparations. At the same time, he sought a partial mobilization of the Soviet forces – not enough to antagonize Hitler further, but enough, it was hoped, to ensure the Soviet Union would be sufficiently well defended should war come. With Stalin facing two ways simultaneously, Soviet military planning grew increasingly confused. On 22 June, the consequences were made clear.12 Stalin misjudged not only the timing of any German attack, but also its direction. The main question facing Soviet defensive planners was whether the main German attack would come north or south of the Pripjet Marshes. Stalin and the Red Army leadership concentrated their greatest defensive force on the Ukraine. Stalin was fixed on the Ukraine because he feared for its economic resources should the Germans attack, while the Red Army leadership was fixed on it because it believed that attack was the best form of defence, and that the Ukraine provided the best jumping-off point from which to drive into Axis territory in the event of war.13 In the immediate run-up to Barbarossa, Stalin wilfully ignored several signs that an attack was imminent. The Germans craftily fed his delusions, with the OKW announcing that the German build-up in the east was a deception aimed at British intelligence. The Axis invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece also provided a good cover story. On 16 June, the German Embassy in Moscow evacuated all non-essential personnel. While this at least might have rung Stalin’s alarm bell, the OKW and the German Foreign Ministry provided a cover story here also, by claiming that the Germans were about to demand changes in Soviet policy or economic aid. Many Soviet commanders thus surmised that the Germans would precede any attack with an ultimatum. On 21 June, Stalin finally ordered his commanders to prepare for attack, but the poor Soviet communications system delayed or garbled the message. By the time the Germans attacked the following day, only a handful of Soviet commands were ready to act on Stalin’s order.14 The Germans overwhelmed the Red Army’s forward fronts before its still poorly trained, prepared and equipped mechanized forces could counterattack

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effectively. Within three weeks, they had shattered its first two main lines of defence.15 Of the three German army groups, it was Bock’s Army Group Centre that made the most spectacular progress; facing it was General D. G. Pavlov’s Western Army Group. Army Group Centre had two infantry armies, two Panzer groups and a major geographical advantage – the Soviet fronts to the north and south were protected on their flanks by the sea, but Pavlov’s was not. Within a week, Army Group Centre had encircled thirty Red Army divisions. The infantry encircled a Red Army force in and around Bialystok – an important transport hub – while the Panzer groups raced eastwards to complete another, bigger encirclement in and around the Belarusian capital of Minsk. ‘Guderian,’ wrote Helmut D., ‘whose Panzer group has broken through somewhat further south, has apparently said the Devil can fricassee him if he isn’t in Moscow in eight days’ time.’16 Hoth’s Panzer Group did equally well. ‘I really don’t think this is going to last much longer,’ mused Corporal Franz F., with the 12th Panzer Division, on 3 July, ‘because we are thrusting ahead something wild.’17 Resistance in the Minsk pocket ended on 8 July with the capture of 324,000 prisoners, the first in a series of enormous ‘bags’ the Germans would achieve over the following four months.18 Guderian, ever intent on pressing forward, had wanted to push on as far as Smolensk so as to achieve an even bigger double encirclement, but Hitler had insisted on closing the ring and destroying the Minsk pocket conclusively first.19 The flanking army groups found the going harder. Field Marshal von Leeb’s Army Group North comprised two infantry armies and General Hoepner’s Panzer Group Four. It benefited from a jumping-off point in eastern Prussia, that had good military bases and an efficient transport system. Most of the population of the Baltic States was relieved to be free of Soviet occupation. A day into the invasion, Private Waldo P. of the first-wave 5th Infantry Division described the soldiers’ reception: ‘we were greeted enthusiastically in the Lithuanian villages we passed through. Bunches of flowers and greenery were handed out to us, also milk and water.’20 Army Group North’s narrow front also enabled its forces to avoid becoming overstretched, at least initially. Yet Army Group North’s progress was less spectacular than Army Group Centre’s. Its Red Army opponents benefited from the narrow front as much as Army Group North did, and the swampy, forested terrain was ideal for defence against armour. And even though Army Group North’s infantry force could negotiate such terrain more easily, it was not large enough to encircle Red Army forces in any great size. Army Group North did take 75,000 prisoners, but most of the Red Army troops facing it were able to withdraw. The Soviets then set up a defensive line along the River Luga.21 Now, with Army Group North having to fan out as it advanced further eastwards, Leeb had to make

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decisions about which objective to concentrate on the most. He wanted to clear the Baltics completely, but Hoepner wanted to drive straight for Leningrad. Leeb eventually fudged the issue by committing his Panzers to both objectives simultaneously. In the event, Leningrad would not fall, and the Germans would feel compelled to subject it to a harrowing, epic siege. Army Group North’s failure to achieve decisive success was an early, ominous sign that Operation Barbarossa was not running according to plan. Army Group South’s advance initially appeared as unstoppable as Army Group Centre’s. ‘No bunker, no fortification can withstand our attack,’ wrote Lance Corporal G. of the 11th Panzer Division, under General von Kleist’s Panzer Group One, in his diary entry of 23 June.22 Second Lieutenant Gerd R. of the 25th Infantry Division described ‘shot-up tanks all over the place on the roads. One day we counted more than a hundred! Destruction everywhere. There are whole villages and towns that you can erase from the map. . . . Just smoking ruins.’23 Field Marshal von Rundstedt’s army group also comprised three infantry armies. Here as in the Baltics, the population often greeted the Germans as liberators – a legacy of the catastrophic effect Stalin’s collectivization policies had had upon rural life in the Ukraine. ‘The population was to some extent quite affecting,’ wrote Second Lieutenant Helmut D. of the 4th Mountain Division, ‘and greeted us as liberators from the Bolshevik yoke. We were showered with garlands and Heil Hitlers.’24 But Army Group South was advancing on a front more than twice as wide as Army Group Centre’s, and with fewer Panzers. Its advance encountered unusually heavy rain in July and, more importantly, the downside of the weakly held front facing Army Group Centre. For General M. P. Kirponos’s Southwestern Army Group was considerably stronger than Pavlov’s Western Army Group. It also benefited from a southern flank guarded by the Black Sea. Two days into the campaign, Rundstedt already recognized the difficulty: ‘it’s not going to go as quickly as we hoped, or as we were used to before’.25 Army Group South did encircle and capture 103,000 Soviet troops around Uman in early August, but the total number captured in the twin pockets at Minsk and Bialystok dwarfed this figure.26 It was also a hard-fought battle that lasted three weeks. ‘Today was the hardest and worst so far,’ recounted Lance Corporal G.’s diary entry of 22 July. ‘With our attack on Uman . . . Major Volz, Lieutenant Höroldt and Sonntag, our radio operator, were all killed by a direct hit from an anti-tank gun. Lieutenant Richter, Corporal Mütze and Lance Corporal Täntzer were badly wounded. Deiseroth, the commander’s driver, was the only survivor. . . . A sorry picture!’27 Army Group South’s tribulations similarly signified that Operation Barbarossa had taken on more than it could cope with. For now, General Halder was far less concerned with sluggish progress on the flanks than with the central drive on Moscow. Yet even Army Group Centre

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could not claim unqualified success. For a start, sealing the Minsk and Bialystok pockets had exacted a heavy toll upon its two Panzer groups; even then, they had been unable to prevent considerable numbers of Red Army troops from slipping through to the east. The Panzer groups had faced several Soviet armoured counterattacks while they sealed the pocket, for though the Red Army executed its armoured counterattacks ineptly during 1941, it was at least able to execute a lot of them. The Panzers were not used to defensive warfare, and German infantry lacked effective anti-tank protection against Soviet armour. Sheer persistence, then, enabled Soviet armoured attacks to whittle down the Germans’ armoured strength.28 General of Panzer Troops Joachim Lemelsen, commander of XLVI Panzer Corps, described such an attack on 10 July: ‘the 17th Panzer Division, which is about 50 kilometres [30 miles] away from us, was very heavily attacked the day before yesterday at Senno by at least one Russian armoured division. . . . The Russian was attacking from the north and south in massive waves with countless tanks.’29 Lieutenant Erich Bunke of the 31st Infantry Division commanded an antitank infantry platoon that, in late June, encountered the T-34 for the first time: ‘a monster like we had never seen before. It fired machine guns from the turret and from the bow side, and shot at us with a big long-barrelled gun. We shot back with eight Pak guns and watched as our shells . . . struck against the armour plating and bounced off. One shot after another bounced off and whirled through the air. A ghastly sight.’30 The T-34 was more heavily armed and armoured than any Panzer; among other things, its cutting-edge ‘curvaceous’ armour enabled it to absorb hits more easily. The Mark IV was the only Panzer model that came close to rivalling it for armour and armament, and the T-34 still outdid the Mark IV for speed. Fortunately for the Germans, they were now at least able to analyse the T-34 close up. Meanwhile, the Red Army still possessed too few for them to have a decisive effect, and had yet to learn how to concentrate them effectively. T-34s often lacked sufficient fuel and ammunition and their crews were poorly trained. On the other hand, the fact that they existed and could already do considerable damage was yet another factor whereby Operation Barbarossa was already proving more gruelling than the Germans had expected.31 The execrable state of the roads wore the Panzers down further. For instance, only a week into the invasion the 7th Panzer Division had lost half its Mark IIs and IIIs, and three-quarters of its Mark IVs.32 Indeed, the very speed of Army Group Centre’s advance created problems. Wachtmeister Josef L. of the 129th Infantry Division gained an inkling as early as 24 June of the problems that awaited foot-slogging infantry trying to keep up with the Panzers: ‘The Russian has dissolved in fear before our motorized forces. The front is 80 kilometres [50 miles] ahead of us. It is simply impossible for us to keep [in] contact with the

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enemy. We are just too slow.’33 In early July, Private Dr Georg D., of the same division, wrote a report on how the roads were affecting vehicles, horses and soldiers: The tired horses are often not in the condition to pull wagons that are sunk into the sand almost up to their axles and laden with munitions and all manner of equipment. Here the human must help. . . . Ropes are tied to the drawbar of every wagon. Ten to twenty infantrymen strain themselves, and thus go things further on until the most dangerous spots have been overcome. The trucks, assuming they cannot go overland, have tasks before them which no one could have imagined when they were built. . . . The wheels grind into the deep sand, [and] drivers and passengers have to dig them out, putting boardwalks underneath, pushing, helped by neighbouring trucks to pull comrades ‘out of the muck’.34

The gap already opening between the thrusting Panzer divisions and the slogging infantry divisions could only increase. With this diminished the Germans’ chances of encircling and destroying the Red Army’s forces and of keeping Operation Barbarossa on track. After the initial shock of the German onslaught, the Red Army made the Germans pay for ground increasingly dearly not just at Uman, but all along the front. The 4th Mountain Division’s war diary for 26 June recorded: ‘already in the first few days since the beginning of hostilities, the view is circulating that the Russian, as an individual fighter, displays extraordinary harshness and tenacity, coupled with bestial cruelty and underhandedness.’35 The Red Army’s troops inflicted still heavier casualties on the Germans when, as the 25th Infantry Division reported, their foxholes were so deep that artillery fire could not destroy them and German infantry had to finish the job in close combat.36 The Soviets’ own infantry counterattacks were crude at first, consisting of little more than vast charging waves of soldiers whom the Germans mowed down in droves. Soon, however, they were executing attacks more adeptly, often using forests and cornfields as cover.37 On 1 July, the 119th Motorized Infantry Regiment, with the 25th Infantry Division, described the enemy’s efforts as ‘courageous, more ruthless than the French and skilfully exploiting the terrain’.38 General Reinhardt, who had helped train the Red Army during its covert cooperation with the Reichswehr, drily confessed in a letter to his wife: ‘sometimes I almost fear that I taught the brothers too well’.39 By mid-August, the 4th Mountain Division had already suffered casualties of 303 dead, 909 wounded, and eighty-five missing.40 On 3 August, Lance Corporal Josef M. of the 5th Infantry Division, now under the Ninth Army in Army Group Centre, reported: ‘there are companies in our regiment that have

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lost half their combat strength in battle’.41 German infantry fared especially badly against Soviet tanks. And as early as 1 July, the 326th Infantry Regiment, fighting under the 198th Infantry Division in the Eleventh Army, suffered eighty dead, 104 wounded and 147 missing when it came under attack from Soviet tanks. Many of its troops fled; this suggests that reserve divisions such as the 198th sometimes lacked the mettle of the army’s active divisions.42 The effects on the German troops were mental as well as physical. ‘My feet are in order, and my nerves are probably getting used to a lot,’ wrote Unteroffizier Willy F. of the 198th Infantry Division on 16 July. ‘We’ve had a lot of losses through nervous shock and so on, even though in my own view the situation was bearable.’43 ‘It’s a gift of God that I’m still alive,’ wrote Second Lieutenant Helmut D. of the 4th Mountain Division three weeks later. ‘The Russian was constantly trying to break out and was driven back every time. . . . Eight days and nights in a hole in the ground without sleep, come rain or shine. My nerves nearly broke, the cries of the charging Russians ringing constantly in my ears.’44 *** Lieutenant Schmidt of the 121st Infantry Division, advancing with Army Group North, described the Red Army’s ‘Asiatic’ soldiers as inhuman and highly dangerous; ‘of course, the soldiers out of the Caucasus . . . are nasty in their grinning fanaticism. One fights against them as one would against animals.’ Schmidt did not let anti-Slavic racism cloud his judgment entirely; on another occasion, he wrote that ‘these propaganda company reports make one sick, even when they are well-written, because they try to paint the serious, manly events theatrically. We speak of Russians, while the propaganda people only speak of the Reds.’ Schmidt, then, apparently saw the campaign more as a contest of arms than an anti-Bolshevik or anti-Slavic crusade.45 More often, however, German troops attributed their opponents’ ferocity and cruelty to the supposedly heinous influence of the Red Army’s ‘Jew-Bolshevik’ commissars. ‘They attack like madmen,’ wrote Second Lieutenant Helmut H. of the 258th Infantry Division. ‘When a comrade falls, they carry on undaunted. They rarely surrender. The Red Army’s officers and commissars have worked up their men into a fear psychosis.’46 The 129th Infantry Division’s intelligence section described the commissars of the opposing Soviet 922nd Rifle Regiment as ‘Jewish to an extent, constantly driving the men to new attacks while they and some of the officers stay behind and shoot anyone refusing to attack.’47 XXXIX Corps issued a memorandum stating that, under the commissars’ influence, the Red Army’s soldiers became ‘wild animals in battle’.48 Not only senior army commands but also the army’s field newspapers fuelled the commissars’ demonic image. In June 1941, for instance, the field newspaper Blücher claimed

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that ‘the Red soldier is persuaded by his political commissars that he will be shot in German captivity’.49 It will be clear from these quotations, as indeed from the evidence generally, that units willingly perpetrated the Commissar Order not only due to antiBolshevism, but also due to their harsh perception of military necessity. The time pressures of Barbarossa brooked no delay. Thus, vilified as the inciters of dogged Red Army resistance, the commissars were marked men. Over 3,400, mostly political officers of the Red Army, were executed by the Germans during 1941 and 1942; 3,400 was a small proportion of the total number of Red Army soldiers whom the Germans captured, but a very high proportion of the officers captured.50 It might have been higher still but for the fact that, as word of the Commissar Order got round the Red Army’s units, commissars were likely to burn their papers and means of identification before they were captured. From October onwards, German army intelligence officers and the SS and Police screened Red Army commissars who had been sent to prison camps, and as a result of this ‘thorough’ procedure many more were exposed and executed.51 According to an exhaustive recent study, reports of shootings exist for all thirteen armies, all forty-four army corps and more than 80 per cent of divisions – a figure that rises to 90 per cent if we include additional cases where there are indications of shootings.52 Nor do these figures provide the comfort of knowing that between 10 and 20 per cent of the army’s divisions were chivalrous enough to spurn the order. Some may have been, but the written record only provides clear evidence for General Stapf ’s 111th Infantry Division. A mundane but plausible alternative explanation would be that more divisions carried out the order, but left no written record. What the figures certainly show is that antiBolshevism and a sense of ruthless military necessity had penetrated the army’s officer corps extensively. For senior commanders were not compelled to carry out the order under duress: no written record exists of any officer whose refusal to carry it out brought him so much as a reprimand.53 Nevertheless, some divisions did not carry out the Commissar Order as much as others. Here, a divisional commander’s moral or political values might have a part to play. Major General Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma was no friend of the Soviets. His hands were not clean; a report of 27 September 1941 recorded that his 17th Panzer Division had shot nine commissars in as many days. But the staunchly National Socialist Major General Ludwig Crüwell’s 11th Panzer Division reported shooting ten commissars on 14 July alone. This suggests that, while divisional commanders might not personally have ordered individual executions, they set the tone among their subordinates.54 More important than a divisional commander’s demeanour was how much opportunity his troops had to kill commissars. Panzer units shot more commissars than frontline infantry units did; each infantry corps shot an average of

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thirty-one while the Commissar Order was active, but Panzer corps – which took larger numbers of prisoners – shot an average of more than seventy-three.55 Then again, attitudes towards the enemy among Panzer troops may well have been harsher than those of the infantry. Leaving aside anti-Bolshevism, the Panzer divisions and the Nazi movement alike were fixated on technological modernity, and Panzer personnel, as the German army’s earlier campaigns had shown, felt immense pride in being the modern technological vanguard of the German army’s triumphs.56 More straightforwardly, they were high on success during the eastern campaign’s opening weeks, just as they had been on a high during the army’s earlier victorious campaigns. With a mind-frame such as this, one did not even need to be a fervent National Socialist to feel the kind of ruthless triumphalism that made it easier to perpetrate criminal acts. But it was rear area units, particularly security divisions, that had the greatest opportunity to shoot commissars. For such units were under none of the time pressure that advancing frontline units faced, and could therefore take the trouble to root out commissars properly.57 Harder to establish is how the individual soldiers who perpetrated the killings actually felt about their role as ‘hangman’s assistants’. The written record provides few indications, though divisional chaplains were often set to work trying to ameliorate the guilt soldiers may have felt.58 Red Army commissars did go to ferocious lengths to terrorize their men into fighting. Among other things, they set up ‘blocking detachments’ almost immediately after the invasion’s start, which were issued orders to fire upon retreating Red Army soldiers.59 But the Germans themselves gave commissars ample grounds for ferocity, because commissars knew they could expect a bullet if the Germans captured and identified them. An early example of the penny dropping for the Germans came during the second week of September, when Army Group North’s chief of staff argued that ‘the commissars should be handled civilly, so as to speed up their desertion’.60 Such joined-up thinking was rare during Barbarossa’s opening months. Nor did many German commands apparently have the wit to recognize that the Red Army’s soldiers might be fighting for other reasons as well as the influence of their commissars. That said, XXVI Corps did argue that ‘the feeling may exist in these people that they must defend their land against attacking foreigners’, and the Ninth Army’s command gained the ‘strong impression of a young, unspoiled people, that is also loyal to its fatherland and is prepared to stand up if not for the Communist state, then for Russia’.61 Such saner reflections only became commonplace when Barbarossa’s heady initial phase was over and the Germans contemplated the prospect of a much longer struggle. ***

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By giving commissars sound reason to whip up their own troops into an antiGerman frenzy, and indeed by attacking the Soviet Union without warning in the first place, the Wehrmacht as a whole played the greater role in initiating a spiral of reciprocal terror and savagery. But reciprocal the terror and savagery certainly were. Moreover, Nazi propaganda vastly exploited evidence of the atrocities that units of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, had committed before retreating. The grimmest example was the discovery of 5,300 corpses in Lemberg at the end of June 1941, left there after retreating NKVD units had murdered their political prisoners.62 The 4th Mountain Division, involved in the fighting to clear the city, similarly discovered the bodies of numerous Ukrainians at Brzezany on 4 July. On the outskirts of the town, its men found meadows containing the bodies of more civilians whom the NKVD had shot.63 Soviet atrocities real, exaggerated, or invented – and it seems there were a lot of all three kinds – were grist to the Nazi propaganda mill. By hearing of atrocities through propaganda or seeing the evidence up close, German units that might not have been especially brutally disposed at the campaign’s start might become so as the campaign went on. The same applied to Soviet propaganda’s effect upon Red Army units. Precise causes and effects might differ for each unit, but the general effects were felt on the battlefield, as units from both sides committed atrocities, particularly against prisoners. ‘The Russians are not giving up,’ wrote Second Lieutenant Helmut D. on 1 July. ‘Their wounded fire on us too, and so do the prisoners. The Russians themselves hardly ever take prisoners. I’ve seen graves in which German of soldiers lay after being shot as prisoners.’64 In a letter to his wife on 6 July, General of Infantry Gottard Heinrici, commander of the Fourth Army’s XXXXIII Corps, recounted an ‘incredibly bloody’ action when ‘in some cases we gave no quarter at all. The Russian was like a beast towards our injured soldiers. In return, our men shot and beat to death everything in brown uniforms.’65 Reports of German prisoners of the Red Army being killed and mutilated – and not necessarily in that order – were commonplace. And at least some Red Army units needed less provocation than others: for instance, on the very first day of the campaign, Dr Heinrich Haape, a medical doctor with the 6th Infantry Division, discovered the bodies of a German doctor, a stretcherbearer, and four wounded soldiers whom the Soviets had killed even when the doctor had waved his Red Cross flag.66 German units likewise contributed further to the deadly self-reinforcing cycle, and to Red Army resilience, by killing surrendering Red Army soldiers themselves. In the heat of battle, the moment of surrender was (and is) always dangerous. Surrendering soldiers were even more likely to be shot out of hand if they were resisting fiercely just minutes before, as so many Red Army soldiers did. But in the war in the east, troops on both sides were even more likely to

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shoot out of hand because they had been saturated with incendiary propaganda. Indeed, German soldiers were shooting surrendering Red Army soldiers during the campaign’s opening weeks on a scale that alarmed even the OKH, albeit for practical rather than moral reasons. Thus, on 9 July, did Field Marshal von Brauchitsch try to discourage German troops from wildly killing surrendering Red Army soldiers, fearing as he did that ‘increasingly embittered fighting’ could result.67 Only rarely did German army units systematically kill all surrendering Red Army soldiers during or immediately after battle, though some units, almost pathologically revolted by the idea of women in combat, did issue orders to ‘shoot women in uniform’.68 By contrast, the gentlemanly General Stapf of the 111th Infantry Division decreed that ‘not all Soviet women are rifle sluts (Flintenweiber)’, and particularly advised his men that Soviet nurses enjoyed protection under international law.69 Another unit that treated its prisoners decently was the 4th Panzer Division, which strove to provide captured enemy wounded with the necessary medical treatment immediately after battle.70 One did not need to be especially virtuous to see the value in such conduct – just sensible enough to recognize that it could also save German lives, by making Red Army soldiers regard the prospect of surrender as more appealing. Although Red Army soldiers were resisting bitterly, they were also surrendering in huge numbers. Rather simplistically, German army intelligence officers who later interviewed Soviet POWs attributed these mass surrenders to Red Army soldiers’ immature mentality: they resisted ferociously if their officers and commissars ordered them to, but reverted to an almost childlike state and surrendered en masse once their leaders had been put out of action. For instance, when, on 15 July, the 4th Mountain Division attacked Red Army bunkers on the Stalin Line in the Ukraine, it captured a number of Ukrainian troops who greeted the prospect of German captivity with relief.71 Had captured Red Army soldiers been able to foresee the fate that would eventually befall them in the German POW camps, most probably would have fought to the death. As it was, the scale of mass surrender was not so great as to diminish decisively the Red Army’s generally phenomenal will to resist. *** Meanwhile, Stalin himself sought further to escalate the intensity of the fighting, this time in those regions the Germans had conquered. On 3 July, he addressed the Soviet people and commanded them to rise up in the Germans’ rear, to liberate not just the Soviet Union but also Nazi-controlled Europe. ‘Anywhere and everywhere, diversion groups must fight the enemy’s units, and support the partisan effort by blowing up bridges and roads, destroying

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telephone and telegraph communications, and burning forests, depots and trains. For the enemy, as indeed for all his accomplices and collaborators, conditions in the occupied areas must be made unbearable. . . . He must be hunted down and exterminated, and all his plans foiled.’72 Though Stalin’s entreaties did not entirely fall on deaf ears, such Soviet authority as still existed in the newly occupied areas was in no position to make them reality. For as well as failing to ensure that the Soviet frontiers were adequately defended, Stalin’s leadership had also failed to lay foundations for effective resistance behind German lines. The Soviet leadership had grown averse to irregular warfare after the Bolsheviks had had such difficulty controlling their own irregular troops during the Russian Civil War of 1917–20. Consequently, irregular resistance in the German-occupied Soviet Union was chronically underprepared in 1941. Generally, the men running it on the ground were Communist functionaries and bureaucrats rather than actual soldiers; many were incompetent, and their efforts to organize resistance could be ineffective to the point of farce. For instance, party bosses seeking to organize partisan units in the Crimea took gramophones into the mountains to entertain themselves with, but forgot to take maps.73 In the Soviet Union’s western regions particularly, the speed and suddenness of the German advance thwarted all attempts to assemble some kind of effective effort. The regional authorities could usually offer only ‘destruction battalions’, small territorial defence units comprising loyal officials and party members, whose duties were now hastily diverted to the task of sabotaging German supply and communications. The Soviet leadership also tried to implant ‘diversion groups’, as partisan detachments were then referred to, drawn from Civil War veterans with experience in irregular warfare. These ad hoc efforts were likewise poorly coordinated.74 Granted, the innumerable bands of fugitive Red Army soldiers cut off by the German advance might form the nucleus of future partisan groups; two weeks after the launch of Barbarossa, General Heinrici wrote to his wife: ‘the vast forests are still full of scattered soldiers and fugitives, some of them unarmed, some armed, and they are extremely dangerous. Even when we send divisions through these forests, tens of thousands have managed to avoid capture in this impassable terrain.’75 But as yet the Soviet authorities had no hope of actually organizing such a dispersed, disorganized, and largely weaponless rabble.76 Moreover, despite the tenets of the ‘war of annihilation’ that were a cornerstone of Nazi Germany’s war in the east, during the summer of 1941 the Germans’ treatment of the bulk of the occupied population had yet to descend to its later depths of terror and rapacity. This too was bound to limit any potential for partisan warfare. Such was the almost complete absence of irregular resistance during the war’s opening weeks that, while German army commanders

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did not discard the Barbarossa Decree in principle, they applied its provisions much more selectively than they would later. For instance, the 20th Panzer Division, serving under Panzer Group Three, forbade its troops to ‘shoot deserters and civilians indiscriminately’.77 And the 4th Mountain Division’s commander, the Austrian-born Major General Karl Eglseer, instructed his men to ‘take an interpreter with them [and] conduct the most rigorous investigation in order to avoid hitting pro-German civilians’.78 Indeed, there is much to suggest that, all other things being equal, Austrian units behaved relatively mildly, in the east anyway. This is not entirely surprising; the number of actual hard-core Nazi supporters in Austria at the time of the Anschluss has been estimated at less than a third, and since then the Nazis had had less time to ‘get to work’ on the Austrian population than they had on the pre-1938 population of Germany. Add to that a certain aversion towards Prussian-style obduracy that was felt by senior Austrian-born officers who, after all, had fought in the more ethnically diverse army of the Austro-Hungarian empire during the First World War.79 When they did face rare instances of resistance, both German- and Austrianborn troops were sometimes too lenient for their commanders’ tastes. At the beginning of July, for instance, the quartermaster of the Seventeenth Army had to remind its troops of the Barbarossa Decree when he discovered that they were sending partisans to prison camps rather than shooting them. The 99th Light Infantry Division similarly complained that its troops were ‘not cracking down hard enough’ on partisans.80 Soviet reports concurred that the Germans were treating the population leniently to a degree, an intelligence report for the Red Army’s Northern Front even noting: ‘initially . . . the Germans didn’t take anything from the population. Even more, they gave children sweets, peasants sugar.’81 Granted, there were ominous straws in the wind, particularly when it came to plunder: for instance, on 27 July, III Motorized Corps, serving with the Sixth Army in the Ukraine, excoriated its troops for abducting and slaughtering several pregnant sows, seizing large amounts of hay and ransacking the homes of agricultural workers who had been out in the fields with their families.82 But the Germans had yet to despoil the land with the locust-like intensity that would characterize so much of their later conduct. The Germans’ relatively restrained conduct, together with the antipathy, indeed hostility, that many rural populations felt towards Stalin’s regime, the majority of the newly occupied Soviet populace adopted a cautious wait-and-see attitude towards the Germans. This attitude was not on a par with the euphoria some German troops had observed on their march into the Baltic States and the Ukraine, but nor was it any kind of foundation for anti-German resistance. ***

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‘The troops must behave with unconditional correctness towards the population’, declared XXXIX Corps on 12 July. It made two exceptions: Jews and Communists.83 Though the German army showed some moderation towards the general population during the opening phase of Barbarossa, it showed none towards the Soviet Jews. That many ordinary soldiers despised eastern Jews was perhaps still more apparent in their letters from the Soviet Union than it had been in their letters from Poland. By June 1941, Germany had been at war for twenty months. The Nazi regime had already persuaded the bulk of German society to support, or at least accept, its legal and defamatory assault against the Jews during the 1930s, and German army recruits who had hitherto been through any combination of the Nazi school system, the Hitler Youth, and the RAD had been subjected to more anti-Semitic propaganda than most. Then, from the war’s outbreak, Nazi propaganda portrayed Jews as a treasonous element in German society, and the puppet masters of the enemy coalition the Germans faced in both east and west. Where the east was concerned, of course, German troops had been subjected to a further welter of directives extolling Operation Barbarossa as a campaign to destroy ‘Jewish Bolshevism.’ Such was the backdrop to the odium with which many German soldiers regarded the Soviet Jews. On the day the invasion started, Lance Corporal Hans S. of the 25th Infantry Division wrote: ‘the place where we are is swarming with Jews. . . . These begging hyenas are able to exploit the general poverty. Bartering is everywhere.’84 The soldiers’ base anti-Semitic sentiments also extended to casually equating Jews with dirt. ‘Of course, it’s nothing like as abundant as in France,’ wrote Corporal Walter K. of the 25th Infantry Division. ‘Lots of Jews, lots of filth. There’s a squalor here to the houses that one rarely sees elsewhere.’85 Soldiers also bought into the supposed equation between Jews and Bolshevism. In mid-August, for example, Captain Friedrich M. of the 73rd Infantry Division, advancing with the Eleventh Army through the Ukraine, described a conversation he had had with an ethnic German woman who told him of her experiences under Bolshevism. Among other things, the captain was presented with the image of a ‘poor, stupefied people who [were] the object of exploitative Jewish rule. For in every village, there sat a Jew who lived well, watched over the people and paid them a little, six to eight roubles per day for ten hours of work.’86 All the indications are that soldiers widely harboured such attitudes, even though only a minority – tens of thousands at most, out of the approximately ten million Wehrmacht personnel who served in the Soviet Union – became actively involved in measures that contributed to the extermination of the Soviet Jews.87 Although it would be August before the OKH issued a general directive to ghettoize the Jews in the army’s jurisdiction,88 advancing army units were swift to exploit the Jewish communities they came into contact with. Frontline and

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occupation units marked out Jews from early on, subjecting them to humiliating, exploitative and discriminatory measures. In particular, as portions of the conquered Soviet Union came under military administration, it was the army that argued for putting the Jews in ghettos, albeit with different guidelines across individual jurisdictions. On arrival in Kharkov, for example, the Sixth Army’s LV Corps cooperated with Sonderkommando 4a over the persecution of the Jews. Jewish shops were marked out, and the city commandant ordered the taking of hostages and the building of camps in which Jews among others could be held as hostages.89 Army units also exploited Jews as interpreters, doctors and street cleaners.90 ‘The place is crawling with Jews,’ wrote Captain Hermann K., an officer serving with the 221st Security Division in mid-July. ‘We’re rounding them all up for work, some to sweep the streets, some to mend them. We’ve got girls washing and darning and boys to clean our boots. For the last couple of days we’ve been forcing them all to wear the yellow star. Mind you, to get them to do any of this we had to set an example first, for the Jew elder had insisted the job mustn’t be rushed. He refused our demand to hurry it up, so we had to shoot him. That got the bastards moving!’91 At the end of the month, General Thomas agreed a policy with Paul Körner, state secretary of the Four-Year Plan, to ‘quarter the Jews in barracks and use them in units as labour gangs’.92 This was one respect, then, in which the army was already complicit in the fate of the Soviet Jews. Nor, even at this early stage, was this the worst of it. In parts of the Baltic States and the Ukraine, army units stood by as local fanatics, furtively incited by the SS, unleashed atavistic pogroms against Jews that would claim between twelve thousand and 24,000 lives.93 For instance, the 121st Infantry Division witnessed rampaging mobs murdering Jews in Lithuania on 27 June, but neither divisional command nor higher-level commanders made any attempt to intervene. Colonel General Ernst Busch, commanding Sixteenth Army, declared the killings an internal Lithuanian matter. Field Marshal von Leeb was appalled by the killings, but concluded in his diary: ‘we have no influence over these measures. All that remains for us is to keep our distance.’94 His more ‘humane solution’ was to sterilize Jewish males.95 The army mainly blamed Jews and Communists for such little acts of sabotage as Soviet partisans were already carrying out, so it targeted them in anti-partisan reprisals. The army also had a ‘pragmatic’ motive for victimizing Jews: it could exploit them, as well as Communists, as a ‘demonstration object’ on whom it could visit terror measures to set an example to the rest of the population.96 Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, commanding the Seventeenth Army in the Ukraine, proclaimed: ‘collective reprisals should not be indiscriminate. As long as there is no firm evidence that the Ukrainian population is responsible for an attack, the village headmen should in the first instance be required to select Jewish and Communist

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inhabitants [for reprisal]. . . . Jewish members of the Young Communists should be singled out particularly as culprits for all sabotage acts and bandit activity.’ Stülpnagel calculated that ‘the population’s widespread dislike of Jews’97 would ensure that it viewed such measures favourably. The most ominous development during the campaign’s first two months was the mounting scale of SS and Police actions against Jews. Until late July, the main forces on the ground were the Einsatzgruppen and the Order Police battalions attached to the army’s security divisions. The first wave of victims comprised mainly Jews in Communist Party positions, though on more than one occasion an Order Police battalion would unleash an indiscriminate massacre under the army’s nose. Such was the case in Bialystok in late June, when men of Police Battalion 309, many of them seriously drunk, massacred between two and three thousand people in the town’s Jewish quarter. The 221st Security Division, which had just captured the town, stood aside while the killings were carried out, expressing no concern for the discipline of those of its own men who might witness them. Indeed, the 221st’s war diary covered for the policemen, reporting that ‘the synagogue was set alight because shots were fired from it’.98 In Poland, army commanders generally had at least sought to prevent their own men from witnessing or participating in the anti-Semitic killings perpetrated by the SS Einsatzgruppen. They would do so again in the Soviet Union from late July onwards, as the SS and Police accelerated their killing campaign there. That the 221st was apparently so insouciant about its troops potentially witnessing a particularly barbaric massacre may have been down to its having been raised in Silesia, a particularly pro-Nazi region of Germany; Silesia had been forced to relinquish much of its territory to Poland after the First World War, its industrial base had been ravaged by the economic chaos of the late Weimar years, and during the early 1930s it had responded by voting Nazi in a proportion higher than the Nazis’ share of the national vote.99 Certainly, the 221st’s division-level officers were proudly anti-Semitic: in July, for instance, the division’s intelligence officer compiled a report for units about to take over the 221st’s jurisdiction as the division itself moved further eastwards. ‘The tensions between the two population groups [Poles and Russians] were exploited by the Jews for their own ends,’ he wrote. ‘They [the Jews] are now getting the payback for all their swaggering and oppression.’100 It was in late July that SS and Police forces began killing on the grand scale. Several factors drove them. Firstly, although many Jews had managed to flee to the Soviet Union’s more easterly regions before the Germans arrived, the absolute number of Soviet Jews under German occupation had risen since the campaign’s opening weeks. Such Jews might be a potentially useful labour force, but housing and feeding them was likely to get harder. And for the Germans in general, Jews, together with POWs, were lowest in the pecking

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order when it came to allocating what food remained available.101 Secondly, as the Germans advanced east, Einsatzgruppe B and Einsatzgruppe C in particular found themselves combing areas that were growing larger and therefore less easy to police. At the same time, because the Wehrmacht had been unable to destroy the Red Army conclusively, the campaign had already lasted longer than originally expected, and the prospect of resistance in the occupied territories was growing. The SS and Police were therefore able to gain the army’s approval for extending their anti-Semitic killing campaign, by depicting Jews as a potential security threat that demanded radical measures. During the second half of July, therefore, the SS and Police began killing not just Jews in Communist Party positions, but also adult male Jews across the board. The SS and Police also started killing more Jews because they had the practical means to do so. The three Waffen-SS brigades, two infantry and one cavalry, had been drawn up for deployment in the east in May 1941, but were initially assigned to frontline duties. By late July, however, both they and the expanded Order Police forces were arriving in the rear areas, and the army’s rear area commanders were approving their transfer to the tactical command of the senior SS and Police leaders.102 From then on, the SS and Police had over thirty thousand Order Police and Waffen-SS personnel operating in the rear areas on top of about 3,500 men from the four Einsatzgruppen.103 In the coming months, as anti-Jewish measures also escalated elsewhere in German-occupied Europe, SS and Police forces in the Soviet Union would extend their killing to Jewish women and children. Frontline and rear area army units would grease the wheels of the entire process. *** July brought the first serious threat to the invasion timetable. With the Germans apparently holding the initiative at the start of the month, Hitler hoped to persuade the Japanese to attack the Soviet Union from the east. At this particular stage, that might have been more than the Red Army could have withstood. But the Japanese, already committed to war in China, were more interested in expanding into the Pacific and Southeast Asia.104 The Germans, then, would have to finish off the Soviet Union on their own. Yet only in the central sector of the front had the Germans achieved a major operational victory, with their destruction of the Minsk and Bialystok pockets; the same could not be said of the front’s northern and southern sectors. And even in the centre, the number of Red Army formations the Germans had destroyed was not enough to throw open the route to Moscow. Furthermore, German intelligence consistently underestimated the total number of divisions available to the Red Army. For instance, before the invasion

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the FHO had blithely assured Barbarossa’s planners that the Red Army could not possibly transport its far eastern divisions westwards in time for them to fight the invaders.105 Now, with the campaign under way, the German army was constantly surprised by the Red Army’s strength because its own frontline intelligence officers were too often not up to the job. But the German army’s leadership only had itself to blame for this, for the General Staff Regulations of 1941 had downgraded intelligence even further. They charged a commander, together with his chief of staff or his operations officer, with the main responsibility for judging the enemy’s situation; the commander’s intelligence officer was only supposed to assist in this process. As General von Seeckt had opined: ‘Uncertainty and chance are inseparable characteristics of war. No understanding can control them, no beam out of the brightest and sharpest intellect can illuminate them. Only the will of the commander can dominate them. . . . The clarity of the will is the only light in the darkness of doubt and the future.’106 By now, moreover, there was a new influx of intelligence officers, for the greater part reservists rather than staff officers who usually had to learn on the job rather than through specialist training. They were also inferior in rank to an operations officer.107 The Soviets thus continued to resist on a scale that bewildered the Germans. Within a fortnight of the invasion, General Halder was triumphantly declaring that it was ‘probably no overstatement to say that the Russian campaign has been won in the space of two weeks.’ By the end of July, however, an increasingly agitated Halder was drastically revising his opinion: ‘We have underestimated the Russian colossus. . . . At the outset of the war we reckoned with about 200 enemy divisions. Now we have already counted 360. These divisions indeed are not armed and equipped according to our standards, and their tactical leadership is often poor. But there they are, and if we smash a dozen of them, the Russians simply put up another dozen.’108 Mechanized and infantry divisions alike were increasingly exhausted by the constant fighting and advances. A letter of early August by Wachtmeister Josef L. captured the experience of both in microcosm, together with the creeping feeling that this was a campaign without end. ‘Weeks of endless, grinding slog lie behind me. We’ve been shown the way to the east through blazing sun, cold nights, foot-high sand and swamps. . . . Nearly 1,200 kilometres [750 miles] of marching lie behind us. Only those who have fought in the campaign in the east can grasp how much all this has cost us in nerves, sweat and effort. Last Sunday our position took a direct artillery hit, which cost the lives of our company commander and two runners.’109 The exhaustion he described was worsened by the army’s mounting supply problems. These were less acute for Army Group North, which benefited from the superior rail and road networks of the Baltic States, and from its proximity to Estonian harbours.110 Supply problems were much worse further south, not

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least in the particularly crucial sector of Army Group Centre. Trucks drawn from civilian transport stocks or western European production sources proved particularly brittle. By 20 July, more than 30 per cent of Army Group Centre’s vehicles had broken down. Trucks also consumed an alarming amount of fuel in these conditions; the fuel they required for 100 kilometres (62 miles) in the relatively benign terrain of western Europe, for instance, covered just 70 kilometres (44 miles) in Russia.111 The Germans found that the Soviet rail system, which they increasingly had to bank upon as they advanced further east, was also thoroughly unreliable. OKH logistical planners had disregarded the fact that German rolling stock was too large for the Soviet railway gauge. This error was less crass than it may sound, for German engineers could at least widen the track.112 But converting track was a herculean task. Soviet scorched-earth measures, fighting on the ground and the Luftwaffe’s bombardment from the air had all wrought immense damage upon railway lines, water stations, signal equipment, rolling stock, telephone lines, bridges and engine sheds. The army’s technical railway troops lacked manpower and materials: for instance, only sixteen of its railway units were fully motorized, and two-thirds had no vehicles at all. There were other problems: Russian coal burned inefficiently in German engines and, most basically, there were not enough railways. In particular, Army Group Centre’s three armies and two Panzer groups had only one main line to supply them.113 German troops were also increasingly plagued by heat, dust and thirst. ‘If you could see me,’ wrote Corporal Franz F. of the 12th Panzer Division on 12 July, ‘you would run away from me. I haven’t washed for four days, and I look like a chimney brush.’114 Dust also affected mechanized transport, attacking air filters, increasing oil consumption and damaging engines.115 The infantry’s particular physical exertions caused them to suffer especially. ‘Every day is the same,’ declared Unteroffizier Willy P. of the seventh-wave 167th Infantry Division, fighting under the Fourth Army, on 15 July. ‘Blazing heat from morning until evening, and dust that gets into everything. The latter is really doing for us. The best we can hope for is a billet with three or four wells in the village between eight hundred men. . . . As well as the dust on ourselves, we also cop the dust from our endless vehicle columns. So you can well imagine that, day in day out, we look like someone has vomited all over us.’116 As for thirst, Lieutenant Helmut D. wrote, for example, on 6 August: ‘there was a terrific heat, and after the battle we could hardly speak from raging thirst; a shallow pond full of frogs provided a little respite.’117 Between a mechanized army racing to maintain a merciless timetable, and a largely unmechanized force trailing in its wake, inevitable tensions now erupted. General Guderian and Field Marshal von Kluge, already ill-disposed towards one another, fell out explosively over the gaps opening up between Guderian’s

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Panzer Group Two and Kluge’s Fourth Army. Guderian’s memoirs recall the ‘exceptionally heated conversations’ between the two men.118 While Kluge wished to stall the Panzers’ advance to safeguard the flanks of the German advance, Guderian accused Kluge of trying to ‘stop the advance of the Panzers at every difficulty arising in the rear’.119 But the wrangle between the two generals was merely a symptom of the ever widening gap between the Germans’ strategic aims and their actual means. It was not just that the footsore infantry were unable to keep up with the Panzers. An unexpectedly tenacious Soviet resistance, a transport and supply network even more ruinous to German logistics than anticipated, and the excessive time needed to encircle, destroy and mop up the huge pockets of Red Army troops were all debilitating Panzer and infantry divisions alike, and with them the whole timetable of Operation Barbarossa. *** Between 7 July and 5 August, the battle of Smolensk raged. During these weeks, the city and its surrounding region became the fulcrum of Germany’s summer campaign in the east. At the start, General Halder was confident of success followed by a decisive advance on Moscow. By the end, the Germans had won the battle, but at the cost of all their hopes of achieving a swift, decisive victory. Smolensk is situated in the middle of the ‘land bridge’ between the great natural obstacles of the rivers Dvina and Dnieper. It was this land bridge that provided the swiftest, surest route to Moscow.120 However, the Germans had to spend the battle advancing on, and taking, Smolensk itself while fighting off Soviet counterattacks from the east. This double challenge placed the Germans under intense pressure. The Western Army Group’s commander, Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, targeted his counterattacks at isolated units with unprotected flanks. The Soviet counterattacks were poorly coordinated, in large part due to their slapdash reconnaissance.121 But Timoshenko had numbers on his side. Although the Germans had inflicted 400,000 losses on the Red Army’s western front during the campaign’s first six weeks, the Soviets were able to mobilize another 800,000 men by the end of June, another 600,000 in July and almost the same amount in August. During the same period, the Red Army increased its total number of divisions from 252 to 384, including a hundred tank divisions. The newly mobilized troops were poorly trained and equipped, but there were a great many of them, and over half were sent to the sector of front west of Moscow.122 By late July, moreover, Red Army units were already equipped with Katyusha multiple rocket launchers.123 They were not the most accurate of weapons but, as

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a company of the 109th Infantry Regiment attested in late October, they had a lacerating effect upon morale: ‘with a dreadful howling noise and like comets with red tails, the missiles tear through the air. On impact, they explode with a thundering crack. Their effect on morale is great, as is the effect of the sheer number of explosions in the smallest area.’124 To make matters worse, the VVS was ominously reminding the Germans that they had only managed to destroy its air power near the frontiers.125 Although its attacks were relatively ineffective, they put the already overstretched Luftwaffe under yet more strain. By 12 July, 40 per cent of the combat-ready aircraft the Luftwaffe had committed to the invasion had been destroyed or damaged. Now, rather than take the attack directly to the VVS, it was needing to focus on supporting ground operations.126 The terrain around Smolensk also hindered the Germans. ‘The landscape is very convenient for defence,’ wrote Corporal Josef M. of the 5th Infantry Division, fighting under the Ninth Army. ‘It consists of large, deep woods, big areas with 3-metre-high [10-foot-high] undergrowth, heathland and high rye fields. The enemy is able to conceal himself very well, and it’s very unpleasant attacking an enemy whom you can’t see. The Russian defends himself extremely bitterly and underhandedly. . . . Single sharpshooters can hold up whole battalions.’127 Finally, during the first week of August, the German Second and Ninth armies were able to liquidate the Smolensk encirclement, and with it three Soviet armies. Operationally, Smolensk was another great victory for the Germans: they captured 400,000 prisoners, including over 300,000 in the Smolensk pocket itself.128 But strategically Smolensk achieved nothing. Neither side won the battle emphatically. However, in the words of David Stahel, ‘the victor was simply the side with the least to lose from the failure.’129 By this definition, the real victory was the Red Army’s, for it just needed to be still in the fight after the battle. Army Group Centre, by contrast, was rapidly approaching exhaustion. The 18th Panzer Division, for example, was already exhausted by 26 July: ‘the men are indifferent, apathetic, partly suffering from crying fits, and not cheered up by this or that phrase. Food is being taken only in disproportionately small quantities.130 In July 1941 alone, the Germans suffered 63,000 dead on the eastern front, and the battle of Smolensk was the main contributor. Panzer losses, caused by enemy action or overexertion, were also enormous. By 29 July, for instance, 71 per cent of Panzer Group Two’s tanks had been lost or were under repair.131 Almost as if to rub the Germans’ noses in it, Timoshenko launched a further counteroffensive between the first and third weeks of August. This would eventually fail, due in large part to the efforts of one of Guderian’s formations, XXIV Panzer Corps. But in the meantime it caused Army Group Centre still further damage. After the battle of Smolensk the exhausted Panzer groups had to recharge and refit before resuming the offensive, so it was the infantry of the Fourth and Ninth armies that had to hold off Timoshenko’s forces. Moreover,

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the guns the Red Army deployed from its still massive artillery force inflicted severe attritional losses upon Army Group Centre.132 At the end of the third week of August, Bock wrote: ‘I am being forced to spread the reserves which I have scraped together for the hoped-for attack behind my front just to have some degree of security that it will not be breached. If, after all the successes, the campaign in the East now trickles away in dismal defensive fighting for my army group, it is not my fault.’133 Then, on 12 August, came reports that the Soviets were concentrating powerful forces for the defence of Moscow.134 Yet the main advance Hitler now had in mind, to which he decided to divert Panzer Group Two, was in the south. Partly, he was being opportunistic: the weaker Soviet forces there now promised an easier victory than in the centre. But a drive south, as well as one to the north – to which Hitler committed Hoth’s Panzer Group Three – was entirely of a piece with the objectives Hitler had particularly coveted before the start of the invasion. It would enable him, he believed, to seize Leningrad in the north and, above all, the economic resources of the Ukraine and the Donbass region in the south. As he went on to proclaim in August: ‘the most important task before the onset of winter is not to get Moscow, but to get the Crimea and the industrial and coal region of the Donez, to pinch out Russia’s oil supply from the Caucasus, to besiege Leningrad and to link up with the Finns’.135 Even before the battle of Smolensk was over, Hitler was beginning to perceive that the Soviet Union might not be defeated in 1941, and that grabbing more economic resources was now the only useful course of action; a directive he issued on 14 July proclaimed that the Germans must seize more raw materials, in other words, launch a reinforced drive on the south, if they were ultimately to prevail. Hitler’s conviction may have hardened after 22 July, when, at a meeting with Brauchitsch, the army commander-in-chief apparently let slip Halder’s duplicitous attempts to manipulate the direction of the main invasion effort.136 His convictions certainly hardened in the face of the military developments of July and early August. Not only were Army Group Centre’s infantry divisions facing Soviet counterattacks northeast, east, and southeast of Smolensk; the northern and southern flanks of Army Group Centre itself were threatened. Advancing to the north and south would remove this danger by straightening out the line.137 Halder’s furtive efforts to keep the campaign focused on Mosow had failed; he would now spend considerable time and energy privately blaming Hitler for the catastrophe he believed was about to unfold.138 During the postwar years, numerous former generals, Guderian among them, would claim that Hitler’s failure to take the open road to Moscow in August 1941 destroyed Germany’s best chance of defeating the Soviet Union that year. Lieutenant Colonel Siegfried Westphal, operations officer for XXVII Corps during the 1941

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campaign, remarked after the war: ‘instead of an operation of the clenched fist, [Hitler] chose an operation of the outspread hand’.139 There was some sound thinking behind Hitler’s decision. The road to Moscow was not open; Soviet opposition was weaker in the south because the Soviets were strengthening their forces before the capital, and Moscow’s defences were stronger in August than they had been in July.140 The ferocity of the fighting around Smolensk was probably a foretaste of what the Germans would have faced had they lunged at the capital straight away. Nor could the Germans immediately jump off towards Moscow anyway. The battle of Smolensk had exhausted their Panzer forces, and urgently refitting these was the main priority before advancing further in any direction.141 The problem was less Hitler’s thinking than the insoluble dilemma the Germans had created for themselves: driving on the south made sense economically, and driving on the north and south made sense operationally, but the only target that might make sense strategically – and even this is debatable – was Moscow. And Moscow was beyond the Germans’ reach.142 *** The direct reason why the Germans could not defeat the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 was that they failed to destroy the Soviet armies at the campaign’s very start. Yet this aim had never been realistic. The Soviets were now holding the Germans at bay, if precariously, so that they could not only organize their defences more effectively, but also transfer much of their industrial plant out of harm’s way beyond the Urals. By September 1941, about 2,500 enterprises had already been successfully moved east.143 This was the first step in a production miracle that would progress spectacularly as the war on the eastern front continued. In view of this, it can be easy to forget how heavily the Wehrmacht hammered the Red Army, particularly in the centre of the front, during the opening weeks of Operation Barbarossa. This success had been due to Soviet ineptitude on several counts: Stalin’s catastrophic misjudgments, inexperienced and often incompetent leadership at various levels, the troops’ poor standard of training, and supply shortages – particularly in fuel and suitable tanks – to name but four. Yet the German army was only able to exploit this ineptitude so fully thanks to its own superior tactics, training, operational art and combined-arms proficiency.144 But much more was needed to translate the Germans’ operational successes into strategic triumph. They might have achieved this had Japan committed to the war in July 1941. However, while the Japanese could not be blamed for avoiding a campaign in which they had no direct interest, the Germans could

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be blamed for going into it ill-prepared. Theoretically, a German victory during the campaign’s opening weeks was not impossible. But the Germans had left no margin for error. Strategic triumph depended far too much on an utterly shambolic performance from the Red Army, and an utterly faultless one from the Germans themselves. Impressive as the Germans’ performance usually was, it fell far short of faultless; their logistical and intelligence failures helped see to that. And inept as the Red Army’s performance often was, its soldiers’ obdurate resistance slowed the Germans and eroded their strength enough for the Soviets to be able to transfer industrial plant eastwards and for the Red Army to cobble together a new front before Moscow. One thing that helped to make the Red Army so resilient, its numerous mass surrenders notwithstanding, was the Germans’ own ruthlessness. Nazi ideology, the criminal orders, the Soviets’ own methods and the fighting conditions in general all helped to drive this ruthlessness. How far each of these forces fuelled the brutality of German troops might vary from unit to unit; a unit’s social and regional background, still more so its particular function, were among the things that could help determine how ruthlessly or otherwise it comported itself Nevertheless, the Wehrmacht itself was more to blame than the Red Army for the spiral of terror that unfolded. Most directly, the Germans’ killing of Red Army commissars and, more sporadically, of surrendering Red Army soldiers did not weaken Soviet resistance, but strengthened it. The relatively quiescent conditions in the occupied rear, meanwhile, might have caused many units to behave more moderately towards the occupied population, but not towards its Jewish sections. This was a further sign of the ideological currents that animated the army’s war in the east. At the front line, given the Red Army’s sheer size as well as the ferocity of its resistance, it is unsurprising that the Germans’ casualty rates were soon mushrooming and their exhaustion levels spiking. By failing to break the Red Army during its opening weeks, Operation Barbarossa’s chance of delivering a swift, decisive strategic triumph had disappeared by early August. The following weeks and months would see the strategic initiative in the entire war begin to slip from the Germans’ grasp.

PART III

Losing the Initiative

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CHAPTER NINE

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 T

‘

he time ticks for the enemy, not for us,’ opined General Guderian on 10 August 1941.1 But while the Germans would strain every sinew between September and December, and achieve further operational successes, strategic triumph would continue to elude them in the east. In the face of ongoing losses and unattainable victory, generals and soldiers in the field grew frustrated to the point of desperation. As a result, many started increasingly to exhibit the full extent of brutality that was ingrained in the criminal orders issued before the campaign. During the summer of 1941, German troops had implemented such orders brutally but selectively. The conditions they faced during the autumn and early winter brought Nazi ideology much further to the fore, as it increasingly suffused both the way the army fought and the way it treated the occupied population. ***

Guderian’s observation that time ticked for the enemy now applied not just to the war in the east, but to the war as a whole. Hitler was conscious of what Germany’s other enemies were doing. In August, Britain and the United States – still officially neutral even though its president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, sought to commit it fully to the Allied side – signed the Atlantic Charter. Here, they declared their wish to see ‘sovereign rights and self government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them’, and ‘a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries’.2 The following month, they assured the Soviet Union of extensive economic aid at the Three Powers Conference. These developments convinced Hitler that the global war he had predicted was imminent. The main danger it would pose would be the combined economic superiority of the coalition Germany would face. This reinforced Hitler’s belief that a swift end to the war was not possible, and that the

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Germans would prevail on both the eastern front and on the global scale only if they could seize the resources of the southern Soviet Union. While Hitler was reconciled to a lengthier campaign in the east, ordinary soldiers contemplated the prospect with fear. On 22 August, Wachtmeister Josef L. of the 129th Infantry Division expressed his hope that ‘a new, decisive operation will soon get going, and set the seal on the Russians’ defeat. One does not talk of winter here. God help us if we have to spend this cold, dark time in snow and ice; here where no person should live, among burned villages and towns, endless forests and swamps.’3 The passing of time also unsettled Private Werner F. of the 12th Panzer Division: ‘The nights are already getting noticeably cold and damp. Thank God I have enough blankets so I don’t freeze. Now the fields are empty and have all been reaped. When we came, the corn was still green.’4 The troops found the terrain of the Ukraine in particular to be disorientating, because of the sheer sameness of the landscape. Captain Friedrich M. of the 73rd Infantry Division, advancing through the far south of the Ukraine with the Eleventh Army, wrote in mid-August: ‘one day is the same as another, just as the landscape and villages are all the same and the routes that we march along – [there is a] monotony to all the days, when one can no longer distinguish different days of the week but only the date itself.’5 The ferocity of the fighting did not abate. The transfer to Army Group South of General Guderian’s Panzer Group Two was intended to give Rundstedt’s armies the offensive power they needed to encircle and destroy the Soviet forces facing them. But the overall task of encircling and destroying the Red Army’s southern forces west of the Dnieper, in acoordance with the Barbarossa directive, was immense. Through most of August, the battle of Dnepropetrovsk tied up General Eberhard von Mackensen’s III Corps. The Germans committed fifty thousand troops to the operation, including the 198th Infantry Division. The urban fighting they experienced exemplifies the severity of the struggle the German army faced as it continued its painful eastward progress. During the German army’s earlier campaigns, the Panzers’ rapid advance had often bypassed urban centres. In the Soviet Union, the Germans had no such choice. Urban centres were major transport and communication hubs that they had to capture if they were to take apart the Soviet fronts.6 Nor, when it came to the larger towns and cities, did they have the option simply of bombardment with artillery or air assault. That would merely create an enormous amount of rubble which Red Army troops could defend more easily.7 On the other hand, the Germans’ eventual capture of Dnepropetrovsk demonstrated how much their urban warfare tactics had improved since Warsaw in 1939. In particular, they no longer made the mistake of sending in a Panzer spearhead without direct infantry support. By now, the Germans had

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learned to play to their strengths. One of these was the special-purpose, combined-arms battle group. For urban assaults, battle groups usually comprised a Panzer platoon, a Panzerjäger (anti-tank) company, an artillery battery, assault infantry, and engineers. This organization gave the Germans flexibility, enabling Panzers and infantry to protect one another. The Panzerjäger dealt with any Soviet tanks, pioneers cleared obstacles and strong points, and artillery provided heavy firepower. In close-quarters urban fighting there was a risk of German artillery hitting its own men, so light howitzers moved with the infantry to provide safe and accurate support. The infantry themselves found hand grenades the best means of clearing snipers and machine-gun nests.8 The German troops who fought in Dnepropetrovsk also widely displayed the flexibility and aggression that were the hallmarks of Auftragstaktik. Yet still the Germans’ progress through Dnepropetrovsk was slow and painful. The Panzers were not in their element and their infantry support should have been more numerous. Soldiers needed to take Pervatin, not to enable them to race ahead as in the west in 1940, but simply to keep them going. In the close and confused urban setting, the artillery expended ammunition rapidly amid the fierce fighting and could not always provide effective support. Maps were often inadequate – though the troops did improvise using captured maps and aerial reconnaissance – and communication difficult, with the Panzers using radio but the infantry needing to use less versatile wire connections, or even runners. Furthermore, the need to move fast left many pockets of resistance to mop up. On one occasion, the Germans had to clear Red Army troops from a wellfortified barracks from where they could observe the Germans with ease. The Soviets counterattacked with tanks no fewer than twenty times, and the German infantry lacked the ammunition with which to repel them conclusively. Two regiments were thrown in without proper medical support, and medical teams located further behind the lines became exhausted as the wounded poured in.9 Yet again, however, Stalin’s miscalculation was to gift the Wehrmacht a huge operational success just as it had further west in June and early July. He refused to allow his troops to withdraw, partly because abandoning the south would mean abandoning the Russian medieval capital of Kiev. The weight of history attached to Kiev made Stalin feel compelled to hold it. The Germans committed three infantry armies, Kleist’s Panzer Group One and Guderian’s Panzer Group Two to the task of encircling and destroying the Soviet forces in and around Kiev. During the last week in August, Army Group South was able to match Guderian’s southward turn by establishing a bridgehead at Kremenchug, 260 kilometres (163 miles) east of Kiev. The two forces completed their encirclement of the Soviet armies on 15 September, and four days later the Red Army troops in the pocket began surrendering in droves. While German claims that 665,000 prisoners were taken are probably exaggerated,10 the figure was

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clearly huge. Individual units took enormous hauls of prisoners. On 21 September, for instance, the first battalion of the 35th Infantry Regiment, serving under the 25th Infantry Division in Panzer Group Two, took 1,069 prisoners for the loss of four dead, nine wounded and four missing.11 The victory also opened up new opportunities for the Germans. The Soviets in the south were now exhausted, and Rundstedt was able to encircle and annihilate further Red Army formations in the battle of the Sea of Azov. General of Infantry von Manstein’s Eleventh Army broke into the Crimea; General von Kleist advanced on the Donbass. Army Group South’s advance also safeguarded Army Group Centre’s southern flank. Yet, predictably by now, the cost to the Germans of the whole Kiev operation was extremely high: they suffered fifty thousand killed. They could particularly ill-afford the losses the mechanized divisions had incurred – on 20 September, for instance, Panzer Group Two reported that it had lost 30 to 40 per cent of its wheeled transport. By the end of September, the Germans had lost 925,000 men on the eastern front. The losses for the campaign’s first three months were actually worse than they would be for the next three; 583,000 were lost during that period, a shortfall that the replacement system could not make up even with the somewhat lighter losses from October to December.12 ‘It is often a misused statement,’ remarked the American journalist Howard Smith, shortly after he left Germany at the end of 1941, ‘but it is true in the case of the Russian war, that Germany has been winning herself to death.’13 That the generals themselves feared this scenario is shown by the alacrity with which they now began falling out over the prospect. Commanders in Army Group South, such as Field Marshal von Reichenau and General von Weichs, criticized Field Marshal von Bock for obsessing over Moscow. Generals in Army Group Centre, such as Guderian, remained equally convinced that Moscow should always have been the priority – though Guderian had turned south readily enough after Hitler had got to work on him. And for Army Group North, Field Marshal von Leeb lamented that he had been relegated to waging ‘a poor man’s war’.14 Thus preoccupied with what was going on in their own sectors, the generals were betraying that flaw in the German command ethos that elevated operational ability at the expense of seeing the wider strategic picture. *** Between the late summer and early winter of 1941, as the front line fighting dragged on, the German army began resigning itself to occupying large parts of the Soviet Union for longer than had been planned. Some officers were prescient enough to recognize that alienating the population was counterproductive. For instance, at the start of October, General von Weichs, now commander of the Second Army, urged his subordinate formations to discriminate in their

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treatment of civilians and not to treat them all as partisans.15 The 4th Mountain Division, too, sought to treat the population with some consideration. Its intelligence section compiled a report at the end of October in which it judged the Ukrainian population as willing and accommodating.16 The divisional commander, General Eglseer, also went directly against the provisions of the Barbarossa Decree by stripping his regimental and battalion commanders of the freedom to order reprisals.17 Examples such as this were of a piece with the relative restraint that many army units had hitherto exercised towards the occupied population despite the injunctions of the criminal orders. Yet the further east the Germans advanced, the more severe the social and economic mayhem they encountered. The Soviets had uprooted not just industrial plants but also thousands of specialist workers, civil servants, doctors and managers. The damage this wrought upon the social and economic fabric of these regions was enormous. The details were described by the Einsatzgruppen, which as part of their intelligence-gathering role compiled reports on the political situation in the occupied territories. In mid-July, Einsatzgruppe B, following Army Group Centre’s advance through Belarus, reported: ‘the flight of the functionaries has brought life in general to a standstill. The population pours back to the cities in its thousands, where instead of any basis of life it finds only ruins . . . because the collective farms aren’t functioning and the depots stand empty and unoccupied, the small shops and distribution points cannot function either. Despite the harsh measures that have been put in place, plunder is universal.’18 The anti-Slavic sentiments that many officers and soldiers harboured were now hardened by the exigencies of an increasingly arduous, chaotic situation for which the army occupation forces were almost entirely unprepared. Furthermore, the military campaign’s unexpected duration led frontline units to seize supplies and accommodation from civilians on a massive scale and in an often wild, unregulated manner; the devastating effects of this would become manifest during the winter of 1941–42. Depending on their ethnicity and how useful the Germans considered them, some civilian groups suffered under the German occupation more than others. Generally, however, the increasingly brutal and rapacious character of the German occupation in late 1941 divested most of the occupied population of any illusion that the Germans were liberators. An October report by the 403rd Security Division, operating in the Army Group Centre Rear Area, outlined why the population’s initially pro-German mood was evaporating: ‘hunger, the long duration of the war, treatment of the Jews (!), punishment beatings and the scale of German administration . . . all of which, they feel, points towards the permanent subjugation and annexation of their land’.19 ***

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The general population was worst affected by the Germans’ actions over two interconnected areas: the food supply and the pacification campaign. On 5 August 1941, Einsatzgruppe B reported: ‘east of Minsk . . . the provisioning situation is catastrophic. For all supplies were destroyed by the Soviets.’20 The social and economic havoc was partly heightened by urban dwellers conducting mass foraging expeditions, or Hamsterfahrten, into the surrounding countryside. But they were also heightened by the copious requisitioning being conducted by German army troops compelled to ‘live off the land’ by their army’s own highlevel planning. For instance, the 6th Infantry Division, which served with the Ninth Army on the northern wing of Army Group Centre, needed a full 30 tons of rations each day. As one soldier from the division later recalled: ‘while in France the daily discussions were mostly about girls, in Russia we talked mostly about food’.21 One reason why Belarus felt the troops’ depredations so severely was that it was not a rich agricultural region to start with; in particular, the German troops found that fruit and vegetables were extremely scarce.22 The spoliation by German troops was not part of the systematic ‘hunger plan’ drawn up before the invasion. Indeed, military administrators in the Soviet Union were already realizing that a lengthy campaign and lengthy occupation required them to keep more of the occupied population alive and relatively healthy so that it could work for them. A more brutally pragmatic consideration was that, with the fighting still raging, the Germans did not have enough troops to cordon off the regions earmarked for starvation.23 Rather, the troops’ plundering reflected a desperate need for both rear area and frontline army units to try and reprovision themselves in advance of winter. The effects for the population as winter approached, of course, were economic misery and the spectre of starvation. A commandant under the 123rd Infantry Division, serving with the Sixteenth Army in Army Group North, described one of the desperate scenes that resulted: ‘troops . . . physically abused civilians who [tried] to protect their property. In one particularly disturbing case, a 75–year-old woman on her knees, begging mounted troops not to take her last cow, was punched repeatedly in her face.’24 To try and keep such marauding on some kind of leash, larger military formations and jurisdictions sought to introduce more systematic rationing. Yet their primary concern was to preserve not civilian lives, but the discipline and supply of their own men. Accordingly, several frontline formations sought to reduce rations for urban populations in order to give food-producing rural populations just enough to live on. By November, they were receiving highlevel direction: on 4 November, Wirtschaftsstab Ost stipulated general rations of 70 grams (2½ ounces) of fat, half a kilogram (18 ounces) of bread, and 2 kilograms (4½ pounds) of potatoes each week in the army-occupied zone. Jews and children under fourteen were to be allocated half this amount.25 Yet

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the office of Army Group South still foresaw trouble, predicting two days later: ‘ruthless use of the land for our home supply could lead to extensive hunger revolts and plunder expeditions by those population groups who are excluded from any supply.’ It also echoed Wirtschaftsstab Ost, maintaining: ‘the agricultural population who are working for us must be protected from the starving urban proletariat. With this, demands upon the security forces will increase sharply.’26 Perhaps the most upfront exhortation came from the commander of the 339th Infantry Division, a substandard fourteenth-wave formation on occupation duties: ‘all criminals and useless eaters should be wiped out’.27 By now, the threat of starvation, and the mass destruction to towns and villages inflicted by the fighting and by the Red Army’s scorched-earth policies, had together driven huge numbers of refugees into the countryside. In Kharkov, in the Ukraine, the Sixth Army’s Field Marshal von Reichenau allowed the population to head west out of the city to fend for itself. Although this risked instability and perhaps worse in the countryside, Reichenau apparently considered it preferable to keeping the ravenous population penned in, with all the increased likelihood of resistance and pestilence that this would pose. He was also concerned about the mental and material burden that the presence of so many starving civilians in the city would place upon his own men: ‘The commander of the army does not want to have a discussion about how far Wehrmacht members should freeze for the benefit of the population.’28 But in the countryside itself, the influx of civilians in search of food, together with the clusters of fugitive Red Army soldiers already at large there, alarmed the German military authorities severely. Such conditions, they feared, could provide a seedbed for nascent partisan groups. *** Even so, there was nothing resembling an effective partisan movement as yet. Resistance was particularly sparse in the north. Here, the Germans’ failure to encircle large numbers of Red Army troops meant there were few fugitive Red Army soldiers at liberty in the first place. The situation was similar in much of the Ukraine, largely because it lacked the kind of terrain from which partisans could operate. Partisans were more active in the eastern Ukraine, for here the Soviet authorities had had more time to organize an underground structure and enlist civilian support before the Germans arrived. Yet even here, the Germans were able to avoid alienating the majority Ukrainian population further by targeting their reprisals against the region’s ethnic Russians instead. Eastern Belarus provided all the conditions for the emergence of partisan groups. Its extensive rural areas encompassed copious forested, swampy terrain that was a gift to irregular fighters. The region was beset by social and economic

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chaos, and the Soviet authorities had had more time here in which to try to form partisan groups than in the more westerly areas. Eastern Belarus’s rural population was also less hostile to the Stalin regime; it had suffered under collectivization, but less horrifically than the population of the Ukraine. However, even all this was not saying much. For such had been the lack of central planning for a partisan movement that, even though partisan groups were establishing themselves in eastern Belarus by the autumn of 1941, they were largely ineffective and disorganized. Nevertheless, eastern Belarus saw a perceptible increase in partisan sabotage from late summer, and the growing presence of Soviet parachute troops. This created the conditions in which the German army’s already overburdened, apprehensive security forces began increasingly to conduct themselves in ways that invoked not just the harshness of the criminal orders, but also the legacy of the ferocious counterinsurgency campaigns the German military had waged in wars past. By now, the occupied Soviet Union was not the only setting for burgeoning resistance. On 16 September, the OKW issued a decree for all German-occupied Europe directing that a hundred hostages be shot for every German soldier whom the partisans killed, and that fifty hostages be shot for every German soldier whom the partisans wounded. Although German army units and jurisdictions in the Soviet Union did not follow this decree to the letter, they took pitiless preventive action against any groups that might conceivably form the nuclei of future partisan units. Among other things, 16 September also saw the expiry of a deadline issued by General of Infantry von Schenckendorff, commander of the Army Group Centre Rear Area, which included much of eastern Belarus. Schenckendorff had declared that every ‘escaped Red Army soldier still roaming around’ in the territory between the rivers Beresina and Dnieper was to be viewed as an irregular and shot on sight.29 The mounting brutality German army units displayed during the antipartisan campaign in eastern Belarus was driven not just by their growing fear and alarm; it was also driven by careerism. Ambitious officers at all levels would have seen that displaying a pitiless attitude to anti-partisan warfare was entirely in the spirit of the criminal orders, and therefore likely to win their superiors’ approval. Colonel Hellmuth Koch commanded the 350th Infantry Regiment, a unit that operated under the 221st Security Division in the Army Group Centre Rear Area. In August 1941, he urged that the ‘Jewish question . . . be tackled far more radically. I suggest that all Jews living in rural areas be put under guard in labour camps. Suspect elements must be eliminated.’30 In December, Koch was promoted and appointed commander of the 454th Security Division in the Ukraine.31 Another of the 221st’s field officers, a Captain Brandt, bemoaned his men’s purportedly weak-kneed attitude to anti-partisan warfare, writing in October:

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‘it is unacceptable that officers have to do the shooting whilst the men watch. Most of the men are too weak. This is a sign that the true meaning of “partisan warfare” is something they have never learned, or at least have been badly taught.’32 Brandt, it seems, was shooting prisoners personally, and his zeal seems to have done his career no harm: on 7 September, he was appointed commander of the 221st’s specialized, motorized partisan combat battalion, at that time the division’s highest-quality combat unit.33 It is worth emphasizing, in passing, that this case demonstrates that rank-and-file security troops could be less rabid in the execution of their duties. Many, if not most, probably harboured the deep aversion to partisan warfare that conventional armies share. Nevertheless, they clearly needed cajoling to be as vicious as some of their officers wished, particularly if the partisan suspects they had captured were not actually armed. Tellingly, a report on an anti-partisan warfare conference that took place in Mogilev in September 1941 stated: ‘the constant decision between life and death for partisans and suspicious persons is difficult even for the hardest soldier. It must be done. He acts correctly who fights ruthlessly and mercilessly with complete disregard for any personal surge of emotion.’34 Career-minded officers in the 221st Security Division may have been further ‘incentivized’ to severity when they compared themselves with the SS Cavalry Brigade, which began ‘cleansing operations’ in part of the 221st’s jurisdiction in September. This particularly savage unit was a trailblazer, not just for brutal anti-partisan warfare but also, more momentously, for the unfolding of the Final Solution on Soviet soil.35 Yet though the army’s own troops adhered to the ‘Jew equals Bolshevik equals partisan’ equation, practical experience now seemed to teach them that it was the increasingly disillusioned general population, not Jews, that was more likely to succour fledgling partisan groups.36 Yet although most of the population was growing bitterly disillusioned at their new masters, it still largely rejected the partisan groups now emerging in its midst. Quite apart from anything else, to support them risked merciless retaliation from the Germans. But many German units, too on edge for such considerations, instead perceived potential partisan supporters all around. Hence, for instance, a report from one of the battalions of the 286th Security Division, also operating within the Army Group Centre Rear Area, on 23 September that Bolshevik functionaries, not pro-German sympathizers, still occupied many posts in the native administration.37 And villagers need not have felt enamoured of the Soviet cause to aid partisans or Red Army fugitives. What governed their actions instead was, in Truman Anderson’s words, ‘a pragmatic day-to-day calculus of personal survival’.38 Excerpts from a partisan diary for September and October, found by one of Army Group North’s security divisions, the 281st, described villages in

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which ‘the population goes out of its way to support us’, yet others where the partisans’ requests for food were refused, but where the villagers told them heart-wrenching stories to convince the partisans of where their ‘true’ sympathies lay: ‘The farmers’ attitude is that they’d gladly help us and have no reason to be pleased at the arrival of the Germans. But “nothing doing”. The Germans frighten them that much.’39 Such cases highlighted just how conditional civilians’ cooperation was. This was hardly likely to fortify the Germans’ trust in the population. A security unit was particularly likely to treat the civilian population with indiscriminate brutality when its own fighting power was curtailed, as this made it more desperate. In October, for instance, the 403rd Security Division lost over 1,700 troops at a stroke when its artillery and some of its security units were transferred to duty elsewhere. The operations section then reported an almost immediate spike in partisan activity.40 The division’s operations officer, Captain Wilhelm, issued a directive on 11 October ordering ‘collective reprisal measures against any village where either co-operation with the partisans is uncovered, or ammunition or weapons are found’.41 And it was not just the 403rd Security Division that saw its fighting power diminish at the very same time as it saw its partisan problem dilate. For from the autumn of 1941 onwards, Army Group Centre increasingly cannibalized its security divisions, sending first their fuel supply to the front line and then, later on, their best combat units.42 As the autumn and the fighting both wore on, the army’s security units saw an increasingly urgent need to destroy potential sources of any future partisan movement before winter came. General von Schenckendorff, too, was extremely anxious to ‘prevent the movement of refugees by whatever means’, and individual commands, like Army Rear Area 580, ordered that refugees, ‘as a matter of principle, be arrested or liquidated’.43 That the army was now going after largely unarmed Red Army fugitives and civilian refugees was clearest in the yawning gap between the numbers of ‘partisans’ the Germans claimed to have killed and their own paltry losses. For instance, in the ten weeks from midSeptember 1941, the 221st Security Division claimed to have killed 1,746 partisans in combat or after capture. Its own losses comprised eighteen dead.44 *** The army’s pitiless ‘security’ campaign also became increasingly entwined with the emergence of the Final Solution. By now, SS and Police forces operating in the newly conquered areas of the Soviet Union had vastly widened their definition of which sorts of Jew constituted a security threat. The killings escalated unevenly, and for different reasons. From late July onwards,

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Einsatzgruppe units began to execute Jewish women and children, as well as all adult males. In doing so, they were both responding to signals from the SS leadership in Berlin, and fulfilling the wishes of their own ambitious commanders, who were eager for higher-level favour. Some units killed particularly large numbers of Jews because they had the means with which to do so. The SS Cavalry Brigade, a particularly mobile and well-equipped formation, had annihilated 25,000 Jews by the middle of August.45 All such SS and Police units were acting in accordance with the practical constraints they faced, the practical opportunities they enjoyed, and a Nazi leadership principle that rewarded subordinates who showed ‘radicalism’ and ruthlessness. SS and Police units took full advantage of the freedom of action that highlevel SS directives gave them, and after 17 July, when Hitler granted Himmler full authority to ‘secure the [eastern] areas by policing measures’, those orders became more radical themselves.46 Himmler believed that fully removing the Soviet Jews would help pave the way for a utopian reordering of Soviet and eastern European territory, named Generalplan Ost (General Plan East). Himmler intended this reordering, which had originally been set in train following the conquest of Poland, to reach its apogee with the conquest of Soviet territory in Europe. Its end purpose was both to exploit the east economically and settle millions of Germans within it. The bulk of the ‘racially inferior’ peoples already there would be resettled, but not before tens of millions had perished from the hunger and upheaval that the plan’s implementation would unleash. Urban dwellers, deemed to be ‘useless eaters,’ were to be hit disproportionately, while the east’s food-producing agricultural populations were put to work in German service. The intelligentsia was to be annihilated. But it was Jews, whom Nazi planners considered useless eaters and the most dangerous element of the Soviet intelligentsia, who were to be targeted most systematically. In the most anti-Semitic regions of the Baltic States and the Ukraine, local auxiliaries willingly did much of the shooting themselves, albeit at the behest of the SS. Moreover, at a conference in Posen in October 1943, Himmler would assert that it had been necessary to kill all Soviet Jews, including the children, in order to prevent a generation of avengers from growing up.47 None of this would have been possible had the army not provided the SS and Police, and their native help, with transport, accommodation, army manpower to cordon off execution areas and other logistical support. The ultimate responsibility for creating the atmosphere in which it became possible to annihilate the Soviet Jews and enmesh the army in the process was Hitler’s. Directives from the highest level set the tone. For instance, on 12 September, Field Marshal Keitel ordered ‘ruthless, energetic and drastic measures above all against the Jews, the main carriers of Bolshevism’.48 Because of the nature of their duties, rear area units were generally much more involved than frontline

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units. Particular assistance, as directed by army commanders, was rendered by the GFP, the intelligence sections of the various occupation units and jurisdictions, the Feldgendarmerie, and the Orts- and Feldkommandanturen. The Orts- and Feldkommandanturen were also charged with registering and ghettoizing Jews in the first place. In this, of course, they rendered the SS and Police invaluable service in enabling them to get at the Jews with ease. The army also helped set the administrative framework that gifted the SS and Police their increasingly free hand. In particular, General Wagner’s drastic reduction of rations for the occupied population on 21 October gave the army an even greater incentive to single out Jews as ‘useless eaters’ and allow the SS and Police to exterminate them accordingly.49 The fact that many army officers and soldiers harboured anti-Semitic sentiments was not enough in itself to convert them to the cause of mass murder. However, it did make it easier for many army personnel to persuade themselves that Jews were the security threat the SS and Police, not to mention the Barbarossa Decree, claimed them to be. The Wehrmacht’s march through the south in September heralded a particularly colossal bout of killing in the Ukraine and Crimea. The single most infamous SS and Police massacre in which the army colluded took place in late September. Einsatzgruppe C murdered 34,000 Jews in the gorge of Babi Yar outside Kiev, in the jurisdiction of the army’s XXIX Corps. Allied Hungarian troops and Ukrainian auxiliaries also took part.50 The Einsatzgruppe ensured the army’s cooperation by blaming Jews for three large fires that had broken out inside the city.51 Corporal B. of the 296th Infantry Division, stationed in Kiev at the time, certainly swallowed this story if his letter of 28 September is any guide: ‘In Kiev there’s been one explosion after another caused by mines. The town has been burning for eight days already, and the Jews have done it all. So all Jews between forty and sixty have been shot, and the Jewish women will be shot too. Otherwise there’ll be no end to it.’52 The army also readily colluded in mass killings by the Order Police; another immense mass killing, in which fifteen thousand Jews were murdered in Kharkov in December, was the work of a company of Police Battalion 314.53 In the Crimea, XXX Corps, commanded by General Hans von Salmuth, allowed Einsatzgruppe D to murder the peninsula’s Jews en masse while declaring that its Sonderkommandos were ‘proceeding harshly in the interests of security’.54 Barely any army commands opposed the massacres taking place in their midst.55 Lieutenant General Kurt Agricola, commander of the Second Army’s rear area from December 1941, tried to prevent Jews in his jurisdiction from being shot by the SS. Agricola, and probably took this strong moral stand because he was married to a Jewish woman, who spent the war in exile in South America and was reunited with him on his release from Soviet captivity in 1955.56 The revulsion felt by some officers, such as Colonel Henning von

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Tresckow, on Field Marshal von Bock’s staff at Army Group Centre, was less public but more profound in its consequences: their experience of the mass murder of Jewish men, women and children seems to have played a role in their decision to begin plotting actively to overthrow the Nazi regime by assassinating Hitler himself. Tresckow later wrote of the extermination of ‘tens of thousands of Jews . . . in the most horrible way’.57 More often, senior rear area commanders might oppose the killings, but only in a qualified manner. In doing so, they betrayed their own national conservative brand of anti-Semitism. For instance, General of Infantry Franz von Roques, commander of the Army Group North Rear Area, protested – albeit unsuccessfully – about the mass shooting of Jews, but his preferred ‘moderate’ alternative, like Field Marshal von Leeb’s, was to sterilize all male Jews.58 Some officers, well aware of what murdering all Soviet Jews irrespective of age or gender amounted to, were anxious to preserve a façade of decency. They may also have been pondering the possibility that Germany would lose the war. Other commanders still might choose to remain completely silent but also record their revulsion, or at least discomfort, in their personal writings and correspondence. Rear area commanders generally came from older age groups. Because they had experienced pre-Nazi society and retained some older conservative values, they were generally less Nazified than their younger colleagues. But while this may have led many to disapprove of, or indeed abhor, the killings, it did not generally lead them into open opposition. Rear area units also had more blood on their hands than their frontline comrades when it came to targeting Jews in the army’s anti-partisan operations. Here, however, was a particularly blurred line between front and rear, for numerous frontline units were also temporarily assigned to anti-partisan duty. Senior commanders rarely displayed qualms about targeting Jews as reprisal victims. After all, army directives and army propaganda usually depicted Jews as inciters of, and accomplices to, partisan action, or labelled Jews themselves as partisans. On this score, some units did not just follow the increasingly extreme security directives emanating from on high, but actually outdid them. Thus, while it was rare – though not unheard of – for army units to carry out or participate directly in mass executions in which over a hundred Jews were killed, the 25th Infantry Division exceeded the OKW’s instructions to shoot a hundred hostages for every German killed by irregular actions. Instead, it reported that, ‘in agreement with the Ortskommandantur, as punishment for the shooting of one officer in the Jewish quarter, 150 Jews were summarily shot and the housing sector blown to pieces’.59 Of the three commanders of the army group rear areas, Army Group Centre’s General von Schenckendorff held most strongly to the view that Jews were a security threat and used SS ‘anti-partisan’ measures as a pointer for his own men. Schenckendorff arranged the army-SS

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conference at Mogilev on 24 September, which drilled the ‘Jew equals partisan’ mantra into all who participated.60 Because of northern Russia’s relatively small Jewish population, Army Group North’s security campaign claimed relatively few Jewish lives. It was a different story with the more southerly army groups. Belarus saw the army’s most direct involvement in the mass murder of Soviet Jews. It had not only a sizable Jewish population, but also a dearth of anti-Semitic nationalists whom the Germans might have recruited as auxiliaries. It therefore fell to the army to assume a more prominent role in annihilating the region’s Jewish communities. In the civilian-administered General Commissariat of White Ruthenia, part of the new Reich Commissariat Ostland, army units were directly responsible for the murder of Jews on a particularly grand scale. The 707th Infantry Division was an extremely substandard division of the fifteenth wave that found itself in temporary overall charge of all security operations in the General Commissariat when Einsatzgruppe B moved further eastwards in mid-August. During October and November, the fanatical Nazis at the division’s head, its commander, General von Bechtolsheim, and its operations officer, Colonel von der Osten, ordered the division’s own regiments to ‘cleanse’ the countryside of Jews and Communists in the name of security, and commanded the 707th’s subordinate Order Police units to exterminate the ghettoized Jews in the territory. Von der Osten proclaimed: ‘the Jews, the spiritual leaders and carriers of Bolshevism and the Communist idea, are our mortal enemy. They are to be exterminated.’61 Not all the 707th’s officers were as murderously disposed as divisional command. Colonel Karl Andrian, commander of the 747th Infantry Regiment, was happy to use Jews as hostages, but drew the line at general massacre, and kept his head in the sand over the killings perpetrated by 707th’s Order Police units. But Colonel Josef Pausinger, who commanded the 727th Infantry Regiment, had no such qualms.The 707th and its subordinate units went on to kill over ten thousand individuals during October and November, the vast majority of whom were Jews.62 A recent in-depth study, which extensively utilizes postwar testimonies from Federal German investigations, has revealed much about the way in which German army units in Belarus, but particularly those of the 707th Infantry Division, became active components of the machinery of mass murder. The soldiers who were involved were rarely homicidal anti-Semites to start with. The men of the 707th, in particular, were too old to have undergone the especially extensive anti-Semitic conditioning to which their younger comrades had been subjected from school through the Hitler Youth, the RAD, and then the army. Yet they hailed from a society that possessed deep undercurrents of anti-Semitism from before 1933, and in which Nazi propaganda had largely succeeded in persuading the population that Jews were a social problem demanding a

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solution. Then, when the men commenced military service, the army itself got to work, seeking to ingrain within them a combination of Nazi ideology and ruthlessly utilitarian military thinking, and to reward the ‘radical’ violent action for which their conditioning had prepared them. Given how socially diverse the army’s enormous rank and file were, the army leadership could not realistically expect to indoctrinate all of them with equal thoroughness. Nevertheless, considering that so many soldiers expressed anti-Semitic sentiments in their letters, it seems that plenty were indeed receptive to extreme anti-Semitic conditioning. A further sign of this is that many senior field commanders had to issue warnings that witnessing or participating in mass executions might affect the troops’ discipline. For instance, Field Marshal von Rundstedt expressed no moral objection to the killings, but he did forbid his troops to ‘take matters into their own hands, participate in the excesses of the Ukrainian population against the Jews . . . [or] watch or photograph the measures being taken by the Sonderkommandos’.63 Soldiers may have sought to attend executions primarily out of morbid curiosity, but ingrained anti-Semitism would have helped to make the notion morally acceptable to them.The vast majority of officers in the 707th’s units smoothly implemented murderous anti-Semitic directives, if not always with the same zeal as one another. The vast majority of their men complied, albeit reluctantly in numerous cases, even if they had the option not to. A few individuals, including one company commander on behalf of his unit, refused to participate in mass killing directly, though none was punished significantly; so much for veterans’ postwar exculpatory claims that refusing orders would have brought fearful consequences. A few soldiers, for personal or moral reasons one can only speculate upon, found it within themselves to help Jews in some way or other. For instance, some men of the 727th Infantry Regiment’s seventh company supplied false work permits to Jews; this was a relatively safe way of helping them evade a massacre of Jews who were deemed to have no economic value. Some soldiers used Jewish women, in direct contravention of Nazi racial laws, as a sexual outlet, but not all their relations with Jewish women were coercive.64 However, hardly any individual refused to participate in guard duty, cordons or other forms of assistance to killing operations. The 707th’s case also shows how individual junior officers had a hand in shaping their men’s conduct. Of all the 727th Infantry Regiment’s companies, the sixth company had a particularly appalling record when it came to killing or maltreating Jews. Like all the regiment’s companies, it was of a poor standard – overaged, undertrained, and underequipped. The 707th as a whole was also overstretched; it was responsible for administering an area the size of Wales.65 The sixth company may therefore have been killing Jews partly in order to compensate for its woeful condition. But it also had a particularly fanatical company commander. Furthermore, its example shows how the

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longer a unit was exposed to mass killings, the more direct and more systematic its own involvement could then become. Very early on in the eastern campaign, the sixth company participated in a massacre of Jews in Slonim carried out by the SS and Lithuanian nationalists. Its men were ordered not to carry out the execution, but to set it up by cordoning off the area and assembling the Jews. Signs that the company’s soldiers were enjoying their work come from eyewitness accounts claiming that the men manhandled the Jews roughly on their way to the execution site, and that six of them volunteered to take part in the actual shootings. Later, the whole company diligently went about hunting down Jews who had managed to evade the execution.66 Of the 2.4 million Soviet Jews whom the Nazis murdered during the Second World War, between 450,000 and half a million were killed within the German army-administered zone in the Soviet Union, almost all during the last six months of 1941. Half that figure was killed in the Ukraine. Open protest or resistance from just a few senior commanders might have encouraged more officers further down the command chain to follow suit. It will never be known whether, and how far, such a stand might have slowed, limited, or even prevented the escalation to mass murder. Field Marshal von Bock was the only senior commander who openly protested during the campaign, and his main concern was to distance the army from what was happening rather than prevent it altogether. Senior commanders, hailing from a national conservative background, generally harboured anti-Semitic views already, and the character of the war against the Soviet Union hardened their anti-Semitism as they came to associate Jews with Bolshevism ever more strongly. They also widely believed that Jews were responsible for the worsening security situation in the occupied rear and also, as their own troops’ food supply situation worsened, that killing Jews was a quick means of closing ‘surplus mouths’.67 This was the corrupted level to which senior commanders’ increasingly unconditional support for National Socialism had now brought them. *** On the front line, as summer turned to autumn, the environment itself turned increasingly against the Germans. Their advance now faced the mud of the autumn rasputitsa, as heavy rains transformed the landscape. For the 25th Infantry Division, the weather worsened as early as 11 September. Lance Corporal Hans S. wrote: ‘the roads are in a crazy state. We can happily count on our trucks, and yet such a journey is now like a mad funfair ride.’68 On 9 November, Second Lieutenant Fritz K. of the 4th Mountain Division described how the horses in his division were wading up to their stomachs in mud.69 The environment, then, was not so much delaying the German advance as miring it.

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Troops suffering from these conditions, as well as from mounting losses and the physical and mental strain of four months’ virtually constant campaigning, were hardly going to feel they were on the cusp of victory. On 2 October, the 4th Mountain Division bemoaned the loss of many of its best commanders, platoon leaders, section leaders and specialist troops. It counted a shortfall of 130 officers, 180 NCOs and 1,800 troops, and this after the addition of two new march battalions.70 By 22 November, its troops were suffering from a litany of physical complaints, including ‘cold-related conditions, lung infections, angina, diphtheria, scarlet fever . . . and twenty cases of first- to second-degree freezing. Cases of jaundice were particularly widespread.’71 This did not mean, however, that the army was breaking down: the 25th Infantry Division, for one, reported that the health of its troops was faring reasonably well.72 Nevertheless, by the end of November, the Eastern Army was short of 340,000 men.73 By autumn, senior field commanders feared for their men’s discipline and morale, and they had good reason if the 198th Infantry Division’s case is any guide. On 1 November, the divisional commander complained of ‘a heap of violations against enforced and established orders, and also against orders that I myself particularly decreed. . . . In order to ensure the discipline and good reputation of the 198th Infantry Division, I will not tolerate this.’74 IX Army Corps declared on 5 September: ‘hard but worthwhile tasks stand before all commanders and all officers who are real men. Whoever up until now was hard, strong and self-sacrificing will not recoil when he has to behave harder still.’ It also declared that ‘the idea of a Heimatschuss (a wound serious enough to warrant sending a soldier home without being crippling) is not one that we want to see resurrected in this war’.75 One of the more successfully debilitating measures the Soviets were employing was scorched earth. Friedrich M. of the 73rd Infantry Division, advancing through the southern Ukraine, described the city of Klisseny as ‘a picture of gruesome destruction both on and off the streets. The shops burned out, the upper storeys collapsed, houses in complete ruins. The fire had burned out everything down to the cellars, and today, seven days after we took the town, the blaze was still hitting us. The Red beasts really got stuck in here. . . . They had even poured crude oil on the streets, to set fire to them and create a firewall to hinder the Germans. The water supply has been destroyed, and . . . electricity works have been blown sky-high.’76 In the eastern Ukrainian town of Stalino at the end of October, Senior Corporal Willy M. of the 4th Mountain Division described even more pertinently the impact scorched earth was having on the advancing Germans’ ability to supply themselves: ‘When the Russians pulled out they destroyed and burned everything that could be of use to us. . . . Until winter is over there will be a great shortage, for many crops have been burned also.’77

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The Soviets were also employing propaganda increasingly dexterously. They recognized that there were vast swathes of the population, particularly in rural areas, who were largely immune to old-style Communist propaganda. Instead, particularly when the Germans reached the soil of Russia proper, the Soviet propaganda machine employed nationalistic messages. Russian heroes of old such as Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible were invoked as examples for the ‘Russian’ people. Soviet propaganda also employed vicious methods, matching Nazi rhetoric about the subhuman Slavs with incitements to immense violence against the German invader. When it came to generating hatred, of course, the Germans were giving Soviet propaganda ample material to work with. After the Germans’ great operational victory at Kiev, with large concentrations of Soviet strength west of Moscow, Hitler ordered a major blow to destroy the Soviet forces before the capital, seize Moscow itself and achieve a final strategic victory – not just an operational success bringing in lots of prisoners. Thus, on 2 October, Army Group Centre launched Operation Typhoon. Army Group Centre was once more the focus of German attention and resources. Just prior to Typhoon, it had been reinforced to the tune of 1.9 million men, 1,500 Panzers – distributed across Panzer Groups Two, Three and Four – and a thousand aircraft. Facing it were 1.25 million Soviet troops of the Reserve, Western and Bryansk fronts.78 Army Group Centre had been too weak to capture Moscow after exhausting itself during and immediately following the battle of Smolensk. However, the Red Army had also exhausted itself on the central front during that fighting, and had then concentrated much of its strength against the German offensive in the south. For these reasons the Soviet defences before Moscow were weaker in October, and Army Group Centre’s prospects correspondingly stronger, than they had been in August.79 Typhoon’s first goal was to destroy the Soviet forces around Vyazma and Bryansk. Again, Soviet intelligence failed to anticipate German intentions, and Red Army high command also obliged the Germans by spreading Soviet forces too thinly. Furthermore, as well as trying to coordinate three army groups before Moscow, the Red Army was distracted by fear of further German attacks to the north and south. The encirclement that followed bagged a further 650,000 Red Army prisoners. ‘Vyazma was a battle of annihilation almost more awful than it is possible to imagine,’ wrote Major Hans R. of the 7th Panzer Division, serving under Panzer Group Three, on 15 October. ‘The encircled masses tried to break out in all directions, had no supply, no munitions, no leadership any more, and yet the deep-seated fear that all prisoners we take are shot drove them ever forward.’80 From mid-October, the Germans were advancing on Moscow itself. However, with Hitler convinced that the Red Army really was finished this time, the Germans did not unleash their full strength on the capital until they

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had finished mopping up the Vyazma-Bryansk pocket. The rasputitsa also stalled them. But, most importantly, the ferocity of the fighting had again worn the Germans out. Among other things, General of Aviators Albert Kesselring, who commanded Air Fleet Two during the battle, commented that the army’s fully tracked vehicles, including tanks, were now barely serviceable.81 Guderian wrote that, on 28 October, ‘we were informed of Hitler’s instructions that “fastmoving units should seize the Oka bridges to the east of Serpuchov” . . . . There were no “fast-moving units” anymore. Hitler was living in a world of fantasy.’82 The Luftwaffe was also under severe pressure during the Vyazma-Bryansk battles. Mud, increasing cold and mounting supply problems all made it harder to maintain aircraft. It also had to operate from primitive dirt strips, while the Red Army’s air force used permanent facilities near Moscow.83 ‘For the Russian aircraft, the cloudy days are the best,’ wrote Corporal Joseph B. of the 2nd Panzer Division on 26 November. ‘For then, there is little that our fighters and flak can do.’84 *** The triumph of Vyazma-Bryansk aside, then, the autumn of 1941 saw the Germans’ frontline advance grow ever more tortuous, and the prospects for decisive strategic success ever more tenuous. This knowledge had a marked effect upon senior frontline commanders. For the most part, senior commanders had been through years of conditioning that had laid the groundwork for their brutalization. They had been schooled in a culture of utilitarian military thinking. In some respects, their conservative worldview inured them to Nazism, but in other respects – anti-Semitism, anti-Slavism, and particularly anti-Bolshevism – it made them more susceptible. The general hubris that infected both the regime and the Wehrmacht following the fall of France made many commanders more susceptible still, especially if they had been rewarded professionally and financially in its wake. The criminal orders they had been issued, and had readily disseminated, had espoused all these values and fused them into an even starker blueprint for ruthlessness. Now, the bloody and ever more arduous conditions of the campaign itself hardened commanders’ already obdurate proclivities further, and lent their conduct an even more brutal aspect. Acute food shortages, burgeoning partisan activity, and the onset of winter all provided the push for senior rear area commanders. The prospect of a protracted winter campaign further debilitating their troops’ fighting power provided the push for senior frontline commanders. The ‘forgotten’ army group, in the north, felt the effect earliest. By autumn, the main military operation with which Army Group North was concerned was against Leningrad. Halder, unlike Hitler, considered Leningrad unimportant. It

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was in fact a major industrial centre and port; capturing it would have effectively wrapped up the whole northern part of the Barbarossa campaign and released Army Group North units to other fronts. However, the drive of General Reinhardt’s XLI Panzer Corps on Leningrad was delayed when Hitler ordered him to halt temporarily for fear that a continued advance would overstretch Army Group North’s front. In any case, Reinhardt’s corps lacked the infantry support needed to take the city swiftly. As for Leningrad itself, the Germans now had to settle down to a lengthy siege. As long as this was ongoing, there would be no end to the fighting in the north. Army Group North still wanted to take the city, but Hitler and the OKW ruled this out, citing the likely cost of the urban fighting that would be needed. Then, on 21 September, the OKW ruled that the city be sealed off, starved, and bombarded by artillery and the Luftwaffe. The survivors would eventually be interned in ghetto-like settlements in the rear area of the Eighteenth Army, and the city razed to the ground.85 In the meantime, any attempt by the city to surrender was to be rejected. ‘What do we do with a city of 3.5 million people, which is just reliant on our supply bases?’ General Wagner asked. ‘There is no room for sentiment there.’86 Field Marshal von Leeb wanted to allow Soviet civilians to pass into Soviet-held territory, but the OKW and the Eighteenth Army’s commander, General von Küchler, were opposed. Küchler also ordered his men to shoot any civilians from Leningrad who approached the German lines. Fearing for the morale of the men who would have to do the shooting, Leeb eventually felt forced to lay mines around the city.87 The Germans would eventually only abandon the siege in January 1944, by which time at least 800,000 civilians, and perhaps well over a million, had starved to death.88 The fact that Küchler was a conservative-minded officer who had condemned SS killings in Poland makes his ruthlessness over Leningrad appear all the more remarkable. But, as his decree to his troops before Barbarossa had shown, he too was shaped by that fusion of military and ideological thinking that increasingly permeated the senior officer corps. He was also under the brutalizing pressures of the campaign itself. The bitter memories of Britain’s naval blockade of Germany during the First World War may also have hardened Küchler’s attitude. And it was probably no coincidence that Leningrad and its surrounding region were situated in Great Russia: in the racial pecking order into which the Nazis arranged the Soviet Union’s population, Great Russians were only one step up from Jews. Moreover, as the campaign became bogged down, some frontline commanders came to believe the troops needed fortifying for the longer, harder struggle that seemed to lie ahead. Blaming ‘Jewish Bolsheviks’ for prolonging Soviet resistance at the front and in the rear might create a particularly potent hate figure with which to stoke the troops’ ideological spirit further. It could

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also help to ensure smoother cooperation between army and SS units over the latter’s mushrooming campaign of mass murder against the Soviet Jews. All this certainly seems to have figured in Field Marshal von Reichenau’s thinking when he issued a general order to his Sixth Army in the Ukraine on 20 November: ‘The soldier must have complete understanding for the necessity of the harsh but just atonement of Jewish sub-humanity. This has the further goal of nipping in the bud rebellions in the rear of the Eastern Army which, as experience shows, are always plotted by the Jews.’89 Judging by the subsequent conduct of several of his subordinate units, Reichenau’s decree had some effect. For instance, the 62nd Infantry Division’s 119th Infantry Regiment shot 140 Jews and ‘bandits’, and the 75th Infantry Division claimed to have shot 1,131 people between 24 October and 21 December.90 Other Sixth Army units used the freedom of action open to them to steer a somewhat more measured course. ‘The pursuit and extermination of partisans and their accomplices is to be carried out with ruthless harshness’, declared LI Corps. ‘It is unavoidable that sometimes the innocent will suffer also.’ But the corps clearly did not want this to be a green light for unbridled savagery, for it also stated: ‘despite all harshness, the punishment methods must not lead to general butchery and burning of villages by individual soldiers’.91 By the same token, however, Reichenau used his own freedom of action to whip subordinates into line: around the same time, he intervened against the 295th Infantry Division’s chief of staff, Colonel Hellmuth Groscurth, who had ordered a stay of execution of a number of Jewish orphans. Reichenau ordered: ‘the action that has already begun is to be carried out purposefully’.92 Generals Hoth and von Manstein issued similar decrees to Reichenau and, it seems, with similar motives. Hoth derided any ‘compassion and weakness’ towards the population as misguided, and described Russia as ‘not a European, but an Asiatic state. Each step in this unhappy, enslaved land teaches us this difference. Europe, and especially Germany, must be liberated for ever from this pressure and from the destructive forces of Bolshevism.’93 Manstein’s order, issued to the troops of his Eleventh Army, asserted that the German soldier ‘marches forth also as a carrier of a racial conception and as an avenger of all the atrocities which have been committed against him and the German people’.94 Manstein was apparently well aware of the extent of Einsatzgruppe D’s killings in the Eleventh Army’s jurisdiction, and may well have been seeking to impress more emphatically upon his troops the view that the killings were a necessary military measure. Indeed, the Eleventh Army’s own Field Gendarmerie and GFP units shot many Jews themselves in anti-partisan actions. Manstein may also have sought to persuade his troops to accept the ‘surplus mouths’ argument for killing Jews. The single worst case of killing in the Eleventh Army’s jurisdiction was to take place at Simferopol, where

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Einsatzgruppe D murdered 10,000 Jews between early December 1941 and mid-February 1942. The Eleventh Army’s quartermaster directly intervened to get the executions sped up, and the ‘surplus mouths’ motive certainly drove him, for he saw in the executions a means of preventing shortages of food and accommodation.95 However formidable Manstein’s military qualities, then, there was no moral quality to his stance over the ‘war of annihilation’ against ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’. Divisional commands also placed increasing importance on ideological instruction; the 129th Infantry Division was just one formation that issued the pamphlet ‘Ideological Instruction and Spiritual Care in the Army’ to its companies. It also recommended lecture themes for the troops including ‘The Nordic Race’, ‘The German People’, ‘The German Reich’, ‘German Living Space’ and ‘National Socialism as a Foundation’.96 Maintaining the troops’ morale became even more important with the prospect of a long campaign, but it needed more than ideological admonitions. Corporal Werner F. of the 12th Panzer Division, advancing on Tichwin in northern Russia, described such efforts in a letter of 10 November. ‘On our journey yesterday along particularly bad routes we saw nice signs, some of the scrawlings on which I can recount: “It’s a joy to be alive!” or “Always look for the sun behind the clouds.” There were other more vulgar ones which I won’t recount.’97 Pastoral care was crucial also. This was easier to provide for those formations already transitioning into static war. On 20 November, the Sixteenth Army’s intelligence section detailed its provisions for the troops’ free time as well as their ideological-political education: newspapers, reading material, films, displays, and proper arrangements for leisure time, as well as sports and various kinds of competition including ‘photo competitions, literary, musical, crafts, art, technical, performing arts, chess, sport, [and] kitting out accommodations’. Political and military instruction was provided by the army’s field newspaper. But though the Sixteenth Army had the time to address its troops’ pastoral care, there were many respects in which it lacked the resources: its propaganda company had three film cars, but the army wanted one such car for each division. Nor was it possible to provide visiting KdF groups with enough transport, accommodation, and performance space. More generally, given the restrictions under which KdF groups had to operate, the army wanted to enable its troops to provide more of their own entertainment: ‘in every regiment, certainly in every division, there are numerous soldiers with particular gifts and training in music, drama, art, recitations, etc.’ It called for one soldier in every unit to be appointed as a sort of entertainments manager, with a brief among other things to set up a soldiers’ choir, an instrumental group, and if possible a theatre group. Yet Nazi ideology still tainted these more run-of-themill morale-boosting efforts. For instance, the intelligence section opined that

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kitting out accommodation rooms properly would not only keep the troops busy, but would also enable them to showcase their clean, tidy quarters to the locals in comparison with the supposed chaos and filth of Bolshevism.98 *** From mid-November, Army Group Centre’s increasingly exhausted formations had scant time for such efforts. For it was then that they resumed their flagging advance on Moscow for the last time. It only really got going again because General Halder, believing that the Soviets finally had been smashed this time, pushed for the attack. This judgment, like many of the OKH’s before, was based on poor intelligence that underestimated Russian numbers.99 The Germans were really only able to move at all because the ground froze in early November. ‘General Mud has been relieved,’ announced Lieutenant Richard D. of the 7th Panzer Division in a letter of 12 November. ‘We saw out the last big battle with him, and now we can travel over the meadows.’100 Panzer Groups Three and Four advanced to the line of the Moscow-Volga Canal, and by 28 November, the German units nearest Moscow were 56 kilometres (35 miles) north of the Kremlin.101 But winter’s arrival portended calamity. In the north, on 6 December, Corporal Werner F. described temperatures of minus 30 degrees even in the sunshine – ‘a barbaric cold’.102 XXXIX Corps, to which the division was subordinated, issued OKH guidelines on how to avoid freezing: ‘Leave no one behind on the march. . . . Hay and straw on the floor of vehicles. . . . No sitting in the snow. . . . Hug comrades on top of trucks, change places, run around, extensive footwear. Insoles, don’t lace up too tightly, enclose feet in rags or newspaper.’103 So confident of victory had OKH planners been that they had made no plans for providing winter clothing and antifreeze for mechanized vehicles. Supplies of all kinds were running chronically low; the German supply system was prioritizing guns and ammunition, but such now were the demands of the campaign that even these could not be provided in the quantities needed. By early November, the transport system in the German-occupied Soviet Union had reached the limits of its capacity, and one month later 70 per cent of German locomotives were out of action due to the cold.104 All this meant there could be no respite for the exhausted formations at the front: so severe were attrition rates among the Panzer divisions, for instance, that, by 18 November, Panzer Group Two’s strength was down to 150 tanks from a peak of around a thousand.105 These were among the reasons why, despite coming so close to Moscow, German frontline operations finally ground to a halt during the second half of November. Panzer Group Two was supposed to be driving on the main rail hub

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south of Moscow, but much of its dwindling force was still tied up clearing the Vyazma-Bryansk pocket. Panzer Group Three and the Ninth Army needed to divert forces to link up with Army Group North, for it was now the Red Army that was attacking here, and the Sixteenth Army formations facing it were blighted by mounting losses and dwindling supply. An even more ominous development unfolded on Army Group South’s front, when Rostov became the first major Soviet city to be recaptured by the Red Army during the eastern campaign. As the army neared crisis point, generals in the field did not rise to the occasion and pull together; instead, they further betrayed their immediate concerns and their disregard for the bigger picture, and fell out even more loudly than before. In Army Group Centre, Panzer generals like Guderian continued to blame infantry generals like Kluge for making timid, sluggish progress. One thing Army Group Centre generals did agree on was that their colleagues in Army Groups North and South were letting them down by not supporting the drive on Moscow. Colonel General Adolf Strauss, commander of the Ninth Army, also accused Field Marshal von Bock of unclear leadership. And Strauss had a point, for although Bock was pushing on towards Moscow, he also feared that pushing on would lead to ‘a soulless front clash with an enemy who it seems commands inexhaustible reserves of men and material; it must not come to a second Verdun’.106 Bock was also aware how little time was left before the matter would be decided, either one way or the other; on 23 November, he declared to the OKH: ‘the clock stands at five to twelve’.107 General Halder ordered Army Group Centre on, mindful of Germany’s defeat in France on the River Marne in 1914, a setback that had ended its offensive in the west and heralded the onset of trench warfare. Halder now urged a decisive battle ‘where the last battalion to be thrown in settles it’.108 But Halder was driving the troops on, in the face of stiff Soviet resistance, dwindling supply and rapidly worsening winter conditions, at a time when it was increasingly apparent that the Red Army was massing powerful forces for a counterattack.109 Halder himself blamed Field Marshal von Brauchitsch for the mounting difficulties. In view of the field marshal’s less than sturdy support over Halder’s strategic objectives, the general’s frustration was at least partly understandable. But Halder was ignoring his own myopic fixation with the Soviet capital and the practical obstacles he had for too long disregarded. Similarly, despite German military intelligence’s admittedly lacklustre performance, the blame he heaped upon its failure to assess the Red Army opponent was not entirely justified. Halder was ignoring the real practical burdens intelligence was now labouring under. The Luftwaffe, which already lacked sufficient reconnaissance aircraft, was becoming too overstretched to provide any useful intelligence,

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particularly now that it faced increasingly effective Soviet air defence. Moreover, the dictates of immediate necessity were sending many army intelligence officers to the front, or to operations and quartermasters’ sections.110 Even Guderian concluded, on 20 November, that Panzer Group Two was too weak to reach Moscow.111 For so long one of the most cocksure German commanders, he became one of the most despondent as he withdrew his spearheads into defensive positions on 6 December.112 By now, in fact, all three of the Panzer groups advancing on Moscow had been battered to a standstill by ferocious Soviet resistance and the still more ferocious winter weather – though, of course, the Germans were only caught by the weather because they had failed to reach Moscow sooner. The Germans’ final drive on Moscow had failed, though it is unclear how much good it would have done them had they reached the city. Moscow’s fall would probably not have been fatal to the Soviet effort on its own. Its loss as a major transport and administration hub would certainly have caused disruption, but the Soviet administration would still have functioned, and so too would the arms factories beyond the Urals. And the Red Army, with its rail network intact, would probably have had little difficulty in establishing a new defence line further east. However, Stalin and the Stavka were still terrified about the possible consequences if the Germans reached Moscow. It was this that lay behind their constant efforts to counterattack and the immensely high losses they were prepared to endure.113 General Konstantin Rokossovsky, commanding the Soviet Sixteenth Army on the direct route to Moscow, commented after the war: ‘the army’s defences were spread so thin that they threatened to burst. It took feats of troop juggling to prevent this from happening.’114 But it was the thinning of the front line, however perilous an undertaking it might be, that was enabling the Red Army both to draw in the Germans further and to amass the reserves that now stood ready to counterattack. Unlike previous Red Army counterattacks, this one would face utterly depleted German forces. *** By now, nearly a quarter of the German force that had invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June were casualties in one way or another. On that date, the German army in the east, or Ostheer, and its European allies had outnumbered the Red Army in the Western Military District by about 1.4 to 1. By 1 December, the Red Army outnumbered its opponents by 1.23 to 1.115 The historian David Stahel has coined the term ‘National Socialist military thinking’ to describe a mentality that, aping that of Hitler himself, believed that sheer willpower could overcome concrete military and material obstacles. This, according to Stahel,

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helps explain why the generals failed to halt their offensive against Moscow and dig in on the defensive sooner. By 5 December, the day the Red Army finally counterattacked before Moscow, the generals no longer had a measurable military objective in mind: attacking for its own sake was the objective now. And although several generals, including Bock and Guderian, had increasingly grave doubts about the wisdom of continuing the offensive, they fully committed their forces to it.116 That same day, the Soviet counterattack before Moscow began to unfold, with the main initial effort by four armies of the Western Army Group.117 Although both sides were suffering from the weather, the Red Army had a fully working railway system behind its lines.118 In most sectors the Germans resisted fiercely, but it was not long before the Red Army, on Stalin’s orders, was increasing the scale of its offensive, eventually to encompass over a million men in front of Moscow together with numerous subsidiary offensives elsewhere along the eastern front.119 Over the following weeks, Army Group Centre was pushed back over 200 kilometres (125 miles) in places. Now it was the Germans’ turn to practise scorched earth, as they sought desperately to stem the Soviet advance. The German offensive against Moscow had already been halted before 5 December. With it had come the Wehrmacht’s first failed campaign of the entire war. The Soviet counterattack emphatically underlined that failure. *** The so often woeful performance of the Red Army between August and November 1941 was caused by the same failings that had beset it during the summer. Above all, the Soviet leadership’s conduct of operations on the southern front and, to an extent, on the central front remained lamentable compared with that of the Germans. All this fuelled German hopes that the Red Army was indeed on the verge of collapse. But while the Germans themselves continued to show the same operational and tactical excellence as before, their overall progress was flagging. Many German generals began to doubt that they could finish off the Red Army before winter. Yet they pushed their troops on all the same. As they did so, the Soviet Union’s size, resources and environment played an ever greater role in slowing them and in grinding down their strength relative to the Red Army’s. These problems might have been avoided, or at least reduced, had the German army leadership been far-sighted enough to organize its logistics much more thoroughly. The Red Army’s defence, flawed as it was, proved resilient when it mattered most. And as it did so, sheer power of will – a central tenet of National Socialist military thinking – replaced sound operational practice as the main

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3. The eastern front, winter 1941/2

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underpinning of the German generals’ conduct of the military campaign. More fundamentally, the flawed conception of the military campaign, and the widening chasm between the Germans’ means and what they were trying to achieve, were the fault not just of Hitler, but also of the OKH and of Halder in particular. In the face of looming strategic disaster, the German army’s anti-Bolshevism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Slavism increasingly came to the fore. The criminal orders had already extolled them; now, the increasingly arduous course of the campaign intensified them, and helped to ensure that frontline formations reacted to the mounting pressures they faced in an ever more ruthless fashion. Moreover, as the fighting at the front dragged on, the occupied areas saw a decline in social and economic order and the first increase in partisan resistance. The Germans’ now increasingly brutal and rapacious occupation policies both caused this state of affairs, and were in turn exacerbated by it. Not all rear area units comported themselves with uniform harshness, but the ruthless trend was unmistakable. This was also part of the backdrop to the spiralling murder of Soviet Jews by the SS, an undertaking that would have been impossible without army back-up. It was an undertaking to which commanders gave their support partly because they believed in the ‘Jew-Bolshevik’ equation. But although this was an essential precondition of their cooperation, what made them prepared to go the extra distance to assist and sometimes perpetrate mass murder was their brutally warped, increasingly desperate perception of what was needed to keep the occupied rear pacified and their men supplied. Moreover, whether against Jews or any other wellspring of resistance real, potential or imagined, the combined influence of National Socialist charismatic leadership and the army’s own Auftragstaktik created an attitude that equated ruthlessness with resourcefulness and initiative. The conservative attitudes of many senior commanders at the front and in the rear proved of little or no hindrance to the army’s increasingly brutal conduct. Indeed, the fact that conservative-minded officers had themselves long held Jews and Slavs in a measure of contempt, and positively abhorred Bolshevism and irregular warfare, made the worsening conditions of the eastern campaign even more likely to radicalize them. The ongoing ferocity of the fighting in the east, and the mounting frustration army commanders felt at their continued failure to defeat the Red Army decisively, hardened their conduct even further, and drove them to exhort their men to conduct themselves in a similarly harsh fashion. If German army units had not always been true to the spirit or letter of the criminal orders earlier in the campaign, then, this was now changing. As for the troops themselves, where they hailed from, and how old they were, were just two of the forces that could still influence just how brutally, or otherwise, they reacted to their situation.

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Indeed, the fact that senior field commanders saw fit to issue ideologically priming orders during the autumn of 1941 shows that they themselves recognized that their troops did not uniformly adhere to the ruthless dictums of Germany’s war in the east. Nevertheless, the troops had been subjected to extensive if varying degrees of military and ideological conditioning before the campaign. Now the ever more desperate, overexerted troops at the front and in the rear were facing conditions that, combined with their conditioning, were to brutalize them increasingly.

CHAPTER TEN

RESISTANCE AND REACTION, 1941 WESTERN EUROPE AND SOUTHEAST EUROPE

D

uring the second half of 1941, the ripple effects of the invasion of the Soviet Union spread through occupied Europe. Across the continent, Communist movements had been very quiet since the signing of the Nazi– Soviet pact. But after 3 July, when Stalin called for Communists across Europe to take up arms against the Axis occupier, they took their place at the forefront of efforts to galvanize resistance. They did not succeed; although resistance did increase in parts of occupied Europe, it was still too haphazard and piecemeal, still too lacking in popular support, to have any long-term effect. But it did sow some of the seeds of the growing resistance the Germans faced from 1942 onwards. And it already had one dramatic effect in 1941: where resistance was on the rise, the German army retaliated by hardening its security policy. Its reprisals also targeted Jews. In this respect particularly, what happened in the occupied territories was also shaped by increasingly brutal impulses emanating from Berlin. ***

In western European countries where resistance threatened, the Germans had to ease the burden on their own overstretched security forces by relying extensively upon local police and collaborationist forces. They even had to rely upon ordinary inhabitants, whom they often made responsible for guarding rail and telephone lines.1 As resistance increased following Operation Barbarossa, military administrations that had hitherto countered resistance with restraint now started to retaliate more ruthlessly, whether against actual resistance or against the Jewish ‘agitators’ supposedly orchestrating it. The Military Government in Brussels had Jews in its sights within weeks of the invasion of the Soviet Union, as it sought to close the gap between its antiSemitic measures and those of the Military Government in Paris. This was

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regardless of the fact that Belgium’s Jewish population was so proportionally small. ‘Despite their relatively small significance,’ reported Reeder’s administrative department in July 1941, ‘a systematic proceeding against the Jews was necessary, in order to come into line with how they are handled in other areas occupied or influenced by Germany. To this end, Jewry’s participation in the economy was registered with numerical precision, and [Jews] were excluded from all public offices and positions.’ Jews and their economic concerns were systematically registered, and German administrators were placed in charge of those Jewish business where the Germans had a particular interest. Moreover, German civilian and police agencies did all the paperwork themselves, for, according to Reeder, ‘the Belgian authorities cannot be expected to work loyally on this.’2 The Military Government thus employed its own agency, a Treuhandgesellschaft, to do the job instead. In November 1941, the Military Government established an association of Belgian Jews in order to help promote and facilitate Jewish ‘emigration’ – a euphemism for deportation to the east. The Military Government also vociferously targeted Communists in the wake of Barbarossa. In October 1941, General von Falkenhausen announced that, if culprits for a resistance act could not be found among non-Communist circles, then Communists themselves should be used as reprisal victims. He justified this measure, just as military colleagues in the east were justifying it, with the claim that Communists were ‘the intellectual orignators’ of resistance. He charged the Brussels branch of the Security Police and SD with the task of carrying out the reprisals.3 The hardening ripple effects of the invasion of the Soviet Union were especially clear in the case of the Military Government in Paris.The Military Government had hitherto decreed that only regional commanders could seize hostages and order actual executions, and that they must consider alternative penalties first. Hostages taken as insurance should only be shot for acts committed after they had been seized, and then by order of General von Stülpnagel himself. The executions then had to be explained to the general public so that it fully understood the consequences of hostile acts. But there was one important respect in which these regulations, and the follow-up regulations issued in March 1941, already suggested the harsher hostage policy that the Military Government would enact later in 1941. They stressed the principle of collective responsibility – in other words, the Germans would respond to hostile acts by collectively punishing communities rather than diligently seeking out actual culprits.4 From the autumn of 1941, the SOE and Charles de Gaulle’s London-based Free French were steadily infiltrating agents and making contact with the resistance in France itself. Yet this kind of resistance, dependent as it was on still patchy Allied support, was slow to develop. The more dramatic development in

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occupied France during the second half of 1941 was the sudden spike in acts of sabotage and assassination committed by French Communists from July onwards. The Military Government did not harden its security policy straight away. Between late August and early September, three German military personnel were killed in separate attacks. Hitler urged a ruthless response, but Otto von Stülpnagel ordered the shooting of ten people, far fewer than Hitler wanted to see executed. Stülpnagel also selected the victims from the pool of prisoners already convicted for some other activity by a military court. Then came the OKW directive of 16 September decreeing that a hundred hostages were to be shot for every German killed. Even now, Stülpnagel tried to keep hostage executions to a minimum. He maintained, correctly, that limiting the number of executions was encouraging the French authorities to cooperate because it was all that was needed to remind them of the consequences of not cooperating. To the OKH he was more forthright still, declaring that he was finding the situation ‘unbearable’.5 He also told the OKH that hostage shootings on the scale envisaged by the 16 September directive made no political sense and ran counter to the guidelines that had been issued around the time of the 1940 armistice. Temporarily Stülpnagel was able to get away with this line because both Hitler and the OKH were so focused on Operation Typhoon.6 Then the Communists escalated their attacks again. Unteroffizier Arnold N., working in the Military Government’s offices in Paris, reflected on the change in the air as fear increasingly plagued German soldiers, and the Military Government sought to restrict their contact with French civilians: ‘The soldiers’ cafés now play a much bigger role than in the summer. We meet there and chat in our free time. In general, we are increasingly detaching ourselves from the population. We can go days without speaking a word of French. . . . Yesterday, I was with two old comrades in the court of Montmartre, although the Kommandantur has advised German soldiers not to go there due to the assassinations.’7 In late October, Stülpnagel again pleaded that shooting hostages only damaged collaboration and that more effort should go into finding the actual culprits. ‘I personally have warned against Polish methods in France,’ he stressed.8 However, with great reluctance, Stülpnagel now finally ordered the execution of a total of two hundred hostages across two cities, Nantes and Bordeaux. Even this was milder than the scale of executions and financial penalties that Hitler was ordering. Nevertheless, Stülpnagel was, finally, escalating reprisal policy. On 23 October, Arnold N. wrote: ‘in recent days there was another murder, this time in Nantes: Feldkommandant himself!’ This was the relatively easy-going Lieutenant-Colonel Hotz. ‘Unconscionable murderers – Communists, possibly even enemy agents. The reprisals are awful as well. Fifty French hostages have been shot. And now, at midnight, it’s two hours and

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twenty minutes before another fifty are shot if the murderers of the German lieutenant colonel from Nantes are not found. Dread is seeping through the French people . . . and I just heard that an officer has been murdered in Bordeaux. Will twenty people die for this, or will the number be raised again? Here, mercy is seen as weakness.’9 By 24 October, the first two batches of fifty hostages had been shot. There followed a chaotic few days, filled by appeals from the Vichy government for the French population to cooperate with the Germans, a pledge from Pétain to have himself taken hostage in place of the remaining hundred existing hostages, de Gaulle’s appeal to his followers – such as they were – to stand down from further attacks, and Germans fears for how the executions were playing in neutral countries. Amid all the confusion, Stülpnagel was able to buy time for an investigation that actually succeeded in arresting a culprit in Nantes. Hitler then suspended the execution of the remaining hundred hostages.10 Then came yet another fresh wave of Communist guerrilla actions. Most prominently, three German soldiers were blown up as they emerged from the Hôtel de Média in Paris in November, and the following month a Luftwaffe major was assassinated. Stülpnagel now faced renewed pressure to adopt a much harsher line from several directions at once, including the OKH, Göring and Best, the head of the administrative subsection within the Military Government. Pressure also came from new regulations emanating from Berlin. That same month, December 1941, Hitler instructed the OKW to subject the western European territories (save Denmark) to the ‘Night and Fog’ Decree. This new measure made it possible for foreign nationals to be spirited away and put on trial in Germany, or simply handed over to the Gestapo and sent on to a concentration camp. The OKW maximized the fear factor surrounding the decree by imposing a blackout of any information concerning individuals who had been seized.11 A grisly example of what the Night and Fog Decree meant for its victims was the fate of eleven men and six women from the southern French resistance group ‘Combat.’ The men were beheaded by the axe in Cologne in October 1943, while the women were sent to concentration camps where all but two of them died.12 Such were the demands now bearing down on Stülpnagel from both Berlin and Paris that he acquiesced again, hardening his hostage policy and this time directing it against Jews. The Military Government had consistently singled out Jews as a potential security threat since the start of the occupation. In 1940, for example, it expressed concern that German soldiers were frequenting Jewish shops. In 1941, unrest in Paris, Lyon, and Marseille following a series of food shortages was blamed mostly on Jews, and in August and September, several thousand Jews were arrested for possessing firearms, illegal leaflets, and other contraband.13 Now, in December, Stülpnagel agreed to impose a fine of

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one billion Reichmarks on the French Jewish community, execute a hundred Jews immediately and deport a further 1,500.14 It is not clear how much Stülpnagel knew about the deportees’ possible fate. On the one hand, foreigners had been regularly deported to Germany for labour during the First World War, and, in December 1941, killing Jewish deportees to the east had yet to become general policy. On the other hand, the Night and Fog Decree was clear as to the fate of its victims.15 Stülpnagel again sought to water down the severity of the reprisals. Although he ordered the execution of a hundred Jews, he otherwise attempted to backpedal to a policy in which the authorities would seek predominantly to break the resistance through criminal investigations, and execute ‘only’ limited numbers of hostages. Stülpnagel’s aversion to mass executions was genuine; Ernst Jünger, the learned author who served as an officer in the Military Government, observed that the policy left the general ‘unnerved and profoundly shaken’.16 Stülpnagel also claimed that transportation problems and the security risk of sending young Communists eastwards rendered deportations impossible at the present time.17 Stülpnagel did, however, assure the OKW that the Military Government would arrest and deport further Jews once transport was available: ‘Another form of atonement is necessary for attacks against Wehrmacht personnel, that is to say, through limited executions, above all through the evacuation of most communists and Jews to the east, when we are able to reach it. Based on my knowledge of the French population, I believe this deterrence, and not mass executions, will work.’18 And in an order of 14 December, he asserted: ‘These measures in no way affect French people, but rather just those individuals who are in the service of Germany’s enemies, who seek to plunge France into ruin, and who are intent on thwarting Franco-German reconciliation.’19 Speidel backed Stülpnagel and argued that, though the Germans should conduct reprisals, they should also offer the French concessions. But Stülpnagel had run out of road. Whatever the ambiguities of his actual position, Hitler now considered him a Francophile and, even more damningly in the Führer’s eyes, a soft touch. Keitel at the OKW and Wagner at the OKH also joined the growing chorus calling for a more ruthless reprisal policy in France.20 In February 1942, Stülpnagel finally resigned over the pressure he faced to continue the executions. His resignation letter maintained: ‘without this trust and freedom of action, the position of the Military [Governor] in the occupied areas becomes more difficult, leads to weighty conflict of conscience, and undermines my energy, self-confidence, and determination.’21 It may be tempting to conclude that Otto von Stülpnagel was an officer who embodied the more virtuous characteristics of the officer corps’s old-school conservatism. But this was only true up to a point. The Military Government

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discriminated against Jews in numerous ways under Stülpnagel’s command, and in some respects did so with relatively little pressure from above. If there were limits to Stülpnagel’s anti-Semitism and to how far he was willingly prepared to go after the Jews – mass shootings were a course of action that he tried to resist or at least restrict – his attitude towards deportations casts him in a less benign light. However, as an at least semi-reluctant instrument of Nazi racial and security policy, Stülpnagel contrasts with some of his markedly more ruthless colleagues in the newly occupied Balkans during 1941. *** The most senior officer overseeing German occupation in the Balkans was the Wehrmacht commander southeast, who also commanded the Twelfth Army. Until July 1942, before he was appointed commander of Army Group A on the eastern front, Field Marshal Wilhelm List held the post. Because Hitler had never intended to conquer Yugoslavia, and wanted to commit as many troops as possible to the east, he sought to place much of the occupation burden on to some of Germany’s European allies and satellites – Hungary, Bulgaria and, predominantly, Italy. In Greece, the Germans retained a presence, for strategic reasons, in the part of Thrace around Salonika, in western Crete, and in the area surrounding and including Athens and Piraeus. The Italians occupied most of the rest of Greece, though Bulgaria annexed part of the north. A Greek civilian government under Lieutenant General Georg Tsolakoglou was to operate under Axis ‘supervision’.22 Hitler did not earmark Greece for particularly harsh treatment. Nazi racial ideology held Greeks in relatively high regard; Hitler respected them as descendants of the founders of Western civilization and as doughty opponents in the recent military campaign. True to this spirit, when the Greek army capitulated in the spring of 1941, the OKW made a special point of instructing the troops to treat Greek POWs correctly.23 However, from the start, some German soldiers found Greece a disagreeable contrast with what they were used to. In mid-May 1941, with the occupation a few weeks old, Lance Corporal Joseph B. of the 2nd Panzer Division wrote: ‘in Elensis, a boy with eggs came up to us. He wanted ten drachmas, or twenty Pfennigs per egg. We sent him packing, I can tell you. We often take the wares from such people and pay absolutely nothing.’ He then added: ‘the rabble here is very inclined towards thievery,’ entirely missing the irony of the contrast between this and his previous sentence. ‘The day before yesterday, a Greek policeman trying to stamp it all out smoothly shot a woman on the street. The conditions here are quite something!’24 Negative views of Greece as a backward den of criminality were not necessarily widespread among German troops at the start of the occupation. They say

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more about the narrow-mindedness of the soldiers who harboured them than about anything else. Nor, however, were such views entirely harmless: the soldiers who did harbour them doubtless believed in Germany’s cultural superiority, and their stance would harden when Greek resistance to the Axis occupiers increased from 1942 onwards. Indeed, an emerging resistance movement was made even more likely by Greece’s mountainous terrain and long tradition of fighting foreign occupiers. Crete in the summer of 1941 was the first setting for Greek civilian resistance and brutal Wehrmacht countermeasures. On this occasion, the reprisals were the work of Luftwaffe paratroopers fresh from conquering the island. Resistance began flourishing on the mainland partly because of the devastating economic conditions that afflicted wartime Greece. The country, like other occupied countries, was forced to pay the Germans’ occupation costs. The Wehrmacht compelled the Greeks to provide interest-free loans, and also burdened them with the cost of massive construction programmes for German air and naval forces. By the end of the occupation in October 1944, circulating banknotes would reach a value approaching three trillion drachmas. Greece’s suffering was particularly acute because it relied extensively on imports, imports of which it was deprived as long as the British continued their naval blockade. Such was the state of Greece’s infrastructure that distributing food around the country was difficult enough in peacetime, but when Bulgaria seized its grain surplus, some regions faced a catastrophic food situation as their bread supply disappeared entirely. During the winter of 1941–42, 360,000 Greeks died of famine.25 ‘Have you heard about the lack of food in Greece?’ wrote Lieutenant Peter G. of the 714th Infantry Division in March 1942. ‘In Athens, two hundred people die of starvation every day. That’s a fact! They’re dropping dead in the street. . . . And most of the country is just steppe. How is the population supposed to feed itself!?’26 Even more Greeks would have died had the British not relaxed their blockade somewhat and allowed in emergency aid from the International Red Cross.27 Resistance to the Axis occupation would begin to spread across the whole of Greece in 1942. But in 1941, the main centre of anti-Axis resistance in southeast Europe was Yugoslavia. It was here that merciless pragmatism would combine with Nazi ideology to forge a security policy much more ruthless than anything Otto von Stülpnagel would have countenanced. *** Multi-ethnic Yugoslavia, like Greece, had never figured in Hitler’s long-term plans, so he committed minimal German forces to its occupation and left most of the burden to the Italians, Axis satellite states or collaborationist native

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administrations. The occupation of Yugoslavia was therefore weak and fragmented from the start, and helped to create the conditions not just for antiAxis resistance, but also for the enmities between Yugoslavia’s many mutually antagonistic ethnic and political groups to sow bloody chaos across much of the country. The Italians proved particularly inept administrators. They exploited the economic resources of their territory severely and sought arrogantly to foist Italian culture upon it, and yet lacked the military strength to keep it under control. The Germans too exploited the country’s economic resources energetically. They gained access to militarily important materials such as asbestos, iron ore and zinc; they particularly valued the bore copper mines at Nis in Serbia.28 The Germans deported few Serbs to the Reich itself, because they needed manpower for Serbia’s own mining industry. But their requisitioning of food, together with the British naval blockade, unleashed enormous supply problems: by the end of 1942, for instance, only a quarter of Serbia’s urban population was being supplied with bread.29 These conditions too would become a recipe for resistance. Moreover, the topography of Yugoslavia’s mountainous regions made them ideal guerrilla country. From the end of August 1941, the rump Serbian state was officially governed by a German-controlled regime headed by former Yugoslav army general Milan Nedić. The practical reality, however, was that Serbia was under the full military jurisdiction of Serbia Command. Accordingly, Serbia saw the Germans’ strongest military presence in occupied Yugoslavia in 1941, encompassing three occupation divisions, some substandard territorial battalions, and a series of Kommandanturen of various sizes. The Germans also retained an additional division in the largest area of the former Yugoslavia, the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, or NDH). The NDH was governed by the extremist Fascist Ustasha regime, which the Axis had installed because it could not find a saner alternative. Although the Germans and Italians stationed occupation troops in the NDH, it was nominally an independent allied state. In Serbia, the German occupation’s early months were relatively quiet, and the army’s occupation formations restrained in their treatment of the population. Serbia Command’s intelligence section observed that the population ‘acknowledged German order and the disciplined behaviour of Wehrmacht personnel’.30 The important exception, here as in the Soviet Union, was the country’s Jews. Wehrmacht authorities were instrumental in marking out and discriminating against Serbia’s 23,000-strong Jewish population. The measures they enacted included dismissing Jews from public and private operations, transferring their goods and property to ‘Aryan’ ownership, ghettoizing them, and inflicting upon them forced labour and the wearing of the yellow star.31 Gerhard Reichert of the 11th Infantry Division described how ‘all the Jews have been penned up. In the towns they’ve even put aside quarters for them, which

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they’re absolutely forbidden to leave. The roads heading out have been blocked off with a tangle of wire, and a guard stands before it. I wouldn’t want to be a Jew.’32 Not all soldiers were as contemptuously disposed towards the Jews as they might have been; in late June, Serbia Command’s operations section complained that some troops, housed in former Jewish homes that had been earmarked for their own accommodation, were still allowing Jews to stay in them.33 Yet the effect of years of anti-Semitic indoctrination is as easy to imagine here as it is in the occupied Soviet Union. Corporal Ludwig Bauer of Supply Battalion 563 gave voice to it when he wrote: ‘Yesterday there was a raid on the Jews where we were; they were all hauled off to the edge of the town. It was really interesting to see what specimens they are. Truly the scum of humanity.’34 The weeks immediately preceding the invasion of the Soviet Union saw a small but perceptible increase in unrest caused by ‘bandit’ groups, many of whom seem to have been simple marauders. Yet this was all it took to reawaken the German military’s abhorrence of armed civilians, particularly when vast quantities of small arms abandoned by the Yugoslav army remained unaccounted for.35 But by far the biggest surge in anti-Axis resistance during 1941 came after the Ustasha in Croatia embarked upon a savagely atavistic campaign to purge the NDH of Communists, Jews, Roma, anti-Fascist Croats and above all ethnic Serbs. They butchered around 300,000 Serbs,36 but in the process precipitated chaos across Yugoslavia that would not abate until the war was nearly over. Many Serbs now feared that the Axis occupation had placed them at the mercy of a regime that was seeking to exterminate them. The summer of 1941 thus saw ethnic Serbs rise up across much of Yugoslavia. In Serbia itself, the Yugoslav Communists under their leader Josep Broz, or ‘Tito’, took control of the revolt and gave it direction through their ‘Partisan’ movement.37 The Communists had had ample practice in clandestine operations during the interwar years, and many early Partisan commanders had military experience from the Spanish Civil War. By early August, the Communists could claim eight thousand members, divided into twenty-one Partisan detachments, in Serbia alone. By aiming their initial attacks against communications, supply and the softer military target of Serbian collaboratorationist forces, the Partisans notched up numerous successes and swelled their support further. From early August, German troops themselves were targeted.38 Whenever possible, the Germans exacted fierce reprisals. The relatively few SS and Police personnel in Serbia carried out the bulk of them at first, though Wehrmacht units cooperated in rounding up and handing over reprisal victims. An early instance took place when a hundred Jews and twenty-two Communists were executed in Belgrade on 29 July, in reprisal for an arson attack on German trucks by a sixteen-year-old Jewish boy.39 Serbia Command did urge German

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forces to distinguish between innocent and guilty, but in September the Germans’ situation grew more perilous and their response more ferocious. That month, Draža Mihailović ’s nationalist Serb Chetnik movement aligned itself with the Partisans. The Chetniks and Partisans were enemies, but Mihailović knew the Chetniks could not stand by and wait for the Partisans to liberate the whole of Serbia. The Germans were unable, for the most part, to rely upon the policing and security forces of the Nedić government to support them effectively, and as their garrisons became progressively isolated they faced the real prospect of losing control of the country. ‘Previously the bandits were only appearing occasionally and in small numbers,’ reported the 704th Infantry Division’s 724th Infantry Regiment on 20 September. ‘Now they are drawing ever nearer to Užice and Požega. Their strength can often be counted in the hundreds, and their equipment is often better than that of our own troops.’40 ‘The shit the bandits are dealing out is just beyond belief now,’ wrote Lieutenant Peter G., at this time a staff officer in LXV Corps, in a private letter. ‘Today a general told us that two companies (!) have been missing for fourteen days (!!!) Just imagine that!! Two companies taken prisoner!!! With five officers and so on!!! We’re searching for them with aircraft, day and night!!! You just want to scream right at the heavens!!!!!’41 Field Marshal List was somewhat lacking in strong Nazi convictions, but he was also somewhat lacking in political sense. Granted, on 5 September, he urged ‘active, intensified propaganda in the Serbian language with every means available (wireless, leaflets, newspapers, posters and so on) . . . increased use of informers . . . full use of the influence of the Serbian government’.42 But he also believed the insurgents’ attacks embodied the ‘passionate, hot-blooded, and cruel’ nature that animated the Serbs on account of their history.43 That month, the OKW appointed General of Infantry Franz Boehme to the new post of plenipotentiary commanding general in Serbia. Boehme took charge of a greatly reinforced German counteroffensive. He implemented the OKW directive of 16 September 1941, by which a hundred hostages were to be executed for every German killed by insurgents and fifty for every German wounded. Boehme also incited his predominantly Austrian-born troops to ‘avenge’ themselves against the Serbs for the humiliations of 1914 – the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Bosnian Serb nationalist, the ignominious defeats the Serbian army had inflicted upon two successive Austro-Hungarian invasions and the casualties Austro-Hungarian troops had suffered against Serb irregulars. ‘Your objective,’ Boehme declared, ‘is to be achieved in a land where, in 1914, streams of German blood flowed because of the treachery of the Serbs, men and women. You are the avengers of those dead. A deterring example must be established for all of Serbia, one that will have the heaviest impact on the entire population.’44 All Boehme’s units followed his orders to

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the letter, or worse. Peter G. reported matter-of-factly in a letter of 13 October: ‘in our area twenty-two comrades, including two officers in a car, were attacked from behind on the street and murdered. Two thousand two hundred Communist have already been shot.’45 Overall, 22,000 reprisal victims perished by German hands during the autumn of 1941.46 Only in isolated cases did German officers question the wisdom of such a surge in indiscriminate brutality: for instance, the Kreiskommandant in Kragujevac, Captain von Bischofshausen, prevailed upon the first battalion of the 724th Infantry Regiment to execute reprisal victims from ‘Communist-infested’ villages, rather than from Kragujevac itself, because ‘not a single Wehrmacht member or ethnic German has been wounded or shot there’.47 And one of Boehme’s subordinate units, Lieutenant General Walther Hinghofer’s 342nd Infantry Division, even outdid Boehme for brutality. The 342nd’s divisional command ordered that a hundred hostages be shot for every German wounded by the insurgents as well as a hundred hostages for every German killed. And in operations between 10 and 19 October, the 342nd reported that its troops had killed 546 insurgents in combat and shot a further 1,081 following their capture – a total from which they had recovered four guns.48 As a fourteenth wave division, the 342nd was not one of the German army’s finest formations, but it was fairly effective compared with the occupation divisions already in Serbia. The most important reason why it comported itself so viciously, then, was not because it was trying to compensate for particularly substandard fighting power, but because General Hinghofer was Austrian. Boehme’s measures had some effect: Mihailović feared that reprisals on such a scale would eventually cause the biological death of the Serbian people. Already emboldened by the support of the British and of the royal government-in-exile, he broke with Tito’s Partisans. The Mihailović Chetniks in Serbia now became largely passive towards the Axis; this immediately enabled the Germans to go after the Partisans. The Partisans, flushed with their initial success, had rashly concentrated all their forces in a ‘free zone’ around Užice in western Serbia. This made it much easier for the Germans to crush them in open combat. For while Partisans might be good at irregular warfare, they had a very long way to go before they could hold their own in face-to-face combat. The Germans crushed them with ease in an operation between 25 November and 4 December. Tito and a Partisan remnant barely escaped into the mountainous regions of the NDH, and embarked upon a painful, halting process of rebuilding. Boehme directed the brunt of his reprisals against Serbian Communists, and against male Jews and male Roma. Even though they were persecuted less thoroughly than the Jews were, the Roma were a group whom Nazi ideology

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similarly deemed racially inferior, and whom the army viewed as a threat to security. The military administration in Serbia had already subjected these groups to discrimination like that which they faced in other parts of occupied Europe. Six thousand of Serbia’s 23,000 Jews were killed during the reprisals.49 Boehme targeted the reprisals in this way because he believed that Communists and Jews in particular were dangerous opponents who should be dealt with mercilessly. But he also calculated – like Stülpnagel in France, only with more relish – that this severity would bend the majority population to German control by making a particularly bloody example of the Jews.50 And yet much of the groundwork for ‘targeted’ reprisals had been set by the OKH before the Balkan campaign, when, on 2 April, General Halder had directed SS and Police units to seize not just emigrants, saboteurs, and terrorists, but Jews and Communists also.51 Thus in turn did the army, not the SS and Police, set the pace for the Serbian Jews’ eventual extermination. From 1942 onwards, while the Ustasha annihilated the remaining Jewish population of the NDH in barbaric concentration camps such as Jasenovac, Einsatzgruppe Belgrade assumed responsibility for disposing of Serbia’s remaining Jewish population. As its chosen method of extermination, it eschewed the army’s bullets and the Ustasha’s medieval-style butchery in favour of the gas van. *** The second half of 1941 saw German occupation in western and southern Europe take a turn into profoundly dark territory. The catalyst was the invasion of the Soviet Union. This created a new Communist enemy on the ground across occupied Europe, stoked officers’ anti-Bolshevik attitudes and steeled them to be more ruthless in the cause of smooth-running occupation. In other words, here as elsewhere, commanders’ ideological beliefs combined with the supposed dictates of military necessity to harden their conduct. They particularly ensured that the German army directed its increasingly ruthless reprisal policy against Jews more than any other group. In France, General von Stülpnagel still possessed sufficient moderating conservative sensibility for him to try and ameliorate the worst effects of the course the German occupation was now taking. His restraint only went so far, but in Serbia General Boehme showed no restraint at all. Indeed, the picture in southeast Europe was grimmer still. Greece’s early economic devastation laid the groundwork for a growing resistance movement from 1942 onwards. In Yugoslavia, the resistance already confronting the Germans precipitated much more ferocious German countermeasures than in France. Here, Hitler’s attempt to occupy the country on the cheap created a power vacuum that the ostensibly allied Ustasha regime filled with its own

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barbaric variety of mayhem. The resistance to Axis rule that the Ustasha’s depravity unleashed particularly frightened the Germans, and tapped into their abhorrence of irregular warfare. The German army’s regional make-up was also crucial; the fact that Austrian-born officers and soldiers were particularly thick on the ground in occupied Yugoslavia meant that the army’s response was not only about military necessity or about guerrillaphobia, but also about terrorizing an enemy of long historical standing. Here, too, calculation and ideology led commanders to target many of the reprisals themselves on Jews, only this time to a much more bloodthirsty extent.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

WINTER CRISIS, 1941–42

 E ‘

verything’s failing, troops are at the end of their strength, everything lost? No, it can’t be so!’ read the borderline-hysterical diary entry of General Reinhardt, now commanding Panzer Group Three, for 9 December 1941.1 The Soviet counteroffensive of that month precipitated the German army’s first real crisis of the Second World War. With a supreme effort, the army was able to weather it; although the front line buckled in the face of the Soviet counteroffensive, it did not collapse. But the cost of the fighting during the winter and the months preceding it had been immense, and the experience further hardened the character of the army and its officer corps. Behind the lines, meanwhile, a crisis of a different kind unfolded. The high command’s contempt for Slavic peoples, and its utter failure to plan adequately for the huge numbers of Soviet POWs taken by the Wehrmacht, had already stored up the ingredients for mass death in the prison camps. The conditions of winter unleashed its full force. Meanwhile, the entry of the United States into the conflict suddenly overshadowed Germany’s entire war effort. *** The surprise attack that Germany’s ally Japan sprang upon the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 did not bring the United States into the war against Germany straight away. Four days later, Hitler made the decision for the United States by declaring war himself. He did this partly because the United States was already providing massive economic aid to Britain and the Soviet Union. Secondly, he believed the Japanese could pin down the Americans effectively – a belief his new ally’s lightning surge of initial conquests seemed to confirm – and that declaring war on the United States more surely guaranteed Japan’s continued participation in the conflict. Thirdly, Hitler was taking the bull by the horns, partly because it was in his character and partly

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because he feared that not declaring war would damage his prestige in the eyes of the German people by making him look hesitant.2 Fourthly, he considered the United States to be weak and degenerate, on account of its multiracial society, and thus eminently beatable. The first motive was reasonable enough. The second had some strategic sense to it, however overoptimistic Hitler’s belief in Japan’s long-term military potential was. But the third motive was probably misplaced, and the fourth was wrong on every level. For leaving aside the obvious fact that the United States was a racially segregated society itself, and that Hitler’s belief in its multiracial degeneracy was warped ideological nonsense, the United States was anything but eminently beatable. The generals on the eastern front were largely too preoccupied with the fighting there to pay much heed to the United States’ entry into the war,3 though General Heinrici did write to his wife on 11 December: ‘I do not expect that it [the United States] will turn against us any time soon. But this stops – or rather hampers – supply transports from America and England to Russia.’ He did also remark, however: ‘our yellow allies have started the war surprisingly and successfully.’4 Considering Hitler’s conviction that Jews controlled the government and economy of the United States as surely as they controlled those of Germany’s other opponents, his declaration of war on the United States may have been the single most important factor that infused him and the Nazi leadership with truly genocidal resolve against occupied Europe’s Jews.5 On the other hand, the final draft of Generalplan Ost, published at the end of 1941, envisioned expelling 31 million people from eastern Europe to western Siberia, including an estimated five to six million Jews living in the Soviet Union, to make way for German settlers. This plan certainly bore all the hallmarks of genocidal thinking, for the forced march and pitiless environment into which the expellees would be ejected would have unleashed mass death upon them. If anything, the plan was actually behind recent events, because it took no account of the fact that the SS and Police, together with their native auxiliaries, had murdered several hundred thousand Soviet Jews already.6 But even an eastern ‘territorial solution’ that envisioned the mass death of Jews through ‘natural wastage’ was not the same as a systematic plan to exterminate them directly. Overall, however, towards the end of 1941 the Nazi leadership was rapidly coming to believe that the pressures upon its efforts to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish problem’ by any means short of extermination – not least the fact that the Soviet Union’s continuing resistance made any eastern territorial solution a non-starter – were insurmountable. Most historians thus concur that around the end of 1941 was when the Nazi regime reached the fundamental decision to exterminate Europe’s Jews. The clearest evidence for this is the minutes of the conference of highranking Reich officials that Heydrich chaired at the Villa Wannsee outside

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Berlin in January 1942. And by the spring of 1942, not only the decision for Europe-wide genocide, but also the preferred means, had finally been arrived at. Mass shootings of the sort the Einsatzgruppen had been committing did not make for effective genocide; the available manpower was too small, and ‘up-close-and-personal’ shooting of men, women, and children frequently traumatised the perpetrators to a point where they could no longer function properly. But the scientific means of mass murder had been advancing. In September 1941, the SS had experimented on groups of Soviet POWs – whom the army itself had handed over to them – by killing them in purpose-built gas vans. Now, in the spring of 1942, the SS implemented this method of extermination for the Jews on the grand scale. It also began organizing the systematic deportation of Jews from across occupied Europe to fill the gas chambers of the new extermination camps in the General Government in Poland. The army leadership was not party to the decision-making that took place during the winter of 1941–42. But without the cooperation of the army leadership, of many field commanders and of various army units, particularly in 1941, the SS would never have completed all the stages necessary for the process to reach its genocidal culmination. Efforts to exterminate the European Jews assumed further urgency for the SS throughout 1942 as the war’s likely duration and final outcome became increasingly uncertain. For, strategically, the Red Army’s counteroffensive before Moscow and the United States’ entry into the war heralded a tectonic shift in the balance between the Axis and Allied sides. Unless the Japanese could indeed contain the United States, and the Germans make a rapid, spectacular recovery in the Soviet Union, the potentially colossal economic and military might of the Allies threatened eventually to overwhelm the Axis. *** Stalin, however, was too impatient to wait to see. He believed he could inflict upon the Germans the fate that had befallen Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Russia in 1812, and finish them off that winter. Here, he was badly overestimating the Red Army’s abilities at this stage in the war, and badly underestimating the Germans’ fortitude in defence. Even so, especially throughout December and January, the Wehrmacht barely staved off calamity. The Soviet counteroffensive’s main targets were Army Group Centre and, to a lesser extent, Army Group North. Both army groups fought to protect the communication and supply lines that enabled them to move troops up and down the front and bring reinforcements from the west. It proved a herculean task. The fiercest fighting of all was in the central sector of the front. ‘Chaos is reigning on the path of retreat,’ read the diary entry for 19 December of Lance

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Corporal G. of the 11th Panzer Division, with the Fourth Panzer Army. ‘Trucks of all kinds are being destroyed. Orders are pouring out over one another. . . . One march battalion after another is being raised and thrown into battle to plug the gaps in the front line.’7 The army faced a crisis not just on the battlefront, but also in its replacement system. It had just about covered the mounting losses of 1941 by rotating frontline units with occupation units stationed across Europe, and by combing out large numbers of rear area personnel. By winter, however, no such sources of manpower remained. Most of the class of 1922 had also been called up.8 One of the first high-level ‘casualties’ of the winter crisis was Field Marshal von Brauchitsch. He was already suffering from serious health problems, including having a major heart attack in mid-November, and from General Halder’s persistent blame for the failure before Moscow.9 On 19 December, Brauchitsch was sacked, and Hitler replaced him with the one individual whom he believed could salvage the situation most assuredly: himself. The Hitler myth remained enormously potent among ordinary German soldiers, and news of his self-appointment boosted their morale. Thus, for instance, did Second Lieutenant Helmut H. of the 258th Infantry Division, under the Fourth Army in the Army Group Centre sector, describe his response to a speech Hitler gave on 30 January, the ninth anniversary of the Nazis’ coming to power: ‘Adolf spoke today. I listened to it all, even with the interruptions. Only the morale of a degenerate could fail to be lifted by those words.’10 In early December, Hitler seems to have been despondent about Germany’s future prospects in the war.11 But when he declared war on the United States and then assumed command of the army, he emerged from his trough. Most of the German generals wanted to pull back Army Group Centre between 80 and 120 kilometres (50 and 75 miles) to the ‘K’ line, stretching from Rhzev down east of Vyazma to Iukhnov. Hitler and Halder refused, and were right to do so: the ‘K’ line was barely prepared, and retreat would have meant abandoning German vehicles and artillery stuck in the snow.12 Furthermore, such was the pressure the Soviets were putting on Army Group Centre’s front that any German retreat might turn into a rout. On 18 December, Hitler issued his ‘stand fast’ order: ‘commanding generals, commanders, and officers are to intervene in person to compel the troops to fanatical resistance in their positions without regard to the enemy breakthrough on the flanks or in the rear. This is the only way to gain the time necessary to bring up the reinforcements from Germany and the West that I have ordered.’13 Yet because Hitler was proved right this time, the long-term effects would be calamitous. Too often hereafter, Hitler would refuse to countenance withdrawal under any circumstances. The winter of 1941–42 also presaged a further ominous development for the army’s future modus operandi. The army’s thoroughgoing use of radio enabled Hitler and Halder to impose a stricter, more

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hands-on command system. Thus, while radio had once enabled individual commanders to respond rapidly and flexibly to how the battle was developing, Hitler and Halder would now use it to impose suffocating, top-down control.14 Over the course of the winter, field marshals von Rundstedt, von Bock and von Leeb were also relieved, or asked to be relieved, of their army group commands. Their respective replacements were Field Marshal von Reichenau, Field Marshal von Kluge and Colonel General (later Field Marshal) von Küchler. Although these men were only slightly younger than their predecessors, the officer corps’s lower command levels underwent more far-reaching change over the winter. Between September 1941 and January 1942, six army-level commanders and Panzer group-level commanders also went. One of the most notable casualties was Guderian. His combative demeanour had crumbled with the Soviet counteroffensive; begging to withdraw rather than stand fast, he drew the ire of his new army group commander and old bugbear, Kluge, who concluded – perhaps correctly – that the man’s courage had deserted him.15 In their place, a generation of commanders largely born in the 1890s, who had served as frontline rather than staff officers during the First World War, came more strongly to the fore. Among the new appointees, albeit one who had largely served as a staff officer during the First World War, was General von Manstein, who became commander of the Eleventh Army in September 1941. But the appointee who most famously embodied those leadership qualities that Hitler particularly favoured was Colonel General Walther Model, who became commander of the Ninth Army in January 1942.16 Like Hitler, Model came from a middle-class rather than an aristocratic background, and although he was not the most fanatical Nazi – his ardent anti-Bolshevism notwithstanding – he approached warfare in a ruthlessly utilitarian manner. There was more to him than just willpower; he proved himself a defensive warfare expert par excellence, a quality that would gain increasing currency over the next three years. Model combined these characteristics with a caustic treatment of his subordinates. General Günther Blumentritt, at that time chief of staff for the Fourth Army, considered Model to be a bully17 while one of Model’s subordinate generals described his effect as like that of ‘an icy wind’ and Model himself as ‘just an awful man’.18 Yet a report from Model’s superiors in Army Group Centre in April 1942 attributed to him ‘clear judgement, quick understanding, [and] great agility’, and described him as ‘a doer’.19 There was also a cull of divisional commanders, seventy of whom were removed from their posts at the start of 1942.20 Yet the senior officer corps was not undergoing some kind of sudden ideological foment. The predominantly aristocratic, conservative contingent that had occupied the field army’s top posts before the winter of 1941–42 had already subscribed to ruthless National Socialist principles. Moreover, they had

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endorsed the criminal orders, and increasingly practised a National Socialist kind of warfare that placed willpower above sound operational practice as a guiding military principle. At the same time, the senior officer corps was becoming younger and less aristocratic, and in the process was further losing any of the distinctive officer ethos that might at least have diluted National Socialism’s effect on its mindset. Hitler also sought to reinvigorate the officer corps more generally. ‘War must not just be a killer, but also a renewer of life,’ he proclaimed at the end of 1941.21 True to his Social Darwinist worldview, he believed war should weed out the old and bring in the young, and that officers should be promoted on merit irrespective of their social origins. On 30 March 1942, new measures were announced that were designed to fast-track suitable candidates for promotion. A lieutenant who commanded a battalion could now be promoted to captain, a major or lieutenant-colonel commanding a regiment to colonel, and a colonel commanding a division to major general. Whether or not he was an active officer or reservist was immaterial. When it came to officer selection criteria, Hitler placed less value on intelligence than on personal courage and Nazi conviction – qualities that were at the heart of National Socialist military thinking. In reality, given the scale of losses, Hitler could illafford to be so choosy, and his ideal officer corps never emerged. But as casualties mounted, the social make-up of the officer corps certainly became more diverse.22 Frontline officers had little time to muse over any of this during the winter of 1941–42. ‘We are going to our doom,’ wrote General Heinrici to his wife on 24 December. ‘And the highest authorities in Berlin do not want to see it.’23 The soldiers, of course, experienced the dire conditions even more directly. Lance Corporal B. of the 2nd Panzer Division, under Panzer Group Three, depicted them in a letter of 21 December: Due to the great cold, very many trucks broke down and had to be destroyed; for we were conducting a planned withdrawal to a shortened front while the Russian was conducting offensives at the same time. . . . On the 12th, there was thaw and rain, then immense cold and thin ice, then snowfall! On the 14th, our Panzers were overtaken by fate. We were the last, covering the retreat. The Russians attacked. Then we too received the order to retreat. We pulled back to a snow hole and didn’t leave it. I called to other Panzers over the radio to help us pull out, but it was already too late. We were hit by antitank fire in our motors. We took the necessaries out of our Panzer . . . and then set fire to it. In the meantime the Russians had got within 50 metres [160 feet] of us and charged with a roar of ‘Hurra!’ We ran towards the two other Panzers and back over the bridge that was immediately destroyed

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behind us. It was awful, enough to make you want to cry. By a miracle, we had escaped, minus our Panzer, unwounded through the enemy fire. The picture of the burning town in the breaking evening is something I will never forget. . . . You cannot imagine what we experienced in the last few days. . . . In any case, you won’t see it in the Wochenschau [the weekly German newsreel].24

At least Corporal B.’s unit was still mechanized, if only barely; more generally, Panzer and motorized infantry divisions were now experiencing the process of ‘de-modernization’ that would beset them over the coming months and years. As their vehicles broke down due to overuse and cold, they regressed to a more primitive technological state. This was the experience of the 25th Infantry Division, under the Second Panzer Army in Army Group Centre. ‘Many of our trucks could no longer cope with this cold,’ attested Corporal Eberhard T. on 26 December. ‘We are therefore barely motorized now, but instead on sledges. Yes, the plain honest carthorses do a good job of pulling us!’25 He also expanded on the cold’s dreadful effects: ‘The retreat in this savage cold was the worst and most awful time I have ever experienced … often retreating day and night uninterrupted, with an icy northeast wind and snowstorm.’26 Because the OKH had not anticipated a campaign going on into winter, the army was forced to rely not on specialist seasonal gear, but on collections of civilian coats and other items from back in the Reich. The effects left plenty to be desired. For one thing, rank-and-file troops could find themselves last in the pecking order. ‘Some lovely gear has arrived from the homeland,’ announced Lance Corporal Otto H., a medical orderly of the 198th Infantry Division, on 10 February. ‘The officers of course get the best stuff, and the ordinary soldiers get the leftovers.’27 Many items arrived too late. Lance Corporal Franz S. of the 12th Panzer Division wrote: ‘Yesterday, we received the winter clothing from Germany that you have been collecting. Unfortunately it arrived rather late, and we’ve had many casualties to frost. In our company many toes have been lost, and a good friend of mine even had to have a leg amputated.’28 Mass casualties from enemy action and cold strained the army’s frontline medical services to the utmost. Otto H. described the conditions in his medical station that winter. ‘The cold is ongoing. The poor wounded have to be brought in by sledge at night in order to avoid being seen by the enemy, and so they freeze all over again before they reach us. Because the Russian is always attacking, driving his hordes ever onwards, there are always wounded and dead for us. . . . Accordingly, the doctors’ work is never-ending. They toil and operate all through the night. . . . Worst of all are the wounds that hit the stomach and the bowels, usually inoperable despite all the means available to us.’29

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The winter of 1941–42 was also the first time the Germans themselves employed scorched earth. On 22 December, the 25th Infantry Division ordered: ‘The non-able-bodied male population and the general female population are to be driven east. Excepted are Wehrmacht-appointed mayors and their families. The remaining male population is to be taken behind our position with horse-drawn sledges, work equipment and provisions, and set to building defences. All villages, wells, buildings, supplies of straw, hay . . . etc are to be destroyed, copses and small wooded areas cut down, [stand-alone buildings] not used for our own artillery are to be razed to the ground. The landscape is to be mined as far as mines are available.’30 Soldiers noted the cost for the occupied population, but still deemed such measures cruelly necessary. Lance Corporal Werner F., serving near Tichwin at the northern end of the front, recounted his experience of one village: ‘on a corner, I saw two girls, one named Manja who has lived near us and who waved at us somewhat helplessly. We already knew full well the fate that awaited this very hospitable village – within a few days, it would have to be razed to the ground. Very hard for the inhabitants who now had to retreat back into the forest bunkers. . . . But war demands ruthlessness, and we must not leave any winter quarters for the Russian troops.’31 Desperate troops also plundered the population for supplies: for instance, the 123rd Infantry Division, serving in Army Group North, not only burned down villages from which it was retreating but also ordered: ‘all felt boots are to be taken immediately from the population without consideration of age or sex.’32 In the middle of winter, this order was a death sentence for civilians. Divisions ordered their men to be hard in the face of the population’s suffering. On 6 January, the 126th Infantry Division, another Army Group North formation, proclaimed: ‘the all too trusting nature of the German soldier is all too often exploited to his disadvantage. Caution and suspicion should therefore be shown towards the Russian population.’33 Scorched earth, and all its attendant civilian misery, would become a regular weapon in the German armoury throughout the rest of the war. Indeed, the 126th Infantry Division for one was further hardened, indeed radicalized, by the winter crisis. One soldier wrote of his ‘murderous rage towards these dammed Russians’, and men from the division also discovered several Germans whose bodies had been mutilated by the Soviets. The 126th’s troops committed several massacres of captured Red Army soldiers during January 1942, and divisional command reported: ‘as a result of the bestial murder of German prisoners and wounded, such a great bitterness prevails in the fighting troops that the repeatedly given order to take prisoners away is no longer obeyed’.34 Difficult as it is to compare systematically the behaviour of different divisions during the mayhem of the winter fighting, the 126th Infantry Division’s

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troops behaved more brutally during these months than did two other Army Group North infantry divisions that have been studied particularly intensively, the 121st and the 123rd. All three experienced similarly ferocious conditions during the winter of 1941–42, but – while only informed speculation is currently possible – two things in particular may have lent the behaviour of the 126th’s rank-and-file troops an especially vicious edge. Firstly, some of the 126th’s units found themselves under temporary command by II SS Brigade, and it is likely that that formation’s own way of doing things rubbed off on the 126th. Secondly, the division was a highly homogeneous formation from Catholic Rhineland-Westphalia. Catholicism had been waning as a badge of identity in that particular region, and to compensate, many of its inhabitants came to identify more strongly with a ‘Greater German’ imperial mentality. In short, their chain of command and their regional origin may have rendered the 126th Infantry Division’s men more susceptible to a ferocious National Socialist view of warfare. The winter fighting of 1941–42 was certainly the kind of setting likely to bring this to the fore.35 A prominent reason why Hitler’s stand-fast order worked in the winter of 1941–42 was that the Red Army was very far from being a war-winning force. As ‘masterminded’ by Stalin, the Soviet counteroffensive was actually a series of smaller offensives, none of which was powerful enough to bring decisive results. In particular, the Soviets spread their tanks too thinly across operations. Light formations such as ski troops, cavalry and paratroopers could disrupt German communications on or near the front line, but could not permanently block railways and roads or capture villages the Germans had fortified.36 And the Red Army’s offensive tactics remained crude and costly. Still deprived of sufficient armoured punch, they continued to rely heavily upon mass infantry assault. There was no mistaking Red Army soldiers’ resilience. The 25th Infantry Division described the great majority of Soviet prisoners it took as naïve and childish and lacking either Bolshevik or nationalistic fanaticism, but it nevertheless acknowledged: ‘the units these people belong to have fought with a stubborn bitterness. After one attack, during which 60 per cent lay dead or wounded, bleeding on the iron-hard battlefield, the survivors who had seen the horrors of the previous day attacked over the same field again the very next day, in wrathful yet stupefied disregard for death.’37 By the beginning of February, despite much ferocious fighting to come, the frontline situation was starting to stabilize. Eventually, the Red Army’s offensive was blunted by the German army’s pugnacious defence and by the spring thaw. Indeed, the mud that the thaw brought mired the Red Army just as surely as it had mired the Germans the previous autumn. ***

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In the rear, another crisis was unfolding, this time affecting Soviet POWs. On paper, German plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union had held out the prospect of decent treatment for the majority of Soviet POWs – those who were not Communist functionaries or Jews. On 16 June 1941, the OKW had stated that, though the Soviets did not recognize the Geneva Convention, the Germans would still act in accordance with it. However, Hitler had openly stated in the run-up to Barbarossa that captured Red Army personnel should not be viewed as fellow soldiers.38 On 3 April, the OKH had declared that Soviet POWs would be a valuable workforce, even though the Geneva Convention forbade POWs from being used for work with a military dimension.39 The spirit of the criminal orders, combined with the anti-Slavism and anti-Bolshevism already ingrained in many officers and soldiers, was also bound to affect how the troops in the field handled their POWs. But the most basic reason why POWs could expect a miserable fate was the OKH’s callous indifference to the need to plan and provision the POW camps. For one thing, the OKH expected the Werhmacht to capture up to two million Red Army soldiers during the campaign’s first six to eight weeks, yet made no provision for such huge numbers.40 It did not require brilliant logistical deduction to recognize that, if German troops were going to live off the land during the campaign and surpluses were to be returned to the Reich, there would be nothing left for the prisoners.41 And even when the Germans eventually recognized that their need for native agricultural labour demanded that the occupied Soviet population needed feeding to some extent, this still left POWs entirely out of consideration. In the event, the OKH made a token effort to feed the prisoners, but the derisory amount they received fell way short of what they needed to survive. In any case, as the ongoing fighting put further pressure on German resources, POWs’ already pitiful rations were the first to be cut. For instance, the OKH’s regulations of 6 August 1941 set them at no more than 2,200 daily calories.42 For most Soviet POWs, if hunger itself did not kill them, what assuredly would were the conditions of winter and the diseases to which hunger made them more susceptible. Although disease became more rife in the camps during the winter, death was visiting the POWs in various forms as early as the summer. From mid-July 1941, Kommandos from the Einsatzgruppen were given unlimited access to the POW camps to execute Soviet commissars. There were rare instances of camp commandants who actively sought to hinder the actions of the commandos: one example was Major Wittmer, who commanded the Durchgangslager (transit camp) Dulag 185, near Mogilev. However, Wittmer did not receive the support of his superiors.43 And the 403rd Security Division’s intelligence officer, Lieutenant Scheiber, admonished the commanders of the

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Dulags and the Feldkommandanturen in his division’s jurisdiction for ‘weakness displayed that is completely out of place in a transit camp’. It seems from this that the camp authorities were trying to spare commissars from execution.44 More often, however, commanders of both the Stammlager (permanent camps), or Stalags, in the rear areas and the Dulags near the front line readily assisted the SS commandos, using informers from the anti-Bolshevik elements among the POWs – particularly Ukrainians and Balts – to weed out the commissars. The Wehrmacht’s own GFP was also involved.45 While SS and Police units selected and murdered prisoners who were commissars or, increasingly, Jews, many prisoners who did not belong to either group were dying as early as the summer due to the unsystematic but sustained maltreatment being meted out to them by the camp guards. Prison camp guard contingents generally came from older age groups, and were drawn from static occupation units called Landesschützen battalions. Unless they came from those more easterly parts of Germany that had experienced centuries of confrontation with the Slavic east, they were generally less likely to harbour strong anti-Slavic sentiments than their more Nazified younger comrades. But they were likely to be brutalized by the conditions in which they worked. Above all, they were numerically overwhelmed. For instance, in Dulag 203, in Army Rear Area 580, 150 guards were responsible for thirty thousand prisoners.46 Guards were issued with higher alcohol rations to help them cope, but the likely effect on their temper and their propensity to lash out can be easily imagined. It is particularly telling that the OKH eventually had to ban them from using clubs on the prisoners.47 Boredom and peer-group brutalization may have contributed as well. For example, Captain Lange, who worked at Dulag 131 in the jurisdiction of the 221st Security Division, admitted to his Soviet captors after the war that shooting of prisoners had been a daily occurrence. By September 1941, the general death rate among Soviet POWs had already reached 10 per cent.48 The potential for calamity was further increased by the general condition of the camps. The military planners’ original intention was to keep most prisoners in Dulags in the army-occupied areas of the Soviet Union, then ship them west to Stalags in the Reich Commissariats and in the General Government in Poland. However, the periodically huge influxes of surrendering Red Army troops – influxes at which the high command could hardly claim surprise – meant that the Stalags were soon overflowing and the Dulags becoming permanent fixtures. The Stalags often lacked proper buildings and heating facilities, but conditions in the Dulags were far worse, for by their very nature they were ill-equipped to house large numbers of prisoners for any duration. One such camp housed twenty thousand POWs, even though it had been built for a tenth of that number.49 Lack of proper sanitation and shelter exposed POWs to

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disease and, eventually, to the worsening weather. The sometimes complete absence of any shelter soon earned the Dulags the blackly humorous soubriquet of ‘summer camps’.50 While the mass death of Soviet POWs really escalated in the winter of 1941– 42, the process was already well under way by autumn. On 19 October, for instance, as Christian Streit explains,‘the OKW was informed that, in the General Government, “the mass death among the POWs cannot be stopped, since they have reached the point of exhaustion”. Over the following ten days alone, 4,500 POWs in the camps there died every single day. These prisoners had been treated and fed not amid any kind of crisis that had taken the OKH and OKW by surprise, but in accordance with the principles that both high-command bodies had themselves laid down in the spring of 1941.’51 On 21 October, General Wagner decided to reduce POW rations further. Now, prisoners who were able to work were to receive just under 2,200 calories, but those unable to work were to receive fewer than 1,500. By 23 November, Wagner was explicitly stating that POWs who were not working should be left to starve to death.52 Some field commanders maintained that cutting POWs’ rations was necessary in order to ease their own troops’ supply problems, but Wagner was not just cutting them for this reason; he was also observing the Nazi regime’s wish to maintain home-front morale by avoiding civilian rationing. As starvation spread through the camps, some prisoners tried to survive by grabbing what they could from the mouldy scraps that German POW camp personnel threw out from their kitchens. Others resorted to cannibalism.53 Prisoners kept arriving in droves at the now teeming camps well into November. Plummeting temperatures from October onwards added to the death rates. Then, with the coming of winter, the insanitary conditions unleashed a typhus epidemic. Although the OKH had ordered that medical facilities be provided for the camps in July 1941, these were rudimentary, manned by often untrained Soviet civilians or POWs, and intended purely to prevent the Reich itself from being overwhelmed with Russian wounded.54 The camps, lacking sufficient serum and delousing equipment among other things, were thus pitifully unprepared to combat such an epidemic. Only in December 1941 did the OKH get around even to announcing that proper delousing stations would be built, and then in the Stalags alone.55 Middle-aged and elderly officers, men who had been socialized in a time well before the Nazis, ran many of the camp administrations. Insofar as they were practically able, they often did what they could for their POWs with the paltry resources at their disposal. Some sought to circumvent their lack of medical facilities by requiring the local population to tend to wounded POWs. Others gave their POWs extra provisions – though this particular measure merely moved the problem elsewhere, because it involved seizing more food

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from local civilians.56 Konrad Jarausch, a middle-aged NCO supervising Russian kitchen staff at Dulag 203, had been an admirer of the Nazis, if not an especially fervent one, but he was appalled by the prisoners’ suffering. His horror was augmented by his strong Christian beliefs. A letter home of 8 January 1942 described scenes of ‘dying . . . on a horrifying scale. Over the next few days we may be able to increase the rations, but that isn’t going to help any more.’57 There was a limit to how much difference his own efforts could make, and in January 1942 he too succumbed to typhus. Ordinary soldiers also showed humanity, to the extent that, on 27 December 1941, General Strauss, Model’s predecessor as commander of the Ninth Army, intervened against them. ‘It has come to my attention,’ he declared, ‘that soldiers could avoid freezing more if they were less soft-headed and mulish. There are cases of some infantrymen in their normal kit being less prepared for the cold than the captive Red Army soldiers to whom they’ve been giving fur coats, fur hats and felt boots!’58 Such acts may have been qualified shows of humanity, for these items could well have been seized from Soviet civilians and POWs in the first place. Yet bugged conversations between German soldiers in British and American captivity later in the war did reveal that, though their anti-Semitic conditioning often caused them to view the mass killing of Soviet Jews with ambivalence, they were rather more disturbed at the ‘uncomradely’ way in which the Wehrmacht had allowed Soviet POWs to perish wholesale.59 Although Hitler had sought to keep the POWs away from German soil altogether, some were being transferred to the Reich as a labour force from as early as July 1941. For reasons of security and ideological consistency, they were to be kept in purpose-built Russenlager (Russian camps). The organization of these camps, like that of the Stalags and Dulags further east, was lamentable; they were to be built with concrete, but took far too long to construct, and such medical facilities and delousing stations as they contained were hopelessly inadequate. Moreover, as a parallel system of camps, administering them required an entirely new organization, one for which, again, too few personnel were available. By the winter of 1941–42, only twelve of the envisaged twenty Russenlager had been built, and the conditions within them were every bit as deadly as in camps further east. Eventually, a large number of this particular group of POWs was transferred to general POW camps inside Germany. Mass death ensued anyway; about half the prisoners perished within the first few months of captivity, and most were too weak to carry out the labour tasks they were to have been assigned. Over the course of 1941, the Wehrmacht eventually handed over thirty thousand such POWs as slaves for the industries being run from the concentration camps. Among them was a group of POWs who were killed in the Zyklon B gas experiments in Auschwitz in October 1941.60

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German military lawyers protested to Field Marshal Keitel about the POW situation, reminding him of Germany’s obligations to the Soviet POWs even though the Soviet Union had not signed the Geneva Convention, but he ignored them.61 Field Marshal von Bock and General von Schenckendorff were among those senior commanders who pressed for measures that would alleviate prisoners’ suffering. They stressed that prisoners with evidently nothing to lose were much more likely to try and escape to join partisan groups. Regardless of whether such commanders were making pragmatic arguments to conceal their moral consternation, their pleas were to no immediate avail.62 Other senior commanders, such as Küchler, intervened only after continued pressure from their administrative staffs. Küchler, like many senior commanders, only showed proper concern for the POWs’ situation when he began seeing their value as a source of labour. This need grew more urgent as the Germans went over from offensive to static warfare, and needed the POWs’ labour for a host of practical tasks such as building defensive positions or clearing roads and minefields. Some German units also began recruiting POWs, particularly Cossacks, as military auxiliaries. For instance, at the end of October, Army Group Centre ordered that ‘Cossack units, mounted units and pioneer groups be formed from released Cossack, Ukrainian, or White Ruthenian prisoners, trained, organized and put into action.’ Some prisoners were eventually sent home on early-release schemes, though as well as being few in number, only Balts and Ukrainians benefited from these.63 The Nazi leadership, meanwhile, came to see the benefit in employing Soviet POWs as forced labour in the German war economy. Furthermore, as the German army came to contemplate occupying the Soviet Union as a longterm commitment, army commanders increasingly saw the value of keeping POWs alive for propaganda purposes. Indeed, because the mass death of Soviet POWs took place under the noses of the occupied population, it did much to embitter civilians against the Germans.64 Commanders were also mindful of the full consequences of the typhus epidemic, for, as Konrad Jarausch exemplified, it was not just Soviet POWs whom the disease was felling. In the face of all these entreaties and concerns, the OKH eventually introduced new measures that brought some improvement to POWs’ conditions.65 They came far too late to prevent death on a colossal scale, however. Of the 5.7 million Soviet troops taken prisoner by the Germans during the Second World War, 3.3 million perished, of whom two million had already perished by the beginning of February 1942.66 Indeed, it was partly because so many POWs had died that the Germans now had the facilities to keep some of the remainder alive, but even then a further 1.3 million would perish by the end of the war. ***

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Germany did not suddenly lose the strategic initiative during the winter of 1941–42; it was beginning to lose it as early as the previous summer. Rather, the winter foreshadowed the way in which the German army would develop as a result of its new reality. Hitler’s self-appointment as head of the army constrained his generals’ freedom of manoeuvre even more. As far as the officer corps as a whole was concerned, the army would come to place increasing importance on resilience, obduracy and ideological conviction as criteria for promotion. Hitler was far more impressed by individuals who displayed these characteristics than by individuals from the officer corps’s traditional social circles. This was not a radical departure from the officer corps of 1941, but it did further embed the harsher qualities that the army was already displaying. Indeed, Hitler was soon crediting these very qualities with the fact that the army eventually ‘came through the fire’ against the Red Army’s winter counteroffensive. This was to ignore other crucial reasons why the German army endured on the eastern front that winter – its assured performance in defensive warfare, particularly from its infantry, and the Red Army’s markedly less assured performance in the attack. However, there can be little serious doubt that an obdurate spirit, fusing ideological and military harshness, increasingly animated the German army from senior officers down to many frontline soldiers. As to the mass death of Soviet POWs – although the army leadership had not consciously decided to exterminate this group at the outset of the Barbarossa campaign, one could fairly say that it may as well have done so. It failed even to begin to consider the basic requirements of the enormous POW population that it could realistically expect to amass. Instead, it sacrificed such concerns in favour of what it perceived to be the Reich’s domestic and military needs. Then, as the full scale of death and suffering among the POWs became clear, General Wagner consciously declared that they should be left to starve to death. Only belatedly, due to practical pressures, economic calculation and, to a lesser extent, injunctions by some frontline commanders, did the army leadership take any steps to reduce death rates among the prisoners. Throughout this process, the army leadership, and indeed numerous senior commanders, displayed a mix of racial contempt and callous utilitarian indifference towards the suffering of the Soviet POWs. The army leadership’s attitude here shared something with the mentality of ideological and military harshness that increasingly shaped the army’s attitude towards the fighting at the front. Whether at the front or in the POW camps, such a mentality did not mark individual units and soldiers in a uniform way; their age profile, their region of origin and the particular conditions they faced were among the many forces that could also influence their behaviour. But the two crises, one at the front and one in the rear, were also connected in a further way. For the mass death of

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Soviet POWs highlights a further reason why the German army would continue to fight so tenaciously during the war’s final three and a half years – its fear of what defeat at the hands of a vengeful Red Army would mean. And, indeed, against an Allied coalition that now included the United States, the prospect of total defeat no longer seemed fanciful.

C H A P T E R T W E LV E

THE DESERT WAR, 1941–42

T

he campaign the German army waged in the Western Desert of Libya and Egypt under General (later Field Marshal) Erwin Rommel is the most mythologized of the Second World War. James Mason’s portrayal of Rommel in the 1951 feature film The Desert Fox is only the most famous example of a ‘Rommel industry’ of films and biographies that the life of Germany’s most famous general of the Second World War has generated. Rommel is the general whom people in the west have associated most closely with the German officer corps’s essentially decent, apolitical popular image. He is also widely applauded as one of history’s most brilliant commanders. In more recent decades, however, Rommel’s reputation has come under fire on both fronts. There is much to indicate that he was an admirer and follower of Hitler and the Nazis for much of the war.‘He isn’t just close to National Socialism,’ wrote Goebbels in October 1942; ‘he is a National Socialist. If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t have got further than colonel.’1 Nor, in contrast to his depiction in The Desert Fox, did Rommel play an active role in the army officers’ plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944. As for his performance as a commander, ascribing powers of military genius to him suited both the Germans and the British. The Germans used him as a much-needed propaganda figure at a time when their grip on the war was increasingly unsure, and the British used him as an excuse for their own military ineptitude. Yet Rommel’s reputation as a military tactician par excellence overlooks his less than accomplished grasp of logistics, and above all of strategy. It also overlooks the serious weaknesses that sometimes marked the performance of his troops – who, after all, were eventually completely defeated, and by an opponent who had not only amassed superior resources, but also learned to marshal them effectively. Yet while the unblemished Rommel legend undoubtedly fails to withstand close scrutiny, the unbridled Rommel backlash of more recent decades has also been overdone. It would be fair to argue, even if it risks cliché, that the truth lies somewhere in between.

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*** The German army became involved in North Africa in order to bail out Germany’s hapless ally Fascist Italy. Mussolini had sought to expand his empire in the Mediterranean and Middle East by invading British-controlled Egypt from the neighbouring Italian colony of Libya. The Italian offensive failed miserably, and the British Western Desert Force then launched a counter-thrust into the Libyan province of Cyrenaica. Hitler initially despatched Rommel with a token force, the nucleus of the German Afrika Korps (Deutsches Afrika Korps, or DAK), to Tripoli in February 1941. The aim was to prevent the complete collapse of the Italian army in North Africa and, with it, possibly, Italy’s complete withdrawal from the war. But in 1942, Rommel’s victories assumed their own momentum, and the Nazi leadership backed him primarily for the aforementioned reasons of prestige as he sought to drive the British out of Egypt. The Allies, particularly the British, had much to lose in the North African campaign. Relinquishing control of the Suez Canal and the oil of the Middle East would have maimed Britain’s war effort. While this in itself would not necessarily have been fatal, an Axis defeat of the British in North Africa might have discouraged the United States from committing to the war in Europe as early and as fulsomely as it eventually did. The Western Allies would also have lost an important opportunity to develop their military proficiency in a subsidiary campaign. Many of the lessons learned in North Africa, and in the land battles of the Mediterranean theatre more generally, proved immensely valuable when the Allies embarked upon liberating mainland western Europe from German occupation.2 For the Germans too, the North African campaign was important. If the Germans had not at least propped up the Italians in North Africa, Italy might have left the war and ruptured the Axis alliance. In immediate military terms, this in itself need not have been serious; but, diplomatically and politically, it would have been disastrous, for Germany needed to be seen helping its allies if it were to attract more countries to the Axis. A defeated Italy would leave a vacuum in southern Europe that the Allies could exploit. It might have also prompted Germany’s Axis satellites – Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia – to jump ship, or even change sides. In short, both sides had a considerable amount riding on the North African campaign. The difference was that the British appreciated this fully, Hitler and the German high command rather less so.3 The campaign possessed unusual characteristics. For one thing, far fewer troops fought in North Africa than in the Soviet Union. The environment also shaped the fighting more fundamentally than in other theatres, even more so than in the Soviet Union. So inhospitable and impassable was the interior that the fighting took place on a coastal strip. Although it was relatively narrow, this

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contained large stretches of open terrain ideal for armoured warfare. The environment also made immense physical demands upon the soldiers. They endured extremes of desert temperature round the clock; by day the desert sun was merciless, while at night temperatures could plunge to zero. The desert could also deceive the eye: among other things, as a report by the 15th Panzer Division’s 33rd Reconnaissance Section highlighted, the lack of easily identifiable terrain features made it even more imperative for patrols to judge distances correctly. The landscape itself could also change due to rain and sandstorms; only in-depth navigation could overcome this particular challenge.4 Hans von Luck, who assumed command of the 3rd Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion in April 1942, later recalled further miseries and tricks that the desert inflicted upon the troops: ‘I got used to the Fata Morgana, the mirage, which looked so hopefully like a lake, but which on approach dissolved into nothing. I had also to get accustomed to the ferocious sandstorm which the Italians called the “Ghibli”. It usually lasted for a day, but sometimes for three. One could see it coming. The sky grew dark, the fine sand penetrated every pore and made any movement, let alone any military operation, impossible.’5 Furthermore, particularly unusual logistical hurdles bedevilled both sides, though they came to affect the Axis most of all. Axis supplies had to cross the Mediterranean while British supplies could come around the Cape of Good Hope or up the Suez Canal. The Mediterranean, therefore, was itself a battleground for the entire duration of the North African campaign, as Axis shipping seeking to reach North Africa ran the gauntlet of British and later US naval and air power. The key to the Mediterranean was the British naval base on Malta – the island was a vital fortified location and refuelling stop for Allied warships and combat aircraft out to disrupt Axis convoys, and successfully withstood repeated Axis aerial assault. Then, once they actually reached North Africa, both Axis and Allied supplies had to reckon with the region’s minimal transport infrastructure. Moreover, any chance either side had of mounting and sustaining an offensive depended on control of the oases along the desert supply routes.6 As a result of all the logistical impediments the Axis faced, it took ten times as much supply transport to keep the three divisions of Rommel’s Afrika Korps in the field compared with three divisions in the Soviet Union. This was a major reason why the German high command never invested in the North African campaign as much as it might have done.7 Letters and reports by officers and men of the 15th Panzer Division, one of the key Afrika Korps units, convey much of the campaign’s flavour. Feldwebel Arnold D. wrote at the end of April 1941: ‘with a few exceptions, the war here is a war of movement. We have to overcome distances and areas that it’s impossible to convey an impression of, even through photos.’8 The following May, Lance Corporal Siegfried K. described ‘heat of 40 degrees, and being thirsty

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isn’t an option. It’s terrible, when one is thirsty and has nothing more to drink. I mustn’t think of Böblingen, how often I got drunk there out of boredom or, more often the case with me, to get over thirst. Today I’d be pleased if I had just a small amount of what I had before to drink. . . . Worse than the heat are the sandstorms. They’re more terrible than words can describe. We copped one the day before yesterday. The sand gets into every joint, even when you’re wearing glasses.’9 Initially, German vehicle filters could not cope with the sand. During the Afrika Korps’s first offensive into Cyrenaica, in the spring of 1941, many of its vehicles got lost or ran out of fuel.10 Nevertheless, so hardy did the German troops prove in this merciless environment that the British thought they had been specially trained in purpose-built greenhouses back in Germany.11 *** The first forward units of the 5th Light (Motorized) Division disembarked at Tripoli on 25 February 1941. By the beginning of April, the entire division had been brought across, with the 15th Panzer Division to follow.12 Rommel employed dummy tanks to inflate the size of this force when it first arrived.13 Colonel von Mellenthin, who served variously as Rommel’s intelligence officer and operations officer between the summer of 1941 and the summer of 1942, alluded to the sometimes hair-raising experience of serving on his staff: ‘as a rule, Rommel expected his chief of staff to accompany him on visits to the front – which frequently meant into the very forefront of the battle. This was contrary to the accepted general staff principle, that the chief of staff is the deputy of the commander-in-chief during the latter’s absence. But Rommel liked to have his principal adviser always at his elbow, and if he became a casualty, well – he could always be replaced.’14 Overall, however, Rommel was not an especially inventive military thinker. Rather, the desert enabled him to become a purveyor par excellence of armoured warfare. ‘The principles laid down to tank warfare have been entirely justified and should be applied unchanged,’ Rommel later wrote. ‘The desert is ideal tank country with unlimited space for manoeuvre.’15 Officially, Rommel’s superior was the Italian commander-in-chief in Libya, Marshal Rodolfo Graziani. In reality, Rommel answered to the commander-inchief of the German army – practically, and from December 1941 officially, this meant Hitler. The Italians ordered Rommel to restrict his operations to reconnaissance, but two weeks after German forces had started arriving he believed he had amassed sufficient strength for a full-scale offensive. When he reached the authorized limit of his advance, on 24 March, he pushed on. Rommel defeated the British 2nd Armoured Division at Mersa Brega on 31 March, and drove the British out of most of Cyrenaica. He then had his first crack at

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capturing Tobruk, a particularly well-situated port for supplying offensives in this theatre. Throughout this initial phase of his campaigning in North Africa, Rommel led from the front as energetically as he had in the west in 1940, using his Fieseler Storch spotter plane to scout the terrain and opposition and then descend upon his commanders to spur them on personally. Indeed, overall, Rommel’s desert aerial reconnaissance outperformed that of the British during 1941 and much of 1942.16 An experience report compiled by the 15th Panzer Division, entitled ‘Es rommelt!’ (‘Rommelling!’), conveyed the general’s way of doing things: Our group isn’t large – a few anti-tank guns, a handful of tanks, and two infantry platoons. But Rommel is moving forward, so everything clicks. We haven’t gone far before we meet the English, so it’s artillery forward to take direct fire! We tear into action, get in position and the first shot flies out. Too short – add 200 metres [650 feet]! Rommel is in the middle of it all. Now we fire shot after shot at the vehicles ahead of us, and the Tommies seek escape in wild flight. The general stands next to our guns; he’s clearly getting a lot of fun out of our merciless firing. ‘Knock them out, boys, fire!’ Thus does he spur on the gunners further.17

Due to their codebreaking efforts, the British knew the Germans possessed only a small force, and so the British commander-in-chief Middle East, General Sir Archibald Wavell, had not expected them to attack before May.18 Hence, on this occasion, British codebreaking proved a curse disguised as a blessing, for when Rommel did attack in March and into April, Wavell was caught on the back foot – and this at a time when he had been forced to commit many of his troops to the fighting in Greece. Wavell nonetheless aimed to wrestle back eastern Cyrenaica from the Germans and Italians, and, it was hoped, reopen a link with the now besieged Tobruk. In mid-May, he launched a counterattack, Operation Brevity, in the Sollum region on the Libyan–Egyptian border. But Brevity made little headway; the Afrika Korps did not counterattack, but only because it preferred to let its 88mm anti-tank guns finish off the British. A follow-up British offensive in mid-June, Operation Battleaxe, likewise failed, and led to Churchill replacing Wavell with General Sir Claude Auchinleck. Booting the Western Desert Force out of Cyrenaica and then blunting all British efforts to counterattack had been a satisfying achievement for the Axis troops. *** Although a number of Italian units, contrary to the often deplorable popular image of the Italian army’s fighting power, regularly provided valuable support

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for the Germans, it was clearly the presence of Rommel and the Afrika Korps that had transformed Axis fortunes. In turn, the backbone of the Afrika Korps was its Panzers, specifically its Mark IIIs and IVs. The Panzers’ high-quality training and tactics proved markedly superior to those of the British in the Western Desert. The Afrika Korps successfully replicated the Panzer division’s structure as a mini-army; its Panzers advanced in combined-arms battle groups moving in box formation. Their standard manoeuvre involved, when such a box encountered the enemy, taking up an all-round defensive position and deploying its Panzers along a wide front. The Panzers would then withdraw slowly, to positions either side of the box. When British tanks attacked, the Panzers withdrew further on both sides. Thus, as the British rushed to engage one group of Panzers, they faced fire from anti-tank guns on their flank. The Panzers on which the British tanks had been advancing then turned and engaged the British themselves. Meanwhile, the Panzers on the unengaged side would swing round to encircle and attack the British from the rear. Intricate as these manoeuvres were, the Germans could pull them off because they possessed command cars fitted with radios. With these, they could coordinate with and monitor the radios of the individual Panzers. Moreover, by perfecting such manoeuvres through incessant battle drill, the Afrika Korps was able to operate in battle on the basis of extremely concise verbal commands.19 The British made for an unedifying contrast, particularly when it came to combined-arms practice. Their infantry-artillery coordination was especially poor: among other things, the British often used field artillery in an anti-tank role and thus deprived their infantry of its support.20 Their inferior communications were of no help either; unlike the Germans, the British lacked radios in sufficient numbers. It was also harder for them to give concise verbal commands in the way the Germans did, because the particularly multinational nature of their force – which eventually included Free French and Greek units as well as British and British Commonwealth and Empire formations – meant they had multiple operating procedures. Armoured engagements could still be fierce and close-run. Lance Corporal Wolfgang H. of the 15th Panzer Division described one such clash during Operation Battleaxe. ‘Tommy wanted to break through to relieve his besieged troops in Tobruk. You can’t imagine how dramatic this battle was. . . . My company has lost 80 per cent of its strength. We were pleased when the battle came to an end. Two hundred English tanks covered the landscape.’21 British armoured tactics crudely resembled old-fashioned cavalry charges. While it is tempting to attribute this to a ‘Tally ho, chaps’ mentality, it was more an attempt to compensate for the fact that British tanks, hobbled by the ongoing failings of British tank design, were technically inferior. The Mark IV Panzer, fitted with the long 75mm cannon, was more than a match for any British tank. The

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Matilda was particularly vulnerable to German anti-tank fire. Its successor, the Valentine, had thicker armour but was no faster or better armed. The Crusader tank was underpowered, which prevented the British from thickening its armour in the same way the Germans could with their Panzers.22 The Germans’ versatile 88mm anti-tank guns exacted a particularly heavy toll on British armour. Thus British tank units, knowing they could not avoid fighting but also fearing German firepower, often resorted to waiting in the hope that their own artillery would destroy the German anti-tank guns. This, of course, denied British tank units the element of surprise. The only alternative was the aforementioned cavalry charge, in which British armoured formations tried to overrun the German anti-tank guns, in David French’s words, in ‘the usually vain hope that they could overrun them before they themselves had been blown to pieces’.23 During Operation Battleaxe, Matildas suffered especially against 88s dug in so well that only their barrels showed above ground.24 Moreover, the RAF was focusing much of its energy on the early stages of the strategic bombing of Germany during 1941 and 1942, so the Western Desert Force lacked proper tactical air support. The British failure in Operation Battleaxe did lead to the creation of the Desert Air Force, but air-ground communication still took time to improve.25 *** On the other hand, Rommel’s first offensive also exposed some of his own failings. He had no qualms about mercilessly driving his troops: whenever his vehicles got lost or ran out of fuel, he tolerated no hold-ups, tearing around the forward areas driving his men onwards. This haranguing approach had its advantages: the pace of the advance was indicated in a letter by Private Klaus N. of 11 June 1941. ‘The fighting is hard, Tommy is getting a kicking,’ he wrote. ‘Otherwise things are moving forward really fast in this hot land.’26 But it also risked driving men and machines to exhaustion. In October, the 15th Panzer Division’s 11th Infantry Regiment stressed that ‘an urgent priority for the first weeks of refitting is the re-establishment of previous strength. Weapons, vehicles and equipment need a fundamental, durable overhaul.’27 Further, while Rommel’s penchant for dashing around his frontline units often made for energetic and effective leadership, it could also cause him to lose sight of the bigger operational picture and end up in the wrong place to coordinate the fight most effectively. For instance, he lost the opportunity to achieve an even more decisive victory against Operation Brevity on the Sollum front because he was too busy driving his men before Tobruk. The Afrika Korps and the Luftwaffe also coordinated poorly during the Sollum fighting.28

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Rommel’s first attempt to take Tobruk in the spring of 1941 exemplified both his impetuosity and the demands he placed on his troops. British and Commonwealth forces had captured Tobruk from the Italians in January. The Australian troops now stationed there had had time to fortify the port more formidably, and it was also being reinforced by sea. On 11 April, the 5th Light Division assaulted Tobruk, but the Germans were too lightly armed and faltered before the defenders’ anti-tank ditch. On the 12th, they were stopped by sandstorms, and on the 13th, by artillery and anti-tank fire. So too were attacks by Italian troops. A reinforced attack the following month similarly wilted in the teeth of the defenders’ strong defensive firepower. Rommel’s troops also still lacked experience, as he himself later recalled: ‘the high casualties suffered by my assault forces were primarily caused by the lack of training. . . . It frequently happened that dash was used where caution was really needed, with, of course, casualties as the result. For the next occasion, when boldness really was required, the men would be overcautious.’29 Rommel also had to relinquish his air support temporarily, when it was transferred to operations over Crete and the Nile Delta. Rommel’s failure at Tobruk also showcased another of his unappealing traits – his habit of blaming the Italians, even though it was Rommel himself who had sent them in against the odds. Rommel and his men regularly castigated their Italian allies. One of the kinder comments came from Second Lieutenant André F. of the 15th Panzer Division, who wrote in May: ‘one must treat the Italians as children. They’re no good as soldiers, but they’re the best comrades. You can get anything from them. Mussolini is the most un-Italian Italian in his thinking, for [among the Italian troops] you never see any sign of the idea of Fascism. The “dolce fare niente” [life of doing nothing] reigns supreme.’30 It would be fairer to say that a good number of Italian units, such as the elite Bersaglieri, gave valuable support to the Germans in the desert, but then made perfect scapegoats when things went wrong. Colonel von Mellenthin, though conscious of serial defects in the Italian army, defended the ordinary Italian soldier in his memoirs. ‘I have no sympathy with those who talk contemptuously about the Italian soldier,’ he stated,‘without pausing to consider the disadvantages under which he laboured.’31 Rommel too reserved special contempt for Italian commanders rather than for their men. His derision is clear in a letter to his wife of 31 August: ‘The Italian high command is dissatisfied having so little say in things here. They mess us about over all manner of petty details, but we don’t take any of it lying down. Maybe they’re working for a real bust-up, in order to get me, or perhaps the whole German force, out of the way.’32 But nor did Rommel spare his German subordinates a verbal lashing; the unfortunate recipient after the failure at Tobruk was Major General Johannes Streich, commander of the 5th

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Light Division. According to Rommel’s aide de camp Lieutenant Schmidt, the commander of the Afrika Korps ‘gave vent to his anger openly and used blunt words, such as presumably only one general may use to another’.33 General Halder had been sceptical about the whole North African enterprise from the start. Forgetting that his own planning for Barbarossa did not have the firmest grounding in reality either, he was appalled at Rommel’s rashness and chastised him for flouting his original orders. ‘Rommel . . . is reporting that he does not have enough power to exploit this “unique opportunity”,’ he recorded in his diary. ‘Well, we’ve known that at this end for a long time.’34 Halder was particularly incensed that Rommel was pushing ahead regardless of his severe supply restrictions; only an airborne invasion of Malta – a seaborne landing was out of the question due to the island’s high cliffs – would have eased this situation. Yet an airborne invasion was also out of the question, once Hitler had decided to commit paratroop forces against Crete instead. ‘Rommel has exceeded his orders,’ wrote Halder, ‘and created a situation which the supply possibilities at the moment are no longer equal to.’35 Then, on 23 April, after Rommel had gone quiet for a few days, Halder fumed that the general ‘just bounces around his widely dispersed units, forays out on adventures and fritters away his troops’. Halder then sent General Paulus, the deputy chief of operations at the OKH, to North Africa to remind Rommel of what he was supposed to be doing there: performing a defensive role with minimal help. ‘Paulus knows him from previous military service,’ Halder maintained, ‘and is perhaps the only one who can rein in this soldier, who has gone mad.’36 Paulus visited Rommel at the end of April. His initially favourable impression evaporated when he saw the Axis troops’ heavily exposed positions at Sollum, the demands the harsh conditions were making upon them, and the dogged resistance of the Australians at Tobruk. Paulus reported back to Halder at the beginning of May, blaming Rommel for the situation and confirming the scale of the logistical mountain facing him. Rommel now received direct orders forbidding him to attack Tobruk again without higher authority.37 Generally, however, Hitler’s protection of Rommel placed a check on what Halder could do, and responsibility for the North African theatre was eventually transferred from the OKH to the OKW. On 19 July, Hitler promoted Rommel to the rank of general of Panzer troops, and appointed him commander of the new Panzer Group Africa, which comprised both the Afrika Korps and Italian formations. General Crüwell, arriving from the eastern front, took over direct command of the Afrika Korps, while Major General Westphal became Rommel’s new chief of operations. Although Rommel often hurled abuse at them, both Crüwell and the new command staff worked hard to improve the Panzer group’s efficiency.38 Yet on the British side, while the Western Desert Force was renamed

4. The North African and Mediterranean theatre

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the Eighth Army and placed under General Alan Cunningham, it remained no less organizationally and tactically defective than before. *** In November, the British were able to use their naval superiority to sever Axis supplies to North Africa temporarily, and on the 18th, General Auchinleck counterattacked with Operation Crusader. In one respect, Crusader showed the way for the British. To some extent, it tried to commit the now numerically inferior Axis forces to the kind of attritional set-piece battle in which the British would later become much more successful.39 The strength of the British force was eventually blunted after the Afrika Korps virtually destroyed the British 7th Armoured Brigade at Sidi Rezegh.40 The British also failed to reach the still isolated port of Tobruk. Nevertheless, Rommel coordinated the German counterattack poorly, sending unclear radio messages to the various units, and popping up here and there to order armoured thrusts without thought for their wider operational value. Crusader also exposed Rommel’s sizable ungracious streak: Crüwell should have been credited with some of the key decisions taken during the fighting, but Rommel seized the accolades for himself.41 By December, the sides had bludgeoned one another into exhaustion. On balance, however, Panzer Group Africa had had the better of the action, because it had forced a stalemate despite being outnumbered. Auchinleck replaced the nervously exhausted Cunningham with General Neil Ritchie. Mellenthin estimated that, while the British had been badly mauled during Operation Crusader, their strength would increase again after January. Meanwhile, however, a Royal Navy flotilla was lost to sea mines, and the Luftwaffe’s II Air Corps arrived on Sicily to put pressure on Malta and loosen the British stranglehold on the Axis supply routes. All this created a narrow window of opportunity in which to attack the British again.42 The newly renamed Panzer Army Africa attacked on 21 January 1942; four days later, as Rommel recounted, the Germans savaged the British 1st Armoured Division, ‘[breaking] into the enemy at tearing speed and [throwing] him into complete confusion’.43 By the end of January, the Axis had captured Benghazi and, apart from Tobruk, had driven the British out of Cyrenaica altogether. To his credit, Rommel praised both his Italian and German troops this time. But Axis losses had been heavier than those of the British, and Benghazi’s capture proved a disappointment; the fuel bonanza Rommel had hoped for did not come up to expectations, and capturing the port did not replace the long overland route from Tripoli; it merely shortened it.44 May and June 1942 brought Rommel’s greatest victory: he broke through the latest British defensive position on the Gazala Line, the northern end of

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which was about 24 kilometres (15 miles) west of Tobruk. On paper, the two forces were evenly matched, and the British hoped Gazala could not be outflanked from the south.45 However, the British system of defensive ‘boxes’, each manned by a brigade group and containing food and supplies for a week, was deeply flawed, for if British mobile troops could not stop the Axis thrusts then the boxes could be easily cut off.46 Furthermore, though the British expected an attack, they did not know where it would fall, for their codebreaking operation at Bletchley Park had yet to become effective enough for signals to reach Cairo within twelve hours of the Germans transmitting them.47 Although the British still had more tanks than Panzer Army Africa, Rommel possessed other advantages. He expected his 88s would again help even the score, which they duly did, and he could also count on air superiority. The British themselves helped him yet again with their crude armoured tactics. Nevertheless, both sides suffered heavily during the battle’s opening phase. Among other things, the 90th Light (Motorized) Division, which had arrived in North Africa in November 1941, and newly arrived Italian forces overcame particularly dogged resistance from foreign legionnaires of the Free French forces. One reason why the legionnaires put up such a ferocious struggle was that, because they belonged to a force whose mother country had surrendered to the Axis, they feared they would be killed if taken prisoner.48 The 1940 armistice had forbidden French citizens from fighting the Germans, and in November 1940, the OKW decreed that captured Free French soldiers were to be shot. It is not clear whether or not Rommel received this order, or what role he may or may not have played in deciding the fate of the legionnaires at Bir Hakeim. However, when Bir Hakeim did finally fall on 11th June, its defenders were not executed, but sent into captivity.49 Now the Gazala Line fell apart. Ritchie counterattacked, but to no avail. Lieutenant Raeder, a pioneer with the 15th Panzer Division, described the moment when a British armoured counterthrust in his sector was beaten off and British resistance collapsed: ‘The artilleryman works precisely, like a machine. Shot after shot leaves the barrel. . . . Tommy’s tanks have had enough. In panicked haste they pull back. . . . Our armoured personnel carriers move forward. The pioneers spring out. Machine guns are brought up, and the first group rolls through the gap with hand grenades ready to throw. Precision fire on the individual foxholes and hand grenades thrown in soften up Tommy further. The first few come out of the forward foxholes and raise their hands. The fear has got into their bones and their faces are ashen.’50 As the British retreated into Egypt, the Axis forces turned on the now perilously exposed Tobruk. Having extricated the majority of his forces, Ritchie retained some units in Tobruk, if for nothing else because relinquishing the port without a fight would have been unthinkable politically.51 In contrast with

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the attacks on Tobruk a year earlier, coordination between the Axis ground forces and the Luftwaffe was excellent. Stukas destroyed the port’s barbed-wire defences and supported the Panzers in tank-to-tank fighting after Axis troops broke through the perimeter. Senior Corporal M. Reiter of Panzer Pioneer Battalion 33 described the assault: ‘We couldn’t see anything of the enemy bunkers or tank ditches . . . but then our first wave of Stukas roared in. At the same moment our artillery got stuck in. The magical spectacle that the bombs and grenades created was indescribable; the smoke clouds rose vertically up to heaven, one appeared after another, and again and again the desert trembled with the impact.’52 This time, Tobruk fell. Hitler marked the occasion by promoting Rommel to field marshal. *** But now came the vexing question of what to do next. The Italians, still Rommel’s nominal superiors, would have happily seen the Axis consolidate its position. Their own preferred next step, a view they shared with Field Marshal Kesselring, German Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean since November 1941, was to secure the Axis supply route by taking Malta with airborne troops. But as far as the Nazi leadership was now concerned, consolidating the Axis position in North Africa was not enough. With the United States now in the war, further German progress on the eastern front uncertain and the RAF’s first thousandbomber raid over Germany having recently taken place, Hitler and Goebbels believed success needed reinforcing wherever it could be found. Tobruk’s fall, Rommel’s promotion to field marshal and the subsequent propaganda blitz had unleashed a wave of ‘Rommelmania’ in Germany. Rommel, ever one to cultivate both the media and his Nazi leadership contacts, readily played along. Hitler reasoned that, if the momentum of this necessary propaganda blitz were to be maintained, Rommel would need to go on the offensive again as quickly as possible. The obvious targets were the Nile Delta and the Suez Canal. Although a full-scale invasion of Egypt seemed a daunting prospect for Rommel’s overstretched forces, the idea was not entirely foolhardy. Rommel was aware there was a new window of opportunity to hit the British while they were weak, and thanks to Italian military intelligence’s efforts in deciphering messages from the US Embassy in Cairo, he knew just how weak they were. Furthermore, the Germans had now captured as many as six thousand usable British trucks.53 Rommel’s order of the day of 21 June bristled with confidence: ‘Soldiers of the Panzerarmee Afrika! Now for the complete destruction of the enemy. We will not rest until we have shattered the last remnants of the Eighth Army. During the days to come, I shall call on you for one more great effort to bring us to this final goal.’54 Nor was this just a public show of bravado. ‘There’ll

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be a few more battles to fight before we reach our goal,’ he wrote home at the end of the month, ‘but I think the worst is well behind us.’55 Yet the obstacles were immense. Capturing Malta, thereby securing Axis supply across the Mediterranean, would have been a sensible prelude to any invasion of Egypt, but postponing the invasion of Egypt to take Malta was not an option. Rommel knew he could ill-afford to give the British time to prepare. Their defence of Egypt benefited from shortened supply lines, and their forces were already growing again: in particular, three hundred US Sherman tanks were now Egypt-bound.56 In any case, Hitler was reluctant to drop parachute troops on Malta following the losses they had sustained on Crete.57 As well he might have been. For all these reasons, Malta remained an insoluble problem for the Axis, plans to capture the island were shelved, and German paratroop forces that might have been used against the island were assigned to Rommel instead. Meanwhile, Kesselring would try to at least to keep disrupting the British operation on Malta with continued aerial bombardment. But this in turn compelled him to reduce Rommel’s air cover.58 In the event, though it achieved a very hardwon local victory at Mersa Matruh at the end of June, Panzer Army Africa would get no further than the British position at El Alamein. By now, Auchinleck had sent Ritchie the way of Cunningham, and had assumed command of the Eighth Army himself. Following the losses of May and June, Auchinleck was only able to commit two greatly weakened infantry divisions, one armoured division, a further infantry division on the way, two infantry brigades, and a series of combat groups.59 To compensate for his shortage in artillery and armour, he elected on a defensive line hinged on the El Alamein position. Such a line could not be outflanked from the south, because there it bordered onto the Qattara Depression, an immense sand sea impassable to tanks. And only about 50 kilometres (30 miles) separated the northern end of the depression from the Mediterranean. In short, this was too small an area for Rommel to execute sweeping manoeuvres around the British flank. It left Rommel no alternative but to attack the British head-on. Rommel attacked on 1 July, hoping to tempt the British into counterattacking in the south. He would then advance through the night and penetrate the British line in the north. But Rommel now lacked reliable intelligence. His radio monitoring company roamed the desert as a mobile unit and provided Rommel with valuable information about British troop dispositions, but working out in the field rather than at headquarters deprived it of the bigger picture.60 The only high-level intelligence source available to Rommel had been closed off on 29 June, when the Americans had discovered and plugged the leak from their Cairo embassy.61 Furthermore, given Rommel’s suddenly paltry air cover, the RAF now ruled the skies over Egypt and prevented the Axis from carrying out effective aerial reconnaissance.

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Moreover, British intelligence efforts were becoming much more proficient, with Ultra decrypts enabling Auchinleck to anticipate Rommel’s every move.62 Ultra was a major weapon in an Allied intelligence effort that, inept though it was at the war’s start, was becoming formidable by 1942. Ultra’s success was a story of German failure as well as Allied achievement. The genesis of Ultra lay in the efforts of Polish cryptanalysts during the 1930s to reconstruct the Enigma mechanism, after a corruptible member of the Reichswehr’s cipher team sold operating instructions and operating keys to the French.63 It was the capture or theft of further Enigma cipher key settings that led to the now world-famous wartime operation at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, England. Thousands of Enigma machines were used, with numerous variations, by all branches of German military and civilian authority. These variations required different branches to repeat the same message several times, and this gave Allied codebreakers the material they needed to reduce deciphering times. The Allies concealed their use of Ultra intelligence using various types of cover, such as ‘Boniface’, a fictitious secret agent working in German command offices, as well as POW interrogations that had actually taken place.64 On the few occasions when the Germans did consider the possibility that the Allies had breached Enigma, they blamed traitors rather than any fundamental flaw in the machinery. Generally, however, they did not believe the Allies had broken their cipher system, and their disbelief says much about German military attitudes under the Third Reich. The Enigma machine had originally been introduced by the Reichswehr during the 1920s. In keeping with the latter’s stress on technical excellence, it was cutting-edge equipment for its time. The Germans also employed numerous safeguards for its use. For instance, they frequently changed service settings in case an Enigma machine fell into enemy hands, and each operator only had responsibility for portions of the daily setting in case one of them was captured. Yet the Germans gradually undercut the effectiveness of such safeguards. For one thing, they transmitted Enigma messages too repetitively, thus making it easier for Allied code breakers to identify patterns. They also adhered to a central command structure in the transmission of messages; this negated the need for multiple ciphers, and thus robbed Enigma of a further crucial security safeguard. Moreover, despite adherence to a central structure, the intelligence branches of the army, Luftwaffe, Kriegsmarine and SS all considered themselves separate organizations within that structure. They therefore failed to imagine that the Allies might glean information about one armed service from messages produced by another. Upgrades did not take place frequently enough or uniformly enough to keep ahead of Allied codebreakers, and sometimes, through sheer laziness, the Germans repeated settings from previous

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months.65 This particular gaffe reflected the Germans’ general complacency over intelligence matters. *** The damage the Ultra decrypts would wreak upon Rommel’s chances was made clear at the very start of the first battle of El Alamein on 1 July. When Rommel’s attack went in, the 21st Panzer Division (the renamed and refitted 5th Light Division) received a hammering from the Desert Air Force. By now, the DAF was employing highly effective fighter-bombers. The 90th Light Division received similar treatment from the British artillery. Rommel’s own air cover, insofar as he had any, was nullified by a sandstorm and a lack of forward airfields. This 1 July assault had been Rommel’s least-poor chance of breaking through. When it failed, Indian and New Zealand troops backed by Allied fighter-bombers held up the Axis forces the following day. Captain Dr Thiese of the 33rd Panzerjäger Section provided a flavour of the battle, and of the pressure Panzer Army Africa was now under, in an after-action report on an Eighth Army counterattack on the southern flank: ‘[We] fought off a mixed infantry and tank attack, but . . . we have lost twelve more men. The division radios that we must hold out at all costs. It is that serious. The radio operator who takes the message falls at his apparatus to a grenade splinter.’ That night, each of the section’s machine guns was forced to cover a 400-metre (1,300-foot) front,‘each in the hands of an exhausted pioneer’. The following night, at 11pm, ‘a big explosion in the middle of my company’s sector announces clearly that an enemy action is in progress. This time the enemy breaks through with strong infantry forces headed by troops specially trained for sabotage and detonation. . . . One gun emplacement after another is blown sky-high. . . . Our defensive fire is amplified by the enormous detonations from the explosive devices the Australians are using. The wounded call for help all around. . . . Australian and German soldiers hurl themselves at one another, and everyone fires against everyone in the darkness.’66 On 3 July, with the Afrika Korps down to twenty-six tanks, Rommel disengaged from the battle.67 Although Auchinleck had halted Panzer Army Africa, Churchill feared that too many of his generals were now suffering from ‘Rommel psychosis’ following their serial defeats. He therefore sought out a fresh team that would not only stop Rommel, but also decisively defeat him. Churchill eventually settled on a partnership of General Harold Alexander as commander-in-chief Middle East, and Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery as Eighth Army commander. But Auchinleck’s effective stand at El Alamein had bought the new team the time it needed to rebuild the Eighth Army. Rommel, for his part, had finally

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fallen short against a commander who had enjoyed air and intelligence superiority and had not counterattacked recklessly. After First Alamein, the Axis air forces’ ongoing failure to subdue Malta increasingly tipped the supply balance away from Panzer Army Africa. Rommel, belying his image as a rash hothead laughing in the face of logistics, later reflected on the situation thus: ‘When it is remembered that in modern warfare supplies decide the battle, it is easy to see how the clouds of disaster were gathering for my army. . . . My troops had at all times given of their best. But it had repeatedly been the superiority of certain German weapons over the British equivalents that had been our salvation. Now there were already signs, in the new British tanks and anti-tank guns, of a coming qualitative superiority of British material. If this were achieved, it would clearly mean the end for us.’68 In August, the Axis lost 65,000 tons of shipping, compared with 20,000 in July.69 Rommel himself became passive and depressed. Kesselring protested that he was unable to give Rommel adequate air cover, pointing out that the Luftwaffe needed to keep pounding Malta now that plans to invade the island had been shelved. Rommel was also refused a request for more anti-tank guns. On 21 August, he suffered a fainting fit, only fully recovering when he was assured that Hitler was not about to replace him with General Guderian.70 Increasingly aware that time was running out, at the end of August, Rommel made a final attempt to crack the El Alamein line, this time in its central sector at Alam Halfa. His own forces’ lack of fuel and, again, the superior intelligence of the British thwarted his advance; indeed, when the Afrika Korps tried to launch one of its tried-and-tested night attacks, its forces were caught in the glare of British flares as, in Rommel’s words, ‘the whole valley, with [the] mass of the Afrika Korps stationary, was lit up like a huge orange fairyland’.71 Montgomery pinned his armour to the ridge and let his air support pound the German advance. Rommel’s further enforced quiet after Alam Halfa enabled Montgomery to continue rebuilding the Eighth Army and strengthening its morale. On 30 September, Montgomery was promoted to field marshal. October saw the Luftwaffe’s last ever assault on Malta; when that too failed, the supply balance tipped away from Panzer Army Africa irrevocably. Not only the quantity but also the quality of Allied equipment now threatened to overwhelm the Axis. The US-manufactured Grant and Sherman tanks were a significant improvement on previous British tank designs. The Grant could outgun any Panzer, bar a Mark IV with a 75mm cannon. The Sherman, despite a tendency to catch fire easily – the Germans came to call them ‘Tommy cookers’ – was even more formidable because it was armed with a 75mm gun in its turret.72 British artillery benefited from the (albeit gradual) introduction of the six-pounder and

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the 7.2-inch howitzer. In addition to this and its now emphatic air supremacy, the Eighth Army gained an inflow of reinforcements. Montgomery also introduced changes to the Eighth Army’s organization and tactics. German practice was still not matched in either respect, but at least the gap narrowed. He organized his corps flexibly so that their composition could be changed according to the developing situation. Signals establishments were expanded and better-quality radios used: this particularly benefited the accuracy of British artillery. Subordinate commanders were now required to have forward tactical HQs, as the Germans did, and now that the Axis forces were on the defensive the task of commanding from the front was less dangerous than before.73 By now, moreover, British army training was benefiting from improved exercises, tactical battle drills, and an innovative system of battle inoculation that prepared the troops for the sights and sounds of actual combat.74 Overall, the Eighth Army began to approach a standard similar to that of the Afrika Korps – as a force whose armour operated as part of a combined-arms plan rather than hurtling in on its own. And the Eighth Army was now a great deal better resourced than the Afrika Korps had ever been. *** The second battle of El Alamein, which heralded Montgomery’s intended decisive offensive against Panzer Army Africa, commenced on 23 October. By then, Rommel was back in Germany on recuperative leave, and Panzer Army Africa was commanded by General of Panzer Troops Georg Stumme. Although its tank force had been built up again, Stumme still commanded only half the tanks of the Eighth Army. Panzer Army Africa comprised around sixty thousand combat troops against Montgomery’s 195,000. The disparity in air strength was even greater.75 On the other hand, Rommel had laid nearly half a million mines, and his infantry held numerous formidable strong points. The battle commenced with an 892-gun artillery barrage and an air attack; Stumme had failed to bombard the British forward areas beforehand in an effort to save ammunition. He then died of heart failure while on reconnaissance, and a still only half-recovered Rommel was brought back to Egypt on 25 October. Tellingly, Panzer Army Africa was now renamed the German-Italian Panzer Army, as though this would share out the blame more explicitly for the fate that was about to befall it. Montgomery envisaged not a fancy set of offensive manoeuvres, but an organized set-piece battle that would marshal the Eighth Army’s superior numbers and materiel to full effect. The first stage of his planned offensive was the ‘break-in’, codenamed Operation Lightfoot, in which his infantry penetrated the Axis minefields to clear them for his armour. Once the armour went in, the

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Afrika Korps’s 88s again inflicted heavy losses upon it. But this was an attritional, First World War battle, fought with Second World War weaponry, and the outnumbered forces of the German-Italian Panzer Army could not compete for long. ‘The situation continues very grave,’ Rommel wrote to his wife on 29 October. ‘By the time this letter arrives, it will no doubt have been decided whether we can hold on or not. I haven’t much hope left.’76 Such was the rate of destruction within the 21st Panzer Division, for instance, that by 4 November it had only twenty operational tanks left.77 An after-action report by the 15th Panzer Division described what Rommel’s armour was now up against: ‘there is no German weapon in Africa that can destroy the new American tank . . . from a distance of over 2,000 metres [2,200 yards].’ It also observed that the British were fitting both new and old tanks with 7.5cm guns. ‘With this, they are reaching a range which is 1,000 metres [1,100 yards] further than the average firing range of all German anti-tank weapons. . . . General result: the tanks and anti-tank weapons the German army uses in Africa are no longer the best in the world.’78 Although the Eighth Army did not immediately break through, it formed a new salient, and the German-Italian Panzer Army was damned however it tried to respond. If it failed to counterattack, then the Eighth Army would break out of the salient. In the event, the counterattacks the Panzer Army did launch ground down its own strength even further.79 On 1 November, the Eighth Army commenced its own breakout, codenamed Operation Supercharge. The Axis forces were deceived by a feint assault in the south, but the real blow came further north between the Germans and Italians. On 2 November, Rommel began pulling part of his force out of the line; the following day, he wrote to his wife: ‘We seem to be crushed by the enemy weight. I’ve made an attempt to salvage part of the army. I wonder if it will succeed. At night I lie open-eyed, racking my brains for a way out of this plight for my poor troops.’80 That same day, Hitler refused Rommel’s request to withdraw, decreeing: ‘you can show your troops no other road but that to victory or death.’81 Here, for the first time, Hitler was applying a central dictum of National Socialist warfare – that the will to stand fast could best any material odds – in a manner that would have doomed an entire army to destruction. It was the beginning of Rommel’s disillusionment with his Führer. Retreat became even more urgent with the news that another Allied army, predominantly comprising US troops, had landed to the west on the coast of French North Africa. Eventually, Kesselring backed Rommel’s request to retreat. Hitler finally granted it, while raging that Rommel had lost his nerve.82 Taking advantage of a timely rainstorm, and of the Italian trucks they had purloined, Rommel’s German troops were able to escape. They managed to retreat in an orderly fashion thanks to a good order of march and Montgomery’s reluctance to pursue them more energetically, still less to try to encircle them.

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There followed successive battles between November and January in which the Germans performed a temporary holding action, usually lasting about a day, before withdrawing again. They reallocated their fuel to where it was most needed; this gave them just enough strength to launch last-minute local counterattacks to delay the Eighth Army’s pursuit. Rommel also used his limited reconnaissance effectively to observe the enemy’s main point of effort. He attributed Montgomery’s failure to inflict a more decisive defeat to an overly methodical attitude and a mania for building reserves, but this was only a partial and simplistic version of the true picture. British army command remained more hierarchical and bureaucratic than its Germans counterpart. This system might improve an army’s day-to-day running, but did not aid swift decision-making in battle.83 But Montgomery was also cautious because he was conscious of the limited manpower and resources Britain was able to devote to her army: in comparison with the resources directed towards the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force, the army was Britain’s third service over the course of the war as a whole. Even so, Montgomery’s defeat of Rommel at El Alamein had been emphatic; all that now remained for the Germans in North Africa was another six months of tenacious but irreversible fighting retreat, before a final stand in Tunisia in May 1943. *** The fight between the Axis and the British-led forces in the desert has been almost universally depicted as a ‘war without hate’, lacking any of the brutality of the eastern front. Broadly speaking, this is true. For one thing, there is no evidence that Rommel treated Allied POWs anything other than correctly. Among other things, as well as the sparing of the French Foreign Legion troops at Bir Hakeim in June 1942, Rommel apparently tore up a general order to execute captured British commandos when it was transmitted to him in October 1942.84 But there are important caveats to the idea of the campaign’s relatively chivalrous nature. There was at least one straightforward reason why it lacked the ideologically driven brutality of the eastern front: there were virtually no civilians to aid either side and risk reprisals as a result. The only exception was the nomadic Arabs who travelled the region. These had little if any personal interest in the campaign’s outcome, and it was relatively easy for them and the combatants to avoid one another. Yet when Rommel did show concern about the Arabs, he also showed insight and restraint. In the spring of 1941, he reported how: as a result of Italian loss of prestige after Graziani’s defeat, a number of Arab tribes had begun to get restive. This was not helped by the fact that Italian

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troops occasionally took liberties with the Arab women, a thing which Arabs particularly resent. I was forced to send an urgent request to the Italian High Command, asking them to see to it that the Arabs were treated with sufficient respect to avoid an armed uprising close behind our front. At about this time officers and men of the Trento Division were responsible for several excesses against the Arab population, with the result that the Arabs killed a number of Italian soldiers and kept the Italians away from their villages by armed force. There are always people who invariably demand reprisals in this sort of situation – for reasons, apart from anything else, of expediency. Such action is never expedient. The right thing to do is to ignore the incidents, unless the real culprits can be traced.85

It would be interesting to see how Rommel would have responded to resistance from Slavic ‘sub-humans’, but this quotation suggests a general whose view of irregular warfare would also have marked him out as a moderate, relatively speaking at least, on the eastern front. The desert campaign was not entirely detached from the criminality of the Third Reich’s wider war. Had the Axis overrun Egypt, still more gone into the Middle East, there would have been nothing ‘clean’ about this victory. For it would eventually have spelt the destruction of the region’s Jewish population. An Einsatzkommando under Obersturmbannführer Walther Rauff was waiting to follow in the wake of Panzer Army Africa, and in the event of a complete Axis victory over the Eighth Army, it would have rounded up Egyptian and Middle Eastern Jews to face the same fate as their fellows across Germany and occupied Europe.86 A reminder of what prejudices lurked beneath the surface of the Wehrmacht forces serving in North Africa came in Tripoli at the beginning of 1942. At this point, as the Final Solution began gearing up across German-occupied Europe, Wehrmacht personnel were appalled that the Italian administration in the port was protecting the city’s approximately sixteen thousand Jewish inhabitants.87 Anti-Semitic measures were certainly carried out in Axis-occupied Tunisia during late 1942, when Rauff’s Einsatzkommando forced Jews to build fortifications. At this time, however, Rommel’s forces were retreating from Egypt, and there is no evidence that Rommel himself had contact with the Einsatzkommando.88 None of this is to deny that Rommel sympathized with many tenets of Nazi ideology, admired Hitler greatly for a long period and flagrantly exploited his own party connections in the service of his career. And as his tenure as commander of Army Group B in northern Italy during the summer and autumn of 1943 would demonstrate, his conduct towards occupied civilians was not always blemish-free. It seems, however, that Rommel’s reputation has been tarnished to an unfair extent by some scholars of recent decades. Such scholars, while understandably seeking to negate the reverence that some of

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Rommel’s early biographers heaped upon him, may have thrown out the baby with the hagiographical bathwater. *** The justifiably measured view of Rommel’s military performance is that, though he could be impetuous and disorganized, his grasp of Auftragstaktik was sound on balance. He certainly proved a superior tactician compared with the majority of opponents he faced in North Africa during 1941 and 1942. His troops might not love him, but they respected him because he gave them victories. If his strategic ambitions in June 1942 were overinflated, he could be forgiven for some overconfidence considering the performance of his British opponents until then. He was also pushed into invading Egypt, if for the greater part willingly, by the Nazi leadership. Rommel’s achievements were particularly impressive considering his logistical difficulties, difficulties of which he was more cognisant than he is sometimes given credit for being. He also retreated skilfully, even though this also had something to do with Montgomery making it easier for him.89 Yet there was a limit to how long Allied commanders would go on repeating the same tactical blunders as their predecessors, especially considering the rapidity with which the British in particular replaced their failing commanders. There was also a limit to how long the Allies’ technical proficiency would continue to lag behind that of the Germans. The timescale was even more truncated because of the Allies’ burgeoning resources, and Rommel’s growing dearth of them, throughout the course of 1942. The Axis forces in North Africa had always been severely stretched, but this did not stop them from winning. The tipping point came when their opponents became not only better resourced, but also more competent. The one fed into the other: for instance, when the British received better-quality tanks, they could develop armoured tactics that consisted of more than just hurling their armour at the German line in the flimsy hope of breaking through before it was destroyed. Over time, moreover, intelligence and air power told increasingly in favour of the Eighth Army and against the Axis. The Germans’ initial victories were due not just to Rommel’s leadership, but also to the Afrika Korps’s wider qualities. Its main strengths lay less in its weaponry than in its tactics, its superior combined-arms organization, the effectiveness of its tactical-level intelligence, the training of its officers and men, and the speed with which they adapted to harsh North African conditions. There are echoes here not just of the efficiency and audacity of the German army’s performance in its early campaigns, but also in how its troops adapted, however painfully, to the environment of the Soviet Union.

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Unfortunately for the German army, by late 1942, these qualities were no longer enough to enable it to wrest back the initiative from an enemy that was not only better resourced, but also increasingly capable. This was now as true of the German army fighting in North Africa as it was of the much larger German army fighting in the Soviet Union.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

SOUTHERN RUSSIA AND STALINGRAD, 1942–43

B

etween december  and April 1942, the German army held the line of the eastern front against Red Army counterattacks for four months. From then until the autumn, it recovered sufficiently to at least try, together with the Luftwaffe, to wrest back the initiative on the eastern front. Thus would it make a last major effort to shift the entire war’s strategic balance back in Germany’s favour. An ambitious new offensive in the south attempted to capture the entire industrial and mining region of the Donbass, the oil of the Caucasus and the city of Stalingrad. The offensive certainly showed what the German army was still capable of, but also further exposed the weaknesses that increasingly debilitated it. Ultimately, it also failed, and with catastrophic results. In the words of Bernd Wegner: ‘Hitler and the Germans tried to go for everything, and were left with nothing.’1 *** Such were the losses the army and Luftwaffe had suffered during 1941 that a renewed offensive along the whole eastern front was out of the question. Among other things, the Germans had lost over 300,000 men killed, twice as many as during the war’s first twenty months. By the start of March 1942, German forces in the east had fallen from a total of three million men at the beginning of July 1941 to slightly more than 2.5 million, and only eight of the army’s 162 divisions were considered fully capable.2 An immense amount of refreshing and rebuilding was needed, then, before the Germans could launch even a more targeted offensive. Yet after the failure in the east in 1941 and the entry of the United States into the war, Hitler was convinced that attack the Germans must. To do anything else would further hand the initiative to Germany’s enemies. On 5 April 1942, Hitler issued a directive through the OKW proclaiming Germany’s main offensive effort in the Soviet Union during 1942. It would

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focus on the south, and would be codenamed Operation Blue. The offensive was intended to ‘destroy the remaining military forces of the Soviets once and for all’, and ‘as far as possible remove from them the most important economic resources necessary for the war effort’.3 In the Germans’ southern path lay the heart of the industrial and mining region of the Donbass, and beyond that the oil of the Caucasus. Capturing the Caucasus would also provide Germany with gold, manganese and other materials, open up the Middle East, and in doing so sever Lend Lease aid routes that the Western Allies had opened up to the Soviet Union. There were even notions of closing in on the Middle East in a pincer movement with Rommel.4 Above all, Hitler believed that capturing the Donbass and the Caucasus were essential to Germany’s war effort against the potentially overwhelming economic strength of the newly aggrandized Allied coalition. ‘If I don’t get the oil of Maikop and Grozny,’ he remarked on 8 May, ‘then I must end this war.’5 He believed that if the Germans could not only capture such rich economic prizes, but also compel the Red Army to burn up its remaining strength defending them, they would both finish off the Soviet Union and position themselves far better against the Western Allies. Meanwhile, the Germans would counter any threat from the west with their U-boat campaign against shipping in the Atlantic, while Germany’s new Japanese allies would help by keeping the Americans busy in the Pacific. In reality, even if the German offensive had captured all its objectives and destroyed much of the Red Army in the process, the war against the Soviet Union would not have been over. Furthermore, the economic might of the new Allied coalition, particularly that of the United States, would at best have been immensely difficult for the Germans to overcome, even with the entire resources of occupied Europe and the Soviet Union at their disposal. Nevertheless, a successful German offensive in the southern Soviet Union would have had tangible effects; at the very least, it would have delayed Germany’s defeat considerably. Furthermore, after his temporary despondency of late 1941, Hitler felt anything but pessimistic about Germany’s long-term outlook by April 1942. The Germans were holding the line in the east, advancing in North Africa and enjoying immense success against Allied shipping in the Atlantic. Meanwhile, the Japanese appeared to be running rampant against the Allies in the Far East and Pacific.6 *** But German efforts to prepare sufficient forces for Operation Blue gave serious cause for concern. One of the greatest worries was the quality of available new manpower. Germany’s European allies and satellites would make a

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sizable, if uneven and unreliable, manpower contribution to Germany’s war effort in the east during 1942. In addition to Finnish forces operating alongside the Germans at the northern end of the eastern front, the Italian Eighth Army, Hungarian Second Army and Rumanian Third and Fourth armies would join Army Group South for Operation Blue itself. Among the new formations raised for the German forces during 1942 were the Luftwaffe field divisions. These were a consequence of Göring’s desire for a bigger piece of the action in the land war. They comprised retrained former Luftwaffe ground personnel, and though they were well equipped, they had received training nothing like as rigorous as the army’s and would prove far less formidable in frontline combat than in anti-partisan warfare. Hermann Balck, who in May was appointed commander of the 11th Panzer Division in the Army Group Centre sector, called the Luftwaffe troops ‘good and willing people’ but ‘absolute military novices. During any action they did not even have the capability to maintain their supply of rations and ammunition.’7 Of greater quality, its ongoing teething troubles not withstanding, was the steadily expanding Waffen-SS, whose total personnel numbered 270,000 by December 1941, compared with fifty thousand a year earlier.8 Though a number of individual army commanders increasingly valued the fighting power of the SS, the army leadership as a whole regarded it with mounting concern as a rival organization that increasingly challenged the army’s previous monopoly on arms. Hitler pointedly, and entirely unfairly, singled out Waffen-SS units for particular praise after the winter of 1941–42: ‘in contrast to today’s Wehrmacht, it has stood the harshest test in the autumn and winter through its particular spiritual focus and solidarity’. This was a deliberate ploy, for like a teacher singling out a pet pupil, Hitler was promoting the Waffen-SS as an ideological example for the army to follow.9 By the spring of 1942, the Waffen-SS counted six divisions, most of which were motorized along lines broadly similar to their army counterparts and also receiving their own Panzer battalions.10 The great majority of replacements still went to the army. It accepted a growing number of foreign volunteers from across Europe, such as the Spanish ‘Blue’ Division and the ‘legionnaire divisions’ from Croatia. Though they were fervently anti-Communist, their combat value varied. But by far the largest source of new army manpower still came from Germany itself. On 10 January 1942, Hitler had issued a new decree that reprioritized the manpower needs of the army over those of the other service branches and of German industry. But the main injection of new German manpower into the army was the class of 1923. This had been called up in April 1941, eighteen months ahead of schedule, and would comprise a considerable part of Operation Blue’s manpower.11 Yet the front’s desperate manpower needs meant that these new recruits were trained less extensively or thoroughly than their older comrades. From 1940

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onwards, moreover, recruits found their three months of basic training spread out because they had to mix it with sentry duty and work on bringing in the harvest.12 To compensate for all this, Army Group South divisions sought to implement rigorous training programmes to prepare their men for the change from defensive back to offensive warfare.13 Yet there was a limit to what such efforts could achieve, particularly among newly formed divisions. One OKH representative who visited the front in April 1942 declared that the ‘worth in training and inner bearing’ of these new formations ‘is described on all sides as exceedingly bad’.14 OKH planners sought to circumvent the problem by creating three new classes of division. Of the 156 German divisions in the east, only forty received first-order classification. These would be fully replenished and re-equipped for offensive action. Fifty-four were designated second-order divisions; within these, one regiment or three battalions were to be dissolved, its manpower distributed across the division to fill the gaps. Finally, sixty-two stationary divisions were to be equipped specifically for defence.15 Transfers from other army groups and from the occupied west gave Army Group South a total of seventy-one German divisions. Along with the allied and satellite divisions, it numbered more than ninety.16 Equipping Army Group South’s German divisions was another matter. The German war economy would undergo a rather lean year in 1942. In 1941, Fritz Todt, the armaments minister, had been authorized by Hitler to initiate rationalization measures enabling firms to optimize their use of machinery and available workers. Todt died in a plane crash in March 1942, but his successor, Albert Speer, continued the work of centralizing and rationalizing the German armaments industry. Speer’s measures benefited from his predecessor’s groundwork more than Speer would later admit, and his efforts would also gain from a massive influx of foreign labour, including slave labour, from across occupied Europe. But output levels would not start showing the full effects until 1943. By contrast, Soviet levels of armament production outperformed Germany’s in every important area during 1942: by two to one in combat aircraft, three to one in small arms and artillery, and four to one in tanks. In part, the Soviets were able to achieve such feats, even before supplies of equipment and other material aid from the Western Allies really began making an impact, because of their utter ruthlessness. They extensively used labour camp inmates, and diverted agricultural workers into industry at a cost of condemning hundreds of thousands to starvation. Among workers more widely, however, a determination to halt and throw back the detested invaders was probably the greatest motivator that drove productivity. The Soviets also achieved impressive economies of scale, restricting their production to a small number of weapon types in a small number of giant factories.17 The most famous Soviet production

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story was the remarkably successful T-34 tank. It still suffered numerous design problems, particularly the layout of its turret, the quality of its gun sights and its initial lack of a radio. However, so massive was the investment required to build one of the colossal KV-1s that the Soviets recognized that T-34s should be a future priority for mass production.18 On the German side, in January 1942, Hitler issued an order to reorganize the arms industry, with top priority going to field weapons, followed by mechanized forces and anti-tank guns. But the arrival of quality new weaponry such as the MG 42 machine gun could not fully compensate for the shortfall in production figures. The new 50mm anti-tank gun was supposed to replace the German infantry’s 37mm anti-tank gun, but there were few of these as yet.19 The shortfall among the Panzer divisions following their evisceration of 1941 was particularly difficult to make up. For instance, by June 1942, the German army claimed a total strength of around 5,300 Panzers, slightly higher than the figure of a year previously, but around two thousand were obsolescent.20 The Panzer divisions’ main workhorse in 1942 was the Mark III, but it could not match the T-34 tank for tank. Nevertheless, Mark III and Mark IV medium Panzers could at least narrow the gap with the T-34 when installed with, respectively, new 5cm and 7.5cm guns – even though the new long-barrelled 75mm Mark IV had yet to be produced in significant numbers by the time Army Group South took the offensive. The Germans also put obsolete Panzers to good use, for a captured Soviet gun mounted on an obsolete Panzer chassis made for a useful if less manoeuvrable type of vehicle: the tank destroyer. Thus was born the first generation of tank destroyers (Panzerjäger), the Marders.21 Also in for an overhaul was military intelligence. General Halder excoriated the FHO for its performance in 1941, dismissing its assessments as ‘in crass contrast to my own’. He sacked Colonel Kinzel in March 1942, replacing him with Colonel Reinhard Gehlen, who in Halder’s view combined ‘excellent technical professional ability, remarkable industriousness, strong creative force and soldierly drive’.22 Gehlen was not quite the intelligence genius he liked to style himself as; he sometimes made vague prognostications that were broadly wrong, but then subsequently fixed on the isolated correct points he had made to suggest he had been broadly right.23 But he certainly improved the FHO’s performance: he brought in new blood to enlarge it, pensioned off some of the old lags, systematized training, established larger and more specialized subsections, introduced a comprehensive card system for information storage and retrieval, and liaised effectively with the similarly revamped intelligence office of the Luftwaffe in the east, Fremde Luftwaffe Ost (FLO).24 Gehlen also ensured that the FHO’s daily reports became more detailed; they now included reports not just on the enemy’s dispositions but also on his likely intentions. The FHO based its reports on the systematic evaluation of all

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enemy communication means, including press and radio, aerial reconnaissance, frontline reconnaissance, interrogating POWs and evaluating captured papers. Intelligence gathering at the front itself became more effective; in particular, because of the obstacles to aerial reconnaissance, the Germans placed new stress on prisoner interrogations. Frontline intelligence also learned new tricks: for instance, a good indicator of whether a Soviet attack was imminent was when alcohol was distributed to Red Army troops.25 *** While Army Group South geared up for Operation Blue, the German front’s northern and central sectors remained in a state of static defence. ‘It’s incredibly monotonous and boring here,’ wrote Wachtmeister Joseph L. of the 129th Infantry Division from the central sector in August 1942. ‘While in the south German armies are marching, pushing the Russians back and notching up success after success on their banners, we are holding the front. This inactivity is slowly reducing me to a state of mindlessness.’26 Stripped of most of their mechanized transport and weaponry to feed the southern offensive, the troops also slid further into those pre-modernized conditions that recalled the western front during the First World War. Panzer troops found their new status particularly galling. ‘Today,’ wrote Lance Corporal Werner F. of the 12th Panzer Division at the beginning of July 1942, ‘the Wehrmacht report announced that German and Allied troops are on the offensive. Everywhere is rolling forward except in this wretched north. . . . This eternal lying about is no fun at all, and prompts our superiors to come up with all means of keeping us occupied, including the thing I hate most in the army – parades.’27 The mood was even more surly on the swampy, heavily forested Volkhov front in Army Group North’s area, which the 121st Infantry Division’s commander described as ‘the world’s arsehole’.28 The priority accorded Operation Blue also banished the northern and central armies to the back of the supply queue. ‘The food has gone to shit lately,’ wrote Lance Corporal Ferdinand M. of the 167th Infantry Division in July 1942. ‘Fortunately there is fruit and veg to buy. But when I next show Father how large our meat ration is, he’ll need to put on his spectacles.’29 Horses as well as men suffered. ‘The cold wet weather has reduced the horses to skeletons again,’ wrote Wachtmeister Artur W. of the 129th Infantry Division in October. ‘Yesterday one fell in front of his cart and was dead. Another one went today. When it gets cold again, the great death will really begin.’30 Both sectors were also at the back of the replacement queue. ‘The new replacements, all from older age groups, who’ve arrived here are just a joke,’ wrote Josef L. on 10 September. ‘These are people who supposedly would rather be soldiers than

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workers, but they just shiver and feel ill all the time. One has a stomach problem, another can’t see anything in the dark, and all try to pull a fast one of some kind or other.’31 Yet despite initial appearances, the northern and central sectors were not monotonous backwaters during 1942. For most of the year, half the Germans’ field armies in the east were stationed there, and during the second half of 1942, they faced, and repelled, a succession of local Red Army offensives. Soviet offensive tactics were undergoing a slow, painful evolution from the previous year. Moreover, because the German onslaught in the south compelled the Soviets to commit more forces there than to the centre and north, the Red Army could often commit only second-rate troops to its central and northern offensives. Lieutenant Albert K. of the 3rd Mountain Division, serving in the north, experienced a three-day battle south of Lake Ladoga in early October in which his division captured six thousand Red Army soldiers, many of whom made an ‘exhausted, undernourished impression; all the prisoners were old men and sixteen- to seventeen-year-olds’.32 The 129th Infantry Division had similar experiences in the Rzhev sector further south.33 The Germans also repelled these offensives, despite their own often poorquality replacements, because their second-order and stationary divisions were good at defensive warfare. Among other things, the relative quiet on the central and northern fronts for much of 1942 helped the Germans construct and fortify their positions properly. ‘We are very happy,’ wrote Wachtmeister Artur W. in November, ‘to have strong bunkers and plenty of munitions. . . . My bunker is quite cosy and warm, with moderate light. But the Russians provided plenty of firewood for us in August.’34 Instructions issued by the Ninth Army in January 1943 directed that the best trench lines include a connecting trench between them, and be dug deep and thin, the better to protect their occupants from Soviet artillery. Such trenches were often also too thin for Soviet tanks even to notice them. In order to disorientate attacking Red Army troops further, small niche trenches, just deep enough for men to fire out of, peppered the landscape near the main trenches.35 The need to build well-constructed, well-fortified trenches was one of the things compelling units to cultivate a more constructive relationship with the civilian population; quite simply, they could not do it without civilian labour. The 123rd Infantry Division, which fought in the Demiansk pocket in Army Group North’s sector, used civilians to construct defensive positions and maintain the roads. In return for their continued help, it took greater care over the population’s food supply once this became possible after links with the Sixteenth Army outside the pocket were re-established. By the summer of 1942, much of the 123rd’s sector had become a veritable allotment, with the division cultivating vegetables including cabbage, turnips and potatoes, and also setting up

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communal soup kitchens. This was a pragmatic policy, not a humanitarian one, for it was a means of keeping the population alive so that it could work for the Germans. Divisional command also pointed out: ‘it is important that we bring in 100 percent of the harvest so the troops are not responsible for feeding the civilian population this winter.’36 In October, the OKH issued directions for building anti-tank trenches not just to halt tanks, but also to trap them; once the Germans had dug the trench, they piled the excavated earth high on their side of the trench to make a further obstacle.37 Another favourite anti-tank device was the ‘hedgehog’, a piece of cross-shaped, angled iron: the Germans usually placed these behind the main fighting line so they were less vulnerable to enemy fire but still able to prevent tanks from breaking through.38 The 25th Infantry Division believed it was able to withstand attack thanks to its high-quality artillery, together with timely assistance from neighbouring divisions’ artillery.39 The German infantry’s 37mm and 50mm anti-tank guns could destroy Soviet armour only at close range, so the Germans learned to deploy them on reverse slopes; 88s could destroy Soviet armour at long range, but there were not enough of them and they were highly visible from the air. To compensate, German infantry and engineers underwent exhaustive training for close-combat tank engagements. The Germans also learned that rapid counterattacks at the base of the Soviet penetration, backed up where possible by Sturmgeschütze and Panzerjäger, were the best; if the enemy invaded their position at night, they were to counterattack rapidly before the enemy could orientate himself.40 It will be clear from all this that the second-order and stationary divisions of Army Groups North and Centre did not merely sit still throughout 1942. Fixed defences, but also firepower and rapid counterattack, were intrinsic to the defensive doctrine the German army practised.41 The army was able to prosecute such measures so effectively because it grounded them in older principles and experiences – the defensive warfare lessons it had imbibed during the First World War; the Truppenführung regulations that had entrenched those lessons further; and most fundamentally the flexibility, initiative, aggression, and coordination that were inimical to Auftragstaktik. Examples from the Army Group Centre sector in 1942 demonstrate that, even in defence, divisions with varying levels of combat power had the opportunity to show what they could do and make good at least some of their shortcomings. The 385th Infantry Division’s manpower was substandard, mainly comprising men relatively advanced in years and drafted from industry. Of the thirty company commanders across its two infantry regiments, twenty-one were reservists. Most of the division’s officers and NCOs lacked effective military training or experience. Yet, thanks in large part to its energetic commander Major General Karl Eibl, it acquitted itself well. The division

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generally fought within a small geographical area, and this enabled the commander to keep a tight rein on developments; he and his subordinates were regularly on the telephone, and he regularly visited the troops in the line. The 385th was not a purveyor of Auftragstaktik, then, but it did its specific job well.42 The 10th Motorized Infantry Division had suffered heavy losses in officers and men since June 1941, and by 1942 was motorized only in name. But its active officers and men still outnumbered the reservists. Like the 385th, the 10th fought in a small area with effective telephone communications and a hands-on commander. But the 10th practised Auftragstaktik more than the 385th, because Major General August Schmidt did not merely give his subordinates orders, but also involved them in the planning process. The division also sent out regular combat patrols; these needed NCOs to show surprise, speed and independent action if they were to be effective.43 A greater contrast with the 385th Infantry Division was the elite Grossdeutschland Infantry Division. This formation was regularly rushed to the danger points along the line in the way of a fire brigade, particularly when the Red Army was on the offensive. In the forefront of numerous large-scale counterattacks, the Grossdeutschland’s officers had ample opportunity to show their decisive, aggressive side.44 From the autumn of 1941, the OKH steadily intensified the troops’ ideological instruction. In July 1942, for instance, it commanded frontline units to select officers to foster the correct worldview among the troops.45 But when Major Freiherr von Lersner visited the Third Panzer Army that summer, its intelligence section argued that officers should take an even more hands-on approach. It asserted that the troops faced greater pressure and danger in this war than had their forebears between 1914 and 1918, but also that a great opportunity lay in the fact that young officers had been schooled in Nazi thinking.46 The intelligence section particularly lauded the performance of a company commander course in Gshatsk, which included lectures on ‘assessing the military-political situation, the war as a spiritual confrontation, [and] the frontline experience as the decisive moment of the true coming-into-being of the people [Volkswerdung]’. The troops had also received lectures on ‘the principles of the Russian campaign, the basis of the war against England, the battle for the second front [and] the relationship between homeland and front.’ ‘Soldiers everywhere want a clear picture of the situation and their connection to it,’ the intelligence section maintained. In particular, ‘the divisions in Army Group Centre need to know that their defence is playing an important role in the outcome of the war, just like the attacks by the armies in the south’.47 The Third Panzer Army appointed a divisional pastoral officer to take over responsibility for the troops’ spiritual care and propaganda. The officer in question was to liaise with the army’s personnel officer, visit the army’s larger formations and keep in contact with unit commanders. Unit commanders themselves

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were to distribute Mitteilungen für die Truppe (Communications for the Troops) and Mitteilungen für das Offizierkorps (Communications for the Officer Corps). The Third Panzer Army would also distribute a regular newsletter and a monthly publication, Erziehung und Bildung (Education and Training).48 The Ninth Army, stationed on the then-quiet Rzhev sector of the front, concurred with the Third Panzer Army and introduced similar measures, proclaiming that ‘the spiritual and mental leadership of our men is of decisive importance in maintaining our moral ability to endure’.49 *** Though the Soviet offensives of the latter months of 1942 in the north and centre all failed, they did tie down forces that the Germans might otherwise have committed to the south. Army Group South’s new commander was the reactivated Field Marshal von Bock, who replaced Field Marshal von Reichenau after the latter’s remarkably short tenure as an army group commander. Reichenau, an inveterate fitness fanatic, had dropped dead in January following an ill-advised cross-country run in sub-zero temperatures. Before Operation Blue proper began, Army Group South fought two preliminary battles. These showed that, however reduced its potency, the German army’s offensive performance could still outshine the Red Army’s. The first operation was to clear the Crimea of Soviet troops, a job the German army had only half-finished in 1941; finishing it would assure the Germans of a secure right flank as they advanced into the Caucasus and would prevent the VVS from posing any threat to Romania’s oil fields. The task fell to Colonel General von Manstein’s Eleventh Army. Manstein enjoyed two advantages over the Red Army forces in the Crimea. Firstly, the OKH had made clearing the Crimea a priority for the Luftwaffe, so he could count on massive air support. Secondly, much of the Red Army’s strength on the peninsula was exposed in a salient.50 Manstein destroyed the forces in the salient at the battle of Kerch. Nevertheless, his delay in taking the port of Sevastopol – partly caused by his own mistake in dispersing his forces too widely, and partly by the lack of a concurrent naval and air blockade – held up the start of Operation Blue.51 Blue was delayed further by the second battle the Germans had to fight, against the Red Army offensive that Marshal Timoshenko launched in the Kharkov sector on 12 May. At this stage, Stalin still often spurned cautionary advice from his generals, but Timoshenko did persuade him that, if he must attack, then Kharkov was the best place to do it.52 Timoshenko’s attack made good progress at first, and received further armoured reinforcements. But during the lull between the battle of Kerch and Manstein’s final assault on Sevastopol, Bock received powerful army and Luftwaffe reinforcements from

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the Crimea.53 He employed German defensive tactics on the grand operational scale, unleashing the First Panzer Army – Kleist’s renamed Panzer Group One – and the Seventeenth Army to cut the Soviet advance at Kharkov in the rear at its narrowest point, then trap it in a pocket to devastating effect. The Red Army’s defeats in Kharkov in the Crimea cost it three armies destroyed and a further three weakened.54 But because of all this, Operation Blue itself did not commence until 28 June. The frontline armies of Army Group South comprised the Second, Sixth and Seventeenth Armies, the First and Fourth Panzer Armies, a motorized corps, and the Hungarian Second Army. Their operation was to unfold in four phases. During the first, the Germans would encircle and destroy Soviet forces around Voronezh, then create a ‘roof ’ between Voronezh and Orel to protect the advancing German armies’ flank and rear. During phase two, the Germans would encircle Soviet forces further south on the central part of the River Don, with a drive east of Kharkov meeting a simultaneous German advance from the north. During the third phase, the Germans would thrust up and down the River Don to encircle and destroy Soviet forces in the Don and bend northwest of the major industrial city of Stalingrad. They would also reach the River Volga and Stalingrad itself. Finally, the Germans would drive south into the Caucasus. Soviet intelligence failed to anticipate Operation Blue; the Red Army was trying to assemble a new strategic echelon and reserve during the summer of 1942, but Army Group South struck before these were ready. The Germans hit the first echelons of the southwestern and southern fronts hard, and the Red Army now had to assemble new defence lines along the Voronezh, Stalingrad and Caucasus axes. The key line was along the Don and Volga rivers deep into the Caucasus; along this, the Red Army deployed no fewer than six fronts.55 Yet Hitler and the OKH were seeking less to carry out grand encirclements on the 1941 scale, than to proceed slowly and methodically against a sequence of smaller objectives. Hitler was not being uncharacteristically modest, but acknowledging the constraints the German army now needed to work within. For a start, Army Group South was uncomfortably short of armour. It was supposed to have received 1,900 Panzers and assault guns, but received only 1,700, of which 300 were command tanks or obsolescent Mark II models. The Luftwaffe, meanwhile, could only spare 1,500 of its 2,700 available aircraft in the east.56 Attacking smaller objectives, then, would create pockets with outer rims of a size that Army Group South’s limited armour could actually hold, and targets that would enable the Luftwaffe to concentrate its own limited resources more effectively. Hitler and the OKH also wanted to avoid overburdening the new recruits. The closely controlled command structure that Hitler and Halder had now implemented would enable them to keep a tight rein on operations. That said, senior commanders like Field Marshal von Bock and

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General Hoth – now in charge of the Fourth Panzer Army – resented being straitjacketed in this way.57 Army Group B and the Sixth Army captured their assigned objectives, encircling and destroying most of the Soviet 21st and 40th Armies and reaching the long western bank of the River Don within fifteen days.58 Yet cracks were already appearing. In capturing Voronezh, Bock believed he had secured an objective that would help strengthen Blue’s rear and flank. Hitler, however, considered Voronezh an expensive diversion; he accused Bock of spending too long capturing the city and allowing Soviet forces elsewhere to escape. Hitler then saw that Soviet forces might escape the Donbass region, and this time ordered Bock to hold up the advance on Stalingrad so that Panzers could be diverted to the lower River Don and Rostov to destroy Soviet forces there. When Bock objected, Hitler replaced him with the more pliable General von Weichs and gave him the same order. In the event, a third of the Soviet forces on the lower Don managed to escape, and the Germans missed their best opportunity to take Stalingrad. This was when the Germans’ problems really started.59 *** Two weeks after Hitler fired Field Marshal von Bock, this time for good, he announced a new plan to make good the delays. The original plan for Operation Blue saw Army Group South completing its later phases successively. But now, it was to complete them all at once, and divide into two army groups for the purpose. Army Group A, under Field Marshal List, comprising the Eleventh and Seventeenth armies and the First and Fourth Panzer armies, would complete the drive on the Caucasus. Army Group B, under General von Weichs, comprised the Second and Sixth armies and the Hungarian Second Army. It was to reach the Volga, take Stalingrad and thereby secure Army Group A’s northern flank. While Blue might just have made good its mechanized and manpower limitations, it now strained under an excess of simultaneous objectives. Hitler, however, again saw only a broken Red Army, and believed the Soviets were finished. In his own mind, then, increasing Blue’s range of operational targets seemed eminently reasonable.60 The Germans killed far fewer surrendering Red Army soldiers in Operation Blue than they had in 1941. Partly, this was because commanders had learned how to rein in their men more effectively. In particular, at the start of 1942, senior commanders had prevailed upon Hitler to rescind the Commissar Order. Though they had widely accepted and implemented it in 1941, they now recognized that its main effect had been to harden Red Army resistance. But a bigger reason why the Germans killed far fewer surrendering Red Army

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soldiers in Operation Blue was that they progressed too haltingly to encircle all that many Soviet troops in the first place. The less than lightning pace of the German advance was attested to by the war diary of the 4th Mountain Division on 26 July: ‘As many divisions come together, log jams are created on the roads, and the animals are brought to a standstill. Men and animals are exhausted after having to march days without shade in the blazing sun. The number of heatstroke cases is increasing.’61 Furthermore, Red Army units did not always obligingly stand, fight and perish as they had in 1941; instead, they often made prudent, timely withdrawals – or, perhaps more accurately, fled in panic. This was certainly how Lieutenant Helmut D. of the 4th Mountain Division perceived it in a letter of early August. In particular, he noted that the Soviets were no longer bothering to carry out scorched-earth measures: ‘Oddly, the Russian has left behind nearly all his poultry, livestock, vegetables and so on. A year ago it was completely different. Nor has he destroyed his railway lines like he did before. Where this is coming from I don’t know; does he have too few men to destroy everything?’62 And as the Germans advanced further east, without encircling and destroying large Red Army formations, their supply lines were stretched ever more precariously. ‘On 6 August,’ wrote Lance Corporal Franz B. of the 198th Infantry Division, ‘we took down our tents and the advance continued. Over 80 kilometres [50 miles] through the steppe. Now we know what real steppe looks like. A blazing heat, the roads full of dust; this is the journey of the horse-drawn columns, the artillery, ever onwards into the endless wilderness of the Russian Empire. The infantry of course have it worst of all.’63 Stalin, at last acknowledging his limitations as a military commander, heeded his new deputy supreme commander, Marshal Georgi Zhukov, when the latter cautioned against launching a major counteroffensive too soon. Zhukov believed that drawing the Germans on further, building reinforcements and waiting to counterattack in the winter was a surer route to success. General Alexander Vasilevsky, chief of the general staff from June 1942, similarly reined in Stalin’s more ambitious thinking and persuaded him to listen to his generals more.64 Yet the Red Army was not simply slipping away to bide its time before launching a counter-offensive; along many parts of the line it resisted tenaciously and launched ferocious, small-scale counterattacks. The main reason why more Red Army formations were escaping destruction was not because they were fleeing without a fight, but because the Germans were no longer strong enough to encircle and destroy them. Moreover, despite the improvements the FHO had made to its operation, the Germans still underestimated the Soviets’ ability to generate new formations or replace old ones. In the course of August alone, Army Groups A and B between them suffered 200,000 casualties.65

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The particularly strung-out advance on Stalingrad was alarmingly exposed from the off. Paulus, now a general of Panzer troops and the Sixth Army’s commander, commented on the danger to his senior adjutant, Colonel Adam: ‘Should the Russians take advantage of the weakness in our deep flank, we will be in a more than unpleasant situation, Adam. Look at how the front runs! It is like a clenched fist.’ ‘Really devilishly unpleasant, General. The enemy only now needs to apply the scalpel to the wrist and the fist is off.’66

Although it would be months before Stalin and the Red Army leadership executed their counterstrike, they had already taken note of the opportunity that the Sixth Army’s advance was gifting them. *** On reaching the Caucasus, Field Marshal List’s Army Group A initially made heady progress. At this stage in the campaign, it also commanded the biggest share of Blue’s armour, transportation, and fuel supplies. The 198th Infantry Division, under the First Panzer Army, advanced through the increasingly mountainous terrain of the Western Caucasus.67 ‘We’re right among the mountains now,’ wrote Private Christian B. on 23 August. ‘They’re certainly steep, but not terribly high yet. But as we advance further in this sector we’ll really come up against the mountain ranges proper. . . . Here there are lots of snipers, for the Russians can hide themselves very well in this brushwood, and it’s very difficult for our infantry to comb these forests.’68 General Eberhard von Mackensen’s III Panzer Corps was in the forefront of the advance. On 10 August, his forces captured Maikop, and although the Red Army had destroyed the city’s oil facilities, German engineers soon had them working again. But in early August, Army Group A was denied the assistance of Manstein’s Eleventh Army, once earmarked to cross from the Crimea into the Caucasus but now despatched to the Leningrad front. Around the same time, the Fourth Panzer Army and much of Army Group A’s air support were switched to Army Group B’s drive on Stalingrad and the Volga. Halder and the OKH believed the country here was far better for rapid armoured movement than the Caucasus, and that these forces were needed to bolster Army Group B’s flagging advance. In doing so, they flipped the Germans’ operational objectives around; now it was Stalingrad and the Volga, not the Caucasus, that were the top priority. By late August, Army Group A’s advance had perceptibly slowed. Hitler nevertheless drove on Army Group A’s depleted forces. When the 1st Mountain Division diverted troops from its advance to plant the German flag

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on Mount Elbrus, the highest peak in the Caucasus, Hitler was enraged. As far as he was concerned, the episode was a frivolous publicity stunt, staged at a time when every man was needed for the main advance.69 Army Group A’s commander, Field Marshal List, fell victim to Hitler’s dissatisfaction on 6 September. The latter, signalling his growing distrust of his generals, took temporary charge of Army Group A himself from his headquarters in the western Ukraine. He began multitasking to extremes, as he sought to conduct the campaign in no fewer than four different capacities – as army group commander, head of the army, commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht and ultimately as Führer. In November, Hitler found a permanent replacement for List in the shape of the immensely capable Panzer commander, General von Kleist. But overall, from this point on, Hitler himself led the entire southern campaign in an increasingly restrictive and destructive manner. *** With Stalingrad and the Volga now the principal German targets, by midAugust, Army Group B comprised the German Second and Sixth armies, the Fourth Panzer Army, the Hungarian Second Army and the newly arrived Italian Eighth Army. When the Fourth Panzer Army arrived, together with powerful air support, the Sixth Army was finally able to attack Stalingrad directly. Direct attack was the only option where Stalingrad was concerned: because it straddled a great length along both banks of the Volga, and the Soviets held the Volga’s left bank and its hinterland, the Germans could not besiege it properly. But the Soviets ratcheted up their efforts against the German advance, rushing in four additional armies. The Fourth Panzer Army had to fight off Soviet counterattacks north and south of Stalingrad, and defend the left wing of the German advance along the River Don to the northwest. In a particularly ominous development, the OKH was already needing to throw in satellite armies to plug that particular flank. The Red Army also counterattacked over the Don, seizing a vital bridgehead that the Germans could not shift.70 Though the Germans were advancing on Stalingrad, their position was already precarious and their progress agonizing. Typical was the battle of Kalach on the River Don, of which Colonel Adam later wrote: ‘A great German victory was proclaimed with blasts of fanfares. It did not mention that we had to pay a high cost in men and material.’ According to Adam, ‘many companies of the 376th Infantry Division had fighting strength of only 25 men. Things were a little better in the 44th and 384th Infantry Divisions, but companies with fighting strength of between thirty-five and forty men gave no cause for optimism.’71 XIV Panzer Corps tried to break into Stalingrad, but Soviet

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counterattacks during the second half of August prevented the Sixth Army from reinforcing it. The 16th Panzer Division eventually had to break out back the way it had come, but not before it had suffered five hundred casualties per day during the last week of August. The Germans’ failure to capture Stalingrad on this particular occasion gave the Soviets real breathing space, which they used to reinforce the troops in the city extensively.72 A Soviet counterattack before Stalingrad on 6 September was poorly coordinated, but gave the Soviet 62nd Army further time to prepare its defence of the city. And by evacuating the bulk of Stalingrad’s population only at the last minute, the Red Army was able to enlist massive civilian help in building the city’s defences.73 Most of the civilians who remained in those parts of the city that the Germans overran could expect a grim fate, albeit less grim than the one Hitler initially envisaged for them: on 31 August, Hitler announced that he wanted the city destroyed and its male population exterminated. Three days later, however, the chief of staff of Army Group B instructed the Sixth Army that all civilians, including the men, were to be evacuated. The reason seems to have been economic rather than moral – their potential as a voluntary or, if necessary, coerced labour force. The Sixth Army retained about four thousand civilians for various tasks, and General Quartermaster Wagner was made responsible for those who could not work, and for accommodating them in villages and collective farms west of the River Don. But so pressured was the Germans’ transport system that most of the non-working civilians were eventually dumped on the Kalmuk steppe. Here they could expect to perish by winter at the latest. Eventually, the Sixth Army’s own increasingly straitened supply situation prevented it from feeding the civilians who remained in its part of the city. While the German army’s treatment of Stalingrad’s civilians was not an attempt to emulate the hunger strategy, then, its poor provisioning led to massive human misery.74 In September, XLVIII Panzer Corps occupied the banks of the Volga south of Stalingrad, and with this blocked the city to the Red Army forces to the south. Over the next few days, the Germans took most of the old city, but made slow progress in the north. The Germans captured more districts during the second half of September, but at huge cost and an almost snail-like pace. While urban fighting is perhaps the most gruelling type for any attacking force, for the attackers at Stalingrad – principally Paulus’s Sixth Army – it was gruelling almost beyond words. On 29 July, Stalin had issued Order No. 227, forbidding the Red Army to take a single step backwards. In Stalingrad itself, the Red Army executed 13,500 of its own soldiers in the space of a few weeks.75 Yet fear of their own side’s ferocious discipline was not the most important reason why Soviet troops held on in Stalingrad. The Germans’ strength had been seriously ground down during their advance upon the city, and once the attack on

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Stalingrad proper had begun, Paulus was never able to concentrate the full strength of his remaining force on the city itself. His VII and XIV corps were tied down by ferocious Soviet counterattacks north of the city when they should have been reinforcing the German attack inside it.76 The Soviet forces inside the city now comprised the 62nd Army, part of the 64th Army and the 16th Air Army. This force was nowhere near strong enough to drive the Germans out of Stalingrad, but this was not the Soviets’ intention. Zhukov had persuaded Stalin that the city bearing his name should be held by the minimum force necessary, while the Red Army gathered the bulk of its available strength in the rear for a well-timed, major counteroffensive. *** The Soviet defenders inside Stalingrad also held on because of their sheer tenacity and resourcefulness, and the ability of their principal commander, General Vasili Chuikov, to harness those qualities. Chuikov was a consummate defensive commander. For one thing, by placing his front line as close as possible to that of the Germans, he made it harder for them to call up their own artillery and air support, for fear of hitting their own troops. Chuikov’s tactic of ‘hugging’ the Germans also kept them in a state of constant nervous tension, and Soviet night attacks and sniper fire wore down their numbers further. The experience of having to fight the enemy so close up was described by Private Willi Hoffmann of the 94th Infantry Division in his diary entry of 13 September: ‘A bad date; our battalion was very unlucky. The Katyushas inflicted heavy losses this morning: 27 killed and 50 wounded. The Russians fight with the desperation of wild beasts; they won’t allow themselves to be taken prisoner, but instead let you come up close and then they throw grenades.’77 The Soviets riddled much of the city with mines and booby traps, as well as with soldiers. Separating Panzers from the German infantry enabled the Soviets to pick off isolated Panzers with concealed anti-tank guns. The Soviets did not just defend buildings indiscriminately, but also selected particular buildings for defence, with anti-tank obstacles and fields of fire cleared around them. They also sought not only to defend buildings, but also to retake them. To do this, they made coordinated use of three types of squad. A covering squad would provide supporting fire for the assault squad that attacked the actual building, with a reinforcement squad held in reserve. On one occasion, an especially resourceful unit, the assault group of the 45th Rifle Division, moved an entire 120mm howitzer piece by piece through a building, then reassembled it and fired it at point-blank range to blast through the wall of the building they were aiming to storm. Targeted counterattacks such as this were especially effective when the Soviets used them to throw the Germans off-balance just before the

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Germans themselves were about to launch a major attack. Reconnaissance patrols that brought back prisoners for interrogation helped the Soviets to pinpoint when and where the Germans were going to attack.78 The defenders also made full use of Stalingrad’s sewers and interlocking underground cellars to move across the city, sending reinforcements where they were needed and springing up, mole-like, to surprise the Germans in the rear. Private Willy Hoffmann’s diary entry for 26 September fumed: ‘you can’t see them: they hide in the buildings and basements and strike at us from all sides – even from the rear. Such barbarians, to use gangster tactics against us. Russian soldiers have suddenly reappeared in a sector which we occupied two days ago, and the battle has begun all over again.’79 Red Army infantry weaponry was straightforward, cheap and above all durable. Indeed, it proved so effective that German troops often preferred captured Soviet submachine guns to their own models.80 The city’s defenders had further formidable technical back-up from artillery, not just Katyushas, on the Volga’s eastern bank. Furthermore, their air support was now radio-coordinated.81 Artillery cover, together with the Volga’s steep banks, enabled the Soviets to bring enough reinforcements across the river despite attacks from the Luftwaffe.82 That the Germans managed to batter their way forward at all was thanks to the further improvements they had made in their combined-arms urban warfare methods. Their infantry was if anything more formidably equipped than ever, with grenades, heavy-infantry weapons, and flame-throwers. The latter were not just fearful weapons psychologically; they were also especially effective against bunkers because they burned up all the oxygen inside. But in Stalingrad, the attackers suffered acute supply shortages, most grievously in fuel and ammunition. For the Germans in Stalingrad stood at the very end of an extremely precarious supply line. Several hundred trains were held up at the start of October by partisan activity, Soviet air attacks, storms and coal shortages, and two of the main railways lines running in Stalingrad’s direction anyway ended west of the Don.83 Horse-drawn transportation was under threat from the environment itself: on the dry, open steppe, the land could supply neither drinking water nor food, and in October, 6,400 of the Sixth Army’s horses died compared with 3,400 the previous month.84 In October, General Paulus despatched all supposedly dispensable horses – barring those necessary for pulling artillery and heavy weapons, or for medical services – to the army area west of the Don, the better to provide them with fodder. As Colonel Adam later observed: ‘this was a risky business. The divisions lost their essential transport. But what else can one do if one was not to leave the animals to starve! That these measures might later contribute to our starving thousands of German soldiers no one considered at the time.’85 Such were the logistical bottlenecks and the mushrooming

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casualties that medical services, never the German army’s highest priority, were also under exceptional strain. For instance, two of the divisions fighting in Stalingrad did not have a single field hospital between them. A particularly grim comment on the Sixth Army’s logistical situation was that it had to ban its men from fishing with hand grenades in the River Don because of the injuries they were causing.86 And the army that was having to contend with all this and with hellish urban fighting had already been whittled down before it even reached Stalingrad. The experience of the 24th Panzer Division highlights what this meant for the units at the sharp end. Both its Panzer grenadier (mechanized infantry) regiments were burned out, losing over 50 per cent of their combat strength.87 The Panzers now often had to cooperate with non-mechanized infantry, troops for whom combined-arms operations with Panzers were unfamiliar territory. The Panzers themselves were highly vulnerable to Soviet fire in the rubblestrewn cityscape, so much so that the division eventually viewed them as useless: ‘Landscape problems like house rubble, bomb damage, closed streets, minefields, tank traps and blocks limit the mobility and the observation ability of the tanks so much that the employment of tank units in urban fighting is on principle to be avoided.’88 Tellingly, one thing the division was not anxious to avoid was civilian deaths: if its troops destroyed Red Army positions that were also protecting civilians, then this was of no consequence.89 Here too, then, the dictates of perceived military necessity had further hardened German conduct since the urban fighting in Warsaw in 1939. German communications in the city were also regularly severed, just as at Dnepropetrovsk the previous year. ‘All connections with the front line were broken,’ reported the 208th Infantry Regiment of an attack on a metallurgy factory on 23 and 24 October. ‘All lines were shot. Overcoming these interruptions was as good as impossible.’90 In such conditions, it was more important than ever for troop leaders to show initiative, but even this could only compensate so far. The Germans nicknamed the urban fighting in Stalingrad Rattenkrieg, the war of the rats. They would learn hard lessons from it that they would put to good use during their own defensive battles later in the war. For now, however, it was they who suffered most. While the Sixth Army’s men died in Stalingrad in droves, the battle was precipitating a wider crisis in the OKH. On 24 September, General Halder resigned as chief of staff. He was increasingly alarmed at Operation Blue’s proliferating objectives, conveniently forgetting his own part in selecting them, and particularly at Hitler’s mismanagement of the campaign. Halder was now falling victim to Hitler’s excoriating mockery, as the dictator needled him for the supposedly comfortable existence he had led as a staff officer during the First World War. In late August, Hitler had publicly humiliated Halder when

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the general recommended that Army Group Centre withdraw to a more defensible line: ‘What can you, who sat in the same chair in the First World War too, tell me about the troops, Herr Halder, you, who don’t even wear the black insignia of the wounded?’91 Some weeks later, Colonel General Friedrich Fromm, chief of army procurement and commander of the Replacement Army, also fell foul of the Führer when he prognosticated gloomily about Germany’s long-term prospects in the war.92 In this atmosphere, Lieutenant General Kurt Zeitzler, Halder’s successor as army chief of staff, had a thankless task. Zeitzler was an ardent admirer of Hitler, but he too would try on numerous occasions over the next two years to prevent or ameliorate the Führer’s more senseless commands. The effort would eventually drive him to a nervous breakdown. That lay in the future. The most significant point about Zeitzler’s appointment in September 1942 was that he was not a staff officer, but a former frontline officer.93 Here then was Hitler telling all his staff officers, not just Halder, exactly what he thought of them compared with an officer who for Hitler embodied the far more essential command qualities found at the front. On 1 October Hitler made an appointment even more pivotal for its transformative effect upon the officer corps. He appointed his adjutant Rudolf Schmundt, now a major general, to head the Army Personnel Office. Schmundt’s brief was to enact measures designed further to elevate ‘character’ as the leading determinant of promotion, and thus to expand the transformation that Hitler had initiated in the wake of the front-line crisis of the previous winter. Hitler rapidly followed up Schmundt’s appointment by announcing that ‘any officer . . . who leads his men successfully against the enemy, and who shows himself suitable, will be promoted to a rank on the level at which he is performing.’ He also decried the notion of a ‘steady-going system of promotion,’ which he believed went against ‘the principles of leadership and achievement to which the Wehrmacht must adhere dutifully in its highest responsibility for the final victory.’94 The effects this policy would have upon the officer corps would reveal themselves during 1943. Meanwhile, regardless of the rate at which the fighting in Stalingrad was chewing them up, Hitler continually ordered German reinforcements into the meat grinder from elsewhere along the southern front. He kept insisting that capturing the city would protect Army Group A’s rear, and also that it would sever the Red Army’s vital supply artery along the Volga. In addition, he maintained that the Sixth Army could supply itself better in the city than if it withdrew onto the steppe to the west. These strategic and logistical arguments were not Hitler’s main motive, however; his desire to take the city had become an obsession, and the principal reason was prestige. By the end of October, Nazi propaganda had hammered on about Stalingrad so much that, according to the SD’s regular morale reports, the German population was fixated on it. Even

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more importantly, Hitler was consumed by the idea that capturing the city named after the Soviet dictator would strike Soviet morale a mortal blow. Stalin and Zhukov were of course delighted to feed Hitler’s obsession, for it weakened the Axis forces everywhere else in the south, and boosted the prospects for the Red Army counteroffensive they were planning. In mid-October, the Germans attacked again in the north of Stalingrad, through the factories of the industrial belt. The Soviet defenders found their backs to the Volga, and the areas contested became ever smaller, while the fighting grew ever fiercer. As one German soldier described it: ‘the front is a corridor between burned-out rooms. It is the thin ceiling between two floors. Help comes from nearby buildings via fire escapes and chimneys. There is ceaseless struggle from morning until night. From floor to floor, we bombard each other with grenades amid explosions, clouds of dust and smoke, heaps of mortar, floods of blood, fragments of furniture and fragments of human beings.’95 Paulus then sent the 14th Panzer Division and the 389th Infantry Division into the factory district. The two formations managed to capture most of the factory district by late October, but at hideous cost to themselves. Meanwhile, the new Don and southwestern fronts northwest of Stalingrad launched further counterattacks north and south of the city. By mid-November, there were no longer enough regiments, let alone divisions, with which to reinforce the Sixth Army, and a now desperate Paulus resorted to cannibalizing his own divisions. He separated off their engineer battalions and hurled them into action with massive air support. However, the Luftwaffe’s aerial bombardment proved self-defeating; for the most part, the Soviet defenders simply hid in the cellars and sewers while it took place, then emerged into even more rubble in which they could hide and fight.96 Paulus’s misuse of the Luftwaffe was not the only serious error he made during the battle; another was his failure to assemble a proper mobile reserve. He was far from incompetent, but he was out of his element. He had assumed command of the Sixth Army in December 1941, when his predecessor, Field Marshal von Reichenau, had taken short-lived command of Army Group South. Prior to this, he had been the deputy chief of operations at the OKH. He was a highly capable staff officer, if also a somewhat diffident one, as his failure to voice his concerns about the feasibility of Operation Barbarossa had shown. But as far as field commands went, he had never commanded anything bigger than a battalion.97 There was one respect in which Paulus was an improvement on Reichenau: he genuinely believed the Germans were more likely to defeat the Soviet Union if they treated the occupied population more considerately.98 But restraint was not the most essential command characteristic in Stalingrad. If Paulus lacked much of his predecessor’s brutality, he also lacked much of his assertiveness. Lieutenant General Balck, who had served with Paulus during

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the interwar years and frequently encountered him at the OKH, considered him a ‘noble and honest individual’ but also ‘shy and sensitive,’ and that, in Stalingrad, ‘as the weak man that he was, he remained true to what he had always done; he presented facts, asked for decisions, and then turned them into orders for others to execute.’99 *** Meanwhile, Army Group A’s debilitated advance slowed over the course of the autumn. It was firmly among the highest peaks of the Caucasus proper, the most difficult natural terrain of the entire eastern campaign, as the soldiers’ letters attest. ‘I’m sitting in the deepest Caucasus. . .’ wrote Helmut D. on 5 September as the 4th Mountain Division drove on Suchumi. ‘We’ve fought nicely up until now. But at the moment the Russian is rather strong. . . . Mountain fighting needs time, and the supplies have to be hauled by pack animal, up the mountain, down the mountain. The forest here is really primeval. There are wild boar, eagles and bears. . . . Countless huge, rotted trees lie on the ground. It’s thick undergrowth, so we can only advance along the paths.’100 A mid-October report by the commander of the 198th Infantry Division, crawling towards Tupase on the Black Sea coast, described the fighting: The storm of infantry and pioneers breaks loose, supported by an exterminating fire of artillery and a gigantic hail of bombing from the Luftwaffe. But in this forest area, visibility is poor and the best-prepared infantry and pioneer attack is vulnerable to being surprised. It is the attack’s power and tenacity that must ultimately force the decision. . . . Mostly, then, the infantryman is on his own in this harsh and unfamiliar mountain battle. With necessary effort, through parching heat he has to hack his way through the thickets, often with entrenching tool in hand, always observed by the lurking, devious enemy. Rock falls and crags have to be overcome through fire, the attack leads to the steepest slope, over thin ridges with huge falls either side, such that hardly any group can move forward. Enemy machinegun, anti-tank-gun and grenade-launcher positions must be overrun, and the bitterly resisting enemy overcome man-to-man.101

A report by the 4th Mountain Division described how the terrain made it harder both for the troops to fight and for the rear to supply them. The troops were also vulnerable because they relied so much on horse-drawn transport. For not only was the horses’ supply of feed breaking down, the mountainous terrain lacked proper grazing land. As the horses weakened and died, the division could no longer move its heavy weapons and artillery.102

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In early November, the First Panzer Army made a final heave in the direction of the oil centre of Grozny and the Caspian Sea. The execrable weather assailed both sides. The 198th Infantry Division took particular heed of the rain, which was of a special nature in the mountains: ‘The rain comes down in torrents, for the heights are mainly in the clouds. It pours down and lasts all day and night.’ There were no villages in the division’s area and so the troops were fully exposed. The mud disrupted supply further, just as it had the previous autumn.103 At least – in contrast with the previous winter – the troops were being supplied with specialist winter gear as temperatures plummeted.104 By now, as in Stalingrad, the Germans and Soviets were fighting over diminishing spaces of territory, and their tightly packed formations made perfect targets for each other’s aircraft. The Germans’ reserves ran out before those of the Red Army, and, on 6 November, the Red Army counterattacked. ‘On 11 November. . .,’ wrote Oberjäger Georg S. of the 4th Mountain Division, ‘all our platoon commanders and all but two of our section commanders were put out of action. I was shot through the upper right arm with a machine pistol. I bandaged myself and carried on. In the evening, after we had repelled two Russian counterattacks, I went to the medical station to get taken care of. The doctor wanted to send me to the field hospital, but I went on my own volition back to my comrades, who needed a leader and who were already so few anyway.’105 Given the distance Army Group A had come, the environment it had fought over and the loss of half its strength to other sectors of the front, it had achieved a remarkable feat in getting this far. But by early November, the German offensive into the Caucasus had come to an end. Within weeks, the Germans would be retreating from the region, for events around Stalingrad were about to imperil the whole German position in the south. *** Colonel Adam described Stalingrad’s shattered cityscape as it appeared to him in mid-November: ‘Seeing the devastated state of the city for the first time from bombing and close-quarter fighting, Schiller’s words came to me: “Horror lives in the empty window frames.” ’106 By 15 November, the Sixth Army’s combat divisions were short of 115,000 men. Between July and November, the German army had lost more than 1,600 tanks. That said, the Red Army had suffered at least 1.2 million casualties in the fighting along the Voronezh and Stalingrad axes between the end of June and the middle of November, compared with Axis losses of about 200,000, and the Soviets had also lost 4,800 tanks. Figures such as this highlight just how formidable a force the German army still was. In Stalingrad itself, the 62nd Army was down to less than a full division in strength. But while the Soviets could still sustain even these phenomenal losses, the

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Germans could no longer sustain theirs.107 Above all, at Stalingrad as in the Caucasus, the Germans had failed to achieve their key objectives. And now winter was coming. As the fighting in Stalingrad sucked in ever more German formations, not only Army Group A suffered. The front line either side of Stalingrad was stripped bare of German units, and manned by second-rate allied and satellite armies – the Italian Eighth Army, Hungarian Second Army, and Romanian Third and Fourth armies. These might have performed their defensive role adequately were it not for the sheer size of their front. They also lacked artillery and anti-tank guns, and the Germans gave them no air support. The Italian, Hungarian, and Romanian armies were thus perilously overextended, positively inviting the kind of Red Army breakthrough that could easily encircle the Sixth Army itself.108 Zhukov continued to indulge Hitler’s obsession with capturing Stalingrad, ensuring that Chuikov always received enough reinforcements while amassing powerful forces for a counteroffensive. Although Hitler did not accept the danger to the Sixth Army’s flanks, several of his generals did, but Zeitzler was the only one who raised the alarm. It is unclear how far German commanders regarded the prospect of a Soviet winter offensive with resigned fatalism, or how far they believed they could somehow weather any storm. The latter, however, is suggested by German military intelligence’s continued failure to grasp the extent of the Red Army’s ability to replenish old units and raise new ones.109 The Soviets’ preparation for the offensive suffered shortages in effective communications and in trucks, such that some of the forces earmarked for it, and some of their supplies, arrived late at their jumping-off points. But by biding their time, planning the operation meticulously and building up resources at least to the necessary level, Red Army leaders were already showing that they had learned vital lessons from the previous winter. The Red Army was able to amass more than one million men and over 1,500 tanks for the operation.110 This was a force that was formidable not just in numbers, but also in fighting power. Red Army training had improved markedly since 1941. Among other things, the Red Army now employed a system of replacement training regiments organizing basic training in the rear. It also used a system of reinforcement that was as ruthless as it was effective. Divisions fought at the front line until they had been thoroughly ground down; they were then withdrawn and replenished. This system precipitated enormous losses, but also ensured that the Red Army got maximum use of its divisions.111 But the most dramatic changes, fuelled by a prodigious armaments production drive, were taking place within the Red Army’s mechanized force. In early July, the Red Army had established four tank armies. A tank army was equivalent to a Panzer corps,

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and emulated the Germans’ combined-arms approach by grouping tank divisions with a rifle division and other infantry and support units. By September 1942, the Red Army had formed twenty-four tank corps within its new tank armies. Each Soviet tank corps was about the size of a 1941 German Panzer division, and was composed overwhelmingly of T-34s.112 Moreover, a new generation of senior Red Army commanders was emerging. Many of the incompetent commanders of 1941 had been sacked, and indeed a few executed. Taking their place were many younger officers. Some proved equally incompetent, but some matured into highly effective commanders. Others, including Zhukov, had been recalled from exile commanding far-flung outposts. Furthermore, following the failure of the Soviet counterattack of winter 1941–42 and the disastrous Kharkov offensive, Stalin was at last more prepared to listen to advice and give his new, competent senior commanders free rein. The officer corps as a whole placed new emphasis on professionalism and merit, and officers enjoyed greater status as limits were placed on the power of Communist functionaries within the Red Army.113 Operation Uranus was launched on 19 November, in wintry conditions, against the especially weakly held sector of the Axis front line north and south of Stalingrad. The lessons learned from it would help the Soviets eventually to launch a successful major offensive against the Germans themselves.114 The operation’s most immediate effect was to swing the pendulum in the south firmly against the Axis, and place the Sixth Army in grave and immediate danger of being cut off. Yet Paulus obeyed Hitler unquestioningly when, on 22 November, the dictator forbade the Sixth Army to withdraw west to escape the Soviet pincers. The following day, the Sixth Army was encircled completely. Peter Wunschel, an ex-journalist who was now an intelligence officer in the 384th Infantry Division, saw disaster ahead: ‘We are shutting ourselves in of our own free will. The core of this information, the full significance of this sentence, struck me like a screaming headline.’115 Hitler readily accepted assurances from Göring, and from Luftwaffe Chief of Staff Hans Jeschonnek, that the Luftwaffe could keep the Sixth Army supplied by air. Airlifts had worked the previous winter with the Demiansk pocket. But Göring and Jeschonnek had felt pressured by Hitler into giving these assurances, and misjudged the obstacles involved in keeping Stalingrad relieved.116 To start with, the Sixth Army was far larger than the body of troops that the Luftwaffe had relieved in the pockets of the previous winter. The Luftwaffe’s fuel and aircraft were already overstretched as it tried to support German ground forces across the south. Because Operation Uranus had overrun the Germans’ forward airfields near Stalingrad, the Luftwaffe hastily had to construct new, makeshift ones.117 It also faced the strength of the VVS and of Soviet anti-aircraft batteries. Even if they got through, German aircraft had

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limited options for landing within the pocket; indeed, after the Soviets overran its remaining working airfields within range in mid-January, all that remained to the Luftwaffe was the even less reliable method of air drops.118 The effects of the shortages were felt very quickly, as Major Werner Beumelberg of the Luftwaffe later recalled. ‘Some divisions still had horses, which they had to share with others. Little by little the horses ended up in the field kitchens. . . . Every day that provisions were not replenished made the situation worse. But the army’s needs could never be met. It was living from hand to mouth. In fact every day it was living beyond its means and it was easy to calculate at what point there would be nothing left at all.’119 *** It was not only the leadership of the Luftwaffe that fed Hitler’s belief that Stalingrad could be held, but also Field Marshal von Manstein. Hitler recalled Manstein from the Leningrad front in late November and appointed him to command a new formation, Army Group Don, which was charged with relieving the Sixth Army. One of Manstein’s first acts as commander of Army Group Don, and his first mistake, was to signal to Paulus on 24 November: ‘we will do all we can to get you out. In the meantime, it is imperative that [Sixth] Army, whilst holding firm on the Volga and North fronts in accordance with the Führer’s orders, stands by strong forces as soon as possible, in order to force a supply route towards the south-west if necessary, at least temporarily.’120 This ambiguous order left Paulus unclear as to whether he should actually be preparing his troops for a breakout to meet any upcoming relief attempt. Manstein can also be criticized on several further counts. He failed properly to assess the Luftwaffe’s actual ability to keep the Sixth Army supplied. He also overestimated the forces that would be available to him in any attempt to break through to Stalingrad. His own army group’s intelligence then underestimated the size of the Soviet forces facing him. 121 Manstein might have been better off calling upon Paulus to break out immediately. Though Paulus was not the strongest of characters, Manstein might have helped fortify his resolve by taking personal responsibility himself for any breakout attempt. It would have helped if Manstein had flown into the pocket to assess the situation there himself. Instead, he sent in his unflappable chief of staff, Colonel Theodor Busse. Busse came back out assuring Manstein: ‘it’s a bad business, sir, but we’ll manage somehow,’122 and fortified the field marshal’s unwarranted optimism further. In turn, Manstein now fortified Hitler’s conviction that the Sixth Army could and must stay put, and that any attempt to relieve it must only be with the aim of holding open a corridor through which to supply it. On 28 November, Zeitzler told Manstein that Hitler

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had decreed: ‘Stalingrad is to be held with all means.’123 In other words, the aim was not to allow the Sixth Army to break out to the west, but for a relief force to open up a supply and reinforcement corridor to the west and thus enable it to stay put. On the other hand, the Sixth Army would have needed time to reposition itself for a swift breakout anyway. By the time it might have been able to break out, its own fuel and ammunition situation was likely to have worsened and the Soviet ring around Stalingrad strengthened. Under those circumstances, the Sixth Army would have had to make a breakout attempt on foot, and risk being annihilated by the Soviets on the open steppe. Manstein also had to consider the potential consequences of what might happen to the rest of the front if the Sixth Army was destroyed. As he wrote in his diary: ‘so now it’s not only about Sixth Army . . . but rather whether we can hold the southern wing during the winter’.124 In short, it may already have been too late for any breakout attempt in any case. None of this is to defend either Manstein or Paulus, but rather to point out that the situation may by now have become too intractable for any course of action to have averted the battle’s eventual outcome. In any case, on 12 December, having had to spend two weeks scraping together such reinforcements as were available, and fighting off the Red Army in order to secure suitable jumping-off positions for a relief attempt, Manstein attacked the strengthening Soviet ring around Stalingrad with Operation Winter Storm. But because the Soviets were threatening a further attack in the direction of Rostov, only one armoured corps, the LVII Panzer Corps, could be spared for the operation, and even this had limited artillery and air support.125 In the event, by 23 December, LVII Panzer Corps had got within 40 kilometres (25 miles) of Stalingrad, but Manstein was unable to get Paulus to assemble forces for a mini-breakout to the west that would have opened up a corridor to the relieving force. Manstein repeated his mistake of November by sending in his intelligence officer, Major Eisman, to assess the situation in the pocket, rather than flying in and trying to fortify Paulus’s resolve himself. It would be easy to blame Paulus for dithering. However, so poor by now was the Sixth Army’s state of supply, and so strong the Soviet ring around the city, that the Sixth Army was probably unable to break out in the limited way Manstein wished. Eventually, the Second Guards Army, a formation of whose presence Manstein’s intelligence contained no inkling, stopped LVII Panzer Corps from getting any further. 126 Then, on 23 December, one of LVII Corps’s divisions had to be transferred north to plug a gap created following the destruction of the Italian Eighth Army. The remnants of Army Group B and Army Group Don at least managed to spare Army Group A the same fate as the Sixth Army, by preventing the Soviets from seizing Rostov.127 But this was the end of LVII Corps’s effort in

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Winter Storm. Colonel von Mellenthin later wrote that ‘of the heroism of the men of the 57th Panzer Corps in this vain attempt to rescue their comrades at Stalingrad, it is unnecessary to say more. By 26th December the corps was almost non-existent; it had literally died on its feet.’128 *** Hitler now hoped to string out the Sixth Army’s death agonies in order to tie down Soviet armies for as long as possible so as to help stabilize the situation in the rest of the south. Manstein himself later wrote: ‘it was the valiant Sixth Army which, by loyally fighting on to the last, snatched the palm of annihilating victory against the German southern wing from the enemy’s hand.’129 Paulus felt bound by the shackles of obedience from surrendering. As Colonel Adam later wrote: ‘Paulus was through and through a disciplined and obedient soldier. He would rather perish with his army than become a mutineer. To me inwardly, General Paulus represented a superior and humane being. I was very sorry for him in this deep conflict.130 But the exhaustion of the Sixth Army’s supplies now condemned it to a lingering death. By mid-December, according to Colonel Adam, it was already eating its horses, and even then, ‘hunger increased and bored even deeper into the bowels of the surrounded. . . . On 15th December the bread ration had to be reduced to 100 grams. Two slices of bread per day, a thin soup of horse flesh and some cups of herb tea or malt tea was what the soldier had to fight and live on, and withstand frost, snow and storm!’131 At Christmas, while some wellconnected officers were able to celebrate in style, soldiers elsewhere in the pocket faced starvation. As there was no shortage of human corpses, some men in Wilhelm Beyer’s unit contemplated cannibalism – even, if necessary, on their own body parts: ‘even those accustomed to hunger, who knew how much pain the disappearance of the last small cushions of fat on the toes or elsewhere cause, seriously consider taking this action in defiance of orders.’132 In turn, the Sixth Army heaped further misery on the civilian population in the pocket: to deny shelter to the advancing Soviets or to make way for German defences, it destroyed numerous small settlements around the city.133 By 10 January 1943, cold, hunger and infection had reduced the Sixth Army to half its original strength. Joachim Wieder, one of the Sixth Army’s soldiers, described the state to which they had been brought: ‘There were emaciated figures among them, muffled in coats, rags; pitiful wrecks, painfully dragging themselves forwards, leaning on sticks and hobbling on frozen feet, wrapped in wisps of straw and strips of blankets. Drifting along through the snowstorm, this was the wreck of the Sixth Army that had advanced to the Volga during the summer, so confident of victory.’134

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That same day, the Red Army launched its final offensive to destroy the Stalingrad pocket. Because it had had to fight off Winter Storm, getting to this point had taken eight weeks. Moreover, the Soviets were unaware that they had a pocket of 270,000 troops to clear, rather than the ninety-one thousand they believed they had encircled, and the task therefore took three weeks. They commenced their attack with overwhelming artillery fire, followed by massed infantry attacks supported by large mechanized forces. There were relatively few casualties. So miserable now was the Sixth Army’s condition that it probably rendered the Soviets’ task easier.135 ‘What order should I give to my troops?’ Paulus asked Hitler on 29 January, with fighting almost at an end.136 On 30 January, Hitler sought to bolster Paulus’s resolve by promoting him to field marshal. He reasoned that, rather than surrender and become Germany’s first ever field marshal to go into captivity, Paulus would do the honourable thing and shoot himself. He was forgetting, however, that Paulus was a Roman Catholic. Paulus surrendered the following day, and Hitler reacted with a rage spectacular even by his standards. ‘This hurts me so much,’ he ranted, ‘because the heroism of so many soldiers is nullified by one characterless weakling. What is life? Life is the nation. The individual must die anyway.’137 Accompanying Paulus into captivity were the remaining soldiers of the Sixth Army who were still alive within the pocket. But the Soviets, like the Germans the previous winter, had not made proper provision for taking vast numbers of prisoners. Only around five thousand of the ninety-one thousand men who went into captivity would live to see Germany again; of those who did not, the great majority perished when a typhus epidemic ravaged the prison camps the following winter. The last word goes to one of the Sixth Army’s own soldiers, whose final letter, presumably written to a wife or sweetheart, conveys both misery at the conditions and loss of faith in Hitler: ‘I love you, and you love me, and so you should know the truth. . . . The truth is the knowledge of the hardest struggle in a hopeless situation. Misery, hunger, cold, resignation, doubt, despair, and horrible dying. . . . I’m not cowardly, just sad that I can give no greater proof of my bravery than to die for such pointlessness, not to say crime.’138 *** By 2 February, the day on which the final specks of resistance in the pocket were obliterated, the Stalingrad campaign had cost the Germans 300,000 men, and the allied and satellite armies 655,000.139 With these losses, not to mention the peril in which the defeat had now placed the German armies in the Caucasus, Stalingrad was a defeat the scale of which could not be concealed from the German people.

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Yet the losses the German army had suffered during the battle of Stalingrad itself were not the worst of it. Worse still was the attrition rate it had suffered since the start of Operation Blue. The Germans had already lost enough equipment for fifty divisions between the launch of Barbarossa and that of Blue. Indeed, by the time Blue began, such losses were already locking the army into a downward spiral, rendering it increasingly incapable of achieving ambitious objectives. Then, between the launch of Blue and the end of the fighting in Stalingrad and the Caucasus in January and February 1943, it lost enough equipment for another forty-five divisions. In one respect, this rate of destruction was less catastrophic than it may at first appear, for by early 1943 the German war economy was again making good the losses in equipment. For instance, between the beginning of July 1942 and the end of January 1943, the Germans lost over 1,900 armoured fighting vehicles, including perhaps 1,500 on the eastern front. Yet during the same period, nearly 2,800 armoured fighting vehicles went into service.140 Against this, however, was an inescapable truth: the Germans were facing a Soviet opponent, and indeed an Allied coalition, whose economic capacity was far greater than theirs. In this new reality, even a net gain of nine hundred armoured fighting vehicles was the kind of figure that increasingly condemned the German army to a situation of running not so much to stand still, as merely to lag behind by less yawning margins. The battle of Stalingrad was not the most important turning point of the German army’s war; that distinction goes to December 1941, a month that had seen both the first failure of a major German campaign, and the entry of the United States into the war. But with 300,000 German troops lost, and their comrades in the Caucasus now facing the same choice of retreat or annihilation, the battle of Stalingrad was the dramatic crowning point of seven months of campaigning that had inflicted catastrophic losses upon the German army for no perceptible gain. Perhaps even more importantly, it provided the Red Army and the Soviet people with an emphatic, morale-boosting signal that they not only could withstand the German onslaught, but also repel and destroy it. Much credit for the Germans’ defeat in the south during 1942 and at the start of 1943 should go to the Soviet Union’s increasing industrial output, and to the phenomenal resilience and resourcefulness of the Red Army’s troops both in Stalingrad and across the south more widely. Credit should also go to organizational changes the Red Army had made. It was still far from being the unstoppable force it would become by 1944, but its improved tactics, organization, leadership, and material strength had all enabled it to begin steadily but surely to approach that state. The German army’s execution of the southern campaign betrayed the constraints that afflicted it following its failure in 1941. Spectacular successes could still be achieved, as at Kharkov and in the Crimea, against a Red Army

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whose operational skills remained inferior to its own for much of 1942. And the army’s performance in the Caucasus exemplified the immense feats of which the German soldier was still capable. Yet the Germans’ narrow military achievements brought no lasting strategic benefit, and were bought at an appalling and, more importantly, unsustainable cost. They also relied excessively upon that National Socialist conception of warfare that placed paramount importance on grit, determination, and willpower – qualities that might get the German soldier far, but not far enough. The effort needed to attain the full set of Operation Blue’s ever more ambitious goals and to take large numbers of Soviet prisoners was beyond an army operating with straitened means at the very ends of singularly precarious supply lines. That the campaign failed on such a catastrophic scale can be blamed upon its leading figures – Hitler primarily, with his debilitating micromanagement and his all-consuming obsession with Stalingrad, but also Halder, Paulus, Manstein and Göring. These commanders mishandled key phases of the fighting or logistics, or, in Halder’s case, were complicit in overloading Operation Blue with additional demands. Fuelling many of the generals’ miscalculations was an improving but still defective German military intelligence service, but the greater blame lay in the generals’ excessive confidence in their own professional abilities and those of their troops.141 Perhaps even more fundamentally, the German army was less capable of conducting a war-winning offensive in 1942 than it had been in 1941. This failure can in turn be traced directly back to its failure to defeat the Red Army a year earlier. Now, for a growing number of soldiers, the immediate future was signified by the degradation and de-modernization already being experienced by the northern and central army groups. Beyond that loomed the prospect of total defeat.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

FACES OF OCCUPATION, 1942–43 THE SOVIET UNION

I

n july , Second Lieutenant Helmut H. of the 258th Infantry Division recorded how his men (and presumably he himself) reacted when told they were being pulled out of the line for occupation duty in newly conquered Belarusian territory: ‘Yesterday, a minor mutiny flared up over the surprise news that we’re to remain in this area as occupation troops. All they want is to push on into the Russian interior and share in the spoils. . . . You get the impression that the men are just burning to get to grips with the enemy.’1 His attitude to the people he was occupying, and to how to treat them, was shared by many of his fellow officers. The following month, he likened the occupied population to pack animals: ‘Yesterday, I decided to put an end to the malodorous laziness of these carthorses. With the help of Caucasus Germans, I explained to the few male inhabitants still left that all inhabitants were to have a pay cut. . . . These people are as thick as sin and deserve no other government that the one they just had. . . . I will ensure that the harvest is brought in in this village. Maybe violence will help.’2 The core period of German military administration in the occupied Soviet Union was between early 1942, when it became clear the German army would be in the east for a much longer haul than it had expected, and the summer of 1943. After that point, the occupation unravelled as the Germans were pushed back westwards. The army’s main challenge during this period was to overcome not just the enormous practical obstacles of occupation, but also its own harsh, short-sighted view of eastern peoples. Ultimately, it failed on the first count and only partly succeeded on the second. In a sense, the army’s occupation administrations – primarily the three army group rear areas and the various army rear areas – performed their role more effectively than did the civilian administrations in the more westerly Reich Commissariats. The German occupation of the Soviet Union was beset by destructive rivalries between the Office of the Four-Year Plan, the

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Wehrmacht, the SS and the ineffectual Ministry for the Eastern Occupied Territories. But while these rivalries certainly afflicted the army’s administration of its own rear areas, the effect was less debilitating than in the Reich Commissariats. This allowed senior army administrators more freedom to place their occupation on a more sensible, sustainable footing, if with only partial success. But rivalries still beset the army administration, and many of its administrators lacked political foresight. The occupiers’ failures were also caused by the sheer scale of the problems they faced, the insufficient forces they commanded, and their often self-defeatingly ruthless and rapacious conduct. *** By the autumn of 1941, some German army commanders and administrators were already devoting more thought to the question of how to maintain order and stability in the occupied territories and thus make them viable for sustained economic exploitation. Even Manstein’s notorious general order of November 1941 stressed: ‘voluntary cooperation in the rebuilding of the occupied countries is absolutely necessary to the achievement of our economic and political aims. The just treatment of all non-Bolshevik sections of the population, some of whom have fought heroically against Bolshevism, is a prerequisite.’3 A more constructive occupation policy, which sought to coopt the population rather than simply terrorize it, was therefore essential. But as Second Lieutenant H.’s outbursts of the summer of 1941 demonstrated, German officers in the east felt that same reluctance to assume occupation duties that characterized the German army as a whole. In some ways, the army’s administration of former Russian territory was to prove relatively enlightened. However, like the army’s administrators in the occupied east during the First World War, it also considered this territory and its peoples backward and uncivilized. Indeed, this bedrock of prejudice was what made many officers and soldiers more receptive to the Nazis’ particularly virulent brand of anti-Slavism. Moreover, the practical means at the army administration’s disposal in the occupied Soviet Union fell short of what was needed. This was apparent at every level. The commanders of the army group rear areas and smaller army rear areas were men in their fifties and sixties who had imbibed the national conservative worldview of imperial Germany. This did not make them Nazis; however, as anti-Slavism was part of their worldview, it did not automatically make them particularly far-sighted either. For example, General Franz von Roques, who commanded the Army Group North Rear Area, viewed the Russians as cultureless. He ascribed to himself a ‘hard but fair’ colonial mentality, but put more stress on the former quality,

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arguing that the population must be treated ruthlessly if it was to serve the military occupation’s needs.4 Below them was a stratum of staff officers, and the commandants of the various Feldkommandanturen and smaller Ortskommandanturen. The majority were in their forties and would have experienced, and perhaps been hardened by, frontline service during the First World War. More than 80 per cent were reservists, less well trained than their full-time professional colleagues. Many came from those middle-class circles to which the Nazis had long appealed. While it is not clear how many were members of the Nazi Party, a great many were members of the SA. This did not automatically mean they would all make poor administrators, but it does suggest they would be too dogmatic in their dealings with eastern civilians. Lieutenant Emerich P. served with Ortskommandantur 351 (II), in the jurisdiction of the 285th Security Division in the Army Group North Rear Area. His own anti-Russian attitude comes through in a letter of 13 July 1942: ‘An hour ago I had a typical Russian experience. A senior doctor in the village hospital came with his Feldwebel and complained there was no power in the hospital. When the [Russian] machinist arrived, he said with the most naïve face in the world that he thought that because today was a big holiday, no power was needed. . . . Such stupidity is undreamt of.’5 This case also signifies what a good job the Soviets clearly did of transferring their competent personnel further east before the Germans’ arrival. Another important group of officers belonged to Section VII (administration), one of which was allocated to each army group rear area, army rear area and security division. These were civilians in uniform rather than soldiers, appointed for their expertise in areas such as economics. Most were between thirty-five and fifty years old, and had received only basic military training before heading east.6 Temperamentally and professionally, then, this body of officers might be prepared for the tasks of military occupation in some respects, but not in others. For their part, frontline troops frequently despised full-time occupation personnel as Etappenschweine (‘rear area swine’), leading a safe and comfortable existence while the real war was fought further east. Thus did Waldo P. of the 5th Light Infantry Division describe Riga in March 1942: ‘There’s a soldiers’ theatre there, at least five soldiers’ cinemas, etc. Also, one sees in cafés and restaurants signs like “Entry only for officers and Wehrmacht officials! Daily dances here.” . . . We never see such things at the front.’7 Severe shortages in lower-level administration and in security forces did not help either. Because of the paucity of their own administrative personnel, the Germans came to rely heavily upon indigenous administrators such as mayors and headmen and, further down, upon native auxiliary police. ‘The Germans were here for a long time,’ recalled one local eyewitness from the

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Army Group North region after the war, ‘but they were rarely in our village. This was because there were more (indigenous) police there. . . . [The Germans] only came to bring or take someone away.’8 The Germans used this native administration to collect agricultural products, taxation and other items, and to help maintain order. From late 1942, moreover, the administration was charged with providing workers for the German war economy. In return, native administrators received various perks, such as emergency rations at times when rations were otherwise being cut. They also exploited widely the opportunities for corruption and nepotism that their position provided. The native administration was also deficient because the great majority of experienced administrators had left with the Soviet retreat. The results were plain in the day-to-day running of the occupied territories. For instance, GFP Group 721, which served in the Gatjtash-Senkov-Mirgorod region of the Ukraine, reported in January 1942 that it regularly had to check rayon (district) chiefs and mayors for reliability. Indeed, ‘in some places, the mayor and the militia were getting drunk’. GFP Group 721 also feared that former Communist functionaries were infiltrating the administration to sabotage it and give the partisans direct and indirect help.9 When it came to policing its occupied territories, the military administration could call on the Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos of the Security Police and SD, and on the Wehrmacht’s own GFP. Reports by GFP Group 721 provide insight into the organization’s everyday activities. Each GFP post had a strength of one officer, one NCO and forty-eight men. By employing reliable native informers as well as captured partisans, they were able to establish the partisans’ strength, weaponry, equipment, and route of march. Where possible, each GFP post maintained a sniffer dog or guard dog for keeping watch and for assisting with transporting captured partisans. Group 721 ran transit camps in Lubny and Chorol, where it concentrated captured partisans and Communist functionaries before handing them over to the SD. In some respects, Group 721 treated the population with some consideration: in Lubny, for instance, it turned over several houses and conducted lengthy investigations following reports that several of the town’s inhabitants were planning to attack the Germans. But it did not inflict a reprisal on the village unless it had unearthed proof of the inhabitants’ complicity first.10 But in January 1942, GFP Group 721 complained that its men were seriously overburdened.11 The occupation administration also needed a large body of army manpower if it was to keep its jurisdictions pacified. By the summer of 1942, there were approximately thirty to fifty thousand security troops in every army group rear area, and approximately five to ten thousand in every army rear area. Among these totals, however, was a large number of native auxiliaries, men who usually entered German service in the hope of paid

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work and better rations. They usually had scant reason to feel enthusiastic about the Germans. For by the spring of 1942, the Germans had squandered most of the goodwill that some sections of the western Soviet Union’s population had at first shown them. One of the many reasons – something that had taken place under the population’s noses – was the mass death of Soviet POWs. A more practical reason was the dire food situation across the occupied territories. The high-level directives that the likes of Göring and Wagner had issued during the summer and autumn of 1941 had set the stage, by cutting the rations available to the population as a whole, and by discriminating particularly against those sections of the population not directly working for the Germans. The OKH, apparently mindful that many German soldiers were taking pity on the starving population, announced in November 1941 that the German soldier would be inclined to give some of his rations to the population. But he must say to himself: every gram of bread or other food that I give the population of the occupied territories out of the goodness of my heart, I am taking away from the German people and therefore my family. . . . The German soldier therefore needs to remain hard in view of the starving women and children. If he doesn’t do this, he endangers the food supply of our people. The enemy is now experiencing the fate he had intended for us. He alone bears the responsibility before the world and history.12

The local Kommandanturen were responsible for cooperating with the Wirtschaftskommandos to oversee food distribution, while native communal administrations did the actual distributing. During 1942, the Kommandanturen tried to make good at least some of the damage that German policy had already wrought. Yet such were the obstacles facing them that they achieved very limited success. One reason for this was that army administrators were often at loggerheads with the Armeewirtschaftsführer and Wirtschafstinspektionen of Wirtschaftsstab Ost. For instance, Wirtschaftsinpektion South despoiled the rear areas of Army Group South and then of Army Group B, areas that included the grain-producing regions of the Ukraine. In Kharkov, thirty people were dying of hunger each day by the beginning of August 1942.13 While General of Infantry Erich Friderici, the commander of the Army Group B Rear Area, accused Wirtschaftsinpektion South of inflicting quotas upon the population ‘similar to those of Bolshevik times’, the inspectorate retorted by blaming the shortages on disruption caused by partisans. This was an unsubtly veiled complaint that the rear area administration itself was failing to keep the partisan threat under control. Similarly, the Army Group Centre Rear Area

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clashed with Wirtschaftsinpektion Centre; its own urban areas suffered severely from hunger, particularly when an influx of refugees swelled the total population from 550,000 to 800,000.14 In some ways, the population of the Army Group North Rear Area had it even worse. There were fewer mouths to feed, but also fewer means with which to feed them; the region already lacked much in the way of cultivatable land and mechanized farming equipment, and the Germans in the north were particularly desperate to seize horses and carts for the front. Wirtschaftsinspektion North piled on the population’s misery by doubling or sometimes quadrupling food quotas to be seized.15 The prospect of starvation also threatened law and order, as black markets flourished and hundreds of thousands of urban dwellers poured into the countryside on foraging expeditions. Such Hamsterfahrten also disrupted railway transport when civilians wandered across railway lines en masse.16 Officers on the ground described what all this meant for civilians. In August 1942, Emerich P. described civilians ‘standing before German field kitchens and begging in a miserable condition. The adults already show the signs of the last stage of hunger, namely swollen feet and faces, children with swollen bellies, otherwise just skin and bone, with an ashen corpse-like look. . . . I’ve arranged for the neighbouring village, which has not slaughtered its cows and is therefore coping better, to provide 20 litres [35 pints] of milk every day for the children of our village.’17 He also had a macabre but all-too-common tale to recount: ‘A young woman who is working here at the Kommandantur had her child stolen. Another woman had enticed the child away. We found this woman with three children whom she had enticed away from home with promises that they could look at her lovely little puppies, etc. Here’s the ghoulish bit – she was planning to eat them.’18 Further east, some field armies, such as the Second and Third Panzer armies, had enough transportation to allow them to feed the population. However, the field armies that marched even further east during Operation Blue in 1942 encountered, or sometimes created, an even more ruinous food supply situation. The Seventeenth Army, advancing through the Donbass, felt compelled to go plundering because it was in an industrial area with little agricultural land. Its economic office even recommended that the army set up ghettos to separate the starving from its own troops. The army command thought this would also be a good way of sealing off what it saw as the particularly hardcore Communist population of the Donbass, though in the event it lacked the troops needed to guard what would have been an enormous ghetto. Meanwhile, the Eleventh Army plundered the Crimea together with the Wirtschaftskommando on the spot, and by the end of 1942, 100,000 people in the southern part of the peninsula had starved to death.19

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Matters across the occupied areas improved marginally in September 1942 when the German authorities began distributing ration cards. However, these were only intended for people who could either work or prove they were unable to work. Actual ration levels did not improve, and in the case of bread they sank even further. That said, the hunger of the winter of 1942–43 was marginally less dreadful than the previous winter’s, and from March 1943 onward, the German occupation authorities began distributing food in a more coordinated, effective manner. A grisly reason why this was becoming easier, however, was that so many civilians had already been deported or had died from starvation. Later in 1943, a flood of refugees from the fighting further east raised population levels again. Facing this situation, Wirtschaftsstab Ost reduced the number of people entitled to rations from 1.4 million to 800,000.20 Populations in the rear of Army Group North, however, experienced a more sustained marginal improvement on the miserable depths of the winter of 1941–42. Here, the Germans helped their cause by storing and distributing to the population some of the produce they had originally seized from it. This was a calculating measure rather than a moral one: they used hunger as a weapon to help ensure the population’s orderly behaviour, and until 1943 at least it seems to have worked. Settlements further to the rear were not in close proximity to marauding frontline troops, and civilians who worked received higher rations. A more ghoulish factor, of course, was that the mass deaths of the previous winter left more food to go around. Active collaborators received access to additional food, and also to payments in kind such as tobacco. However, the bulk of the more ‘privileged’ working section of Army Group North’s civilian population still suffered great misery. In the town of Slutsk, in July 1942, the daily ration of 300 grams (10 ounces) of bread for workers and 150 grams (5 ounces) for non-workers was little better than what the besieged population of Leningrad was living on during November and December 1941.21 German policy in the Army Group North area also alleviated the population’s misery more than German policy elsewhere because northern Russia had fewer mouths to feed in the first place. *** In the face of hunger, army administrators sought to win civilians’ hearts and minds, ensure they worked effectively for the Germans and preempt them from joining resurgent partisan groups. One ‘flagship’ reform the Germans initially tried to trumpet was ‘privatization’ of the collective farming system. This was announced for the northern and central occupied sectors on 15 February 1942. The civilian and army occupation administrators who backed the reform believed it would appeal to the spirit of free enterprise

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among Soviet farmers by giving them a genuine economic stake in the German occupation. However, though the reform contained elements of private enterprise, the central economic planners in Berlin wanted to keep the Soviet command system largely intact in order to maximize the amount of agricultural yields that could be seized for the German market. And the Ukraine was excluded from the reform entirely until the autumn of 1942.22 It was the occupation authorities of Army Group North who, again, gave the reforms greater credibility than army administrators elsewhere. They allocated more generous amounts of land, and also granted collaborators a limited amount of further land on which to grow their own produce. A Soviet report of September 1943 concerning the occupied Leningrad oblast (province) described how many peasants were farming their own portion of former collective farmland, around 2 or 3 hectares (5 or 7½ acres) per family with a male member able to work, with a horse at each family’s disposal.23 Yet the fact that the benefits of the agricultural reform, such as they were, were felt sooner and more perceptibly in northern Russia than in the more agriculturally important Ukraine reflects the policy’s essential bankruptcy. More generally, as the partisan movement began re-establishing itself, farmers often came to fear being given an individual farm under the reform in case it made them targets for partisan reprisals.24 German troops’ plunder of livestock, and the Soviets’ scorched-earth policies, had together wrought havoc upon agriculture in 1941, and the too often paltry reality of the Germans’ muchvaunted reform was not enough to remedy the damage. German army administrators also tried to compensate with educational and religious reforms. While Hitler and the Nazi leadership wanted the Slavs reduced to a primitive, serf-like level, army administrators realized they needed qualified people to help them run the economy. They also recognized that re-establishing an effective school system was a good means of keeping children and teenagers under control and away from partisan influence.25 In June 1942, Emerich P. ‘initiated the teaching of German for adults and children, which has now been running for the past few days. There’s a lot of demand for the courses. We have 150 students already, and that will certainly increase.’26 However, in this as in so many other areas, the Germans relied completely upon native personnel to run the schools. ‘You ask me whether I’m running the German school myself,’ Emerich P. continued. ‘No, the Russians alone have to do that. We Germans are only meant to initiate the idea and set the direction, otherwise nothing will come of it.’27 Yet in occupied Belarus particularly, far too many teachers had fled or been killed, and those who were available feared being marked out as collaborators. There was also a dearth of schoolbooks. The 281st Security Division, in the Army Group North Rear Area, tried to get around this problem with a

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sport-heavy curriculum which, while fun for many of the pupils, was of limited use otherwise. Many children were unable to attend school because of the distances involved in getting there.28 The Ninth Army had a harsher way of controlling its civilian population: in 1942, it established a camp for children roaming around its jurisdiction, and charged Sonderkommandos 7a and 7b with catching them.29 Generals von Schenckendorff and Karl von Roques, the latter of whom commanded the Army Group South Rear Area during 1941 and again during the second half of 1942, also sought to restore freedom of worship to the occupied population. For instance, 1,500 churches were reopened across the armycontrolled areas of the Ukraine.30 It helped that the SS was not murdering the Russian and Ukrainian clergy in the way it had the Polish clergy. Emerich P. described the scene when he gave permission for a Russian Orthodox church to be built in May 1942: Yesterday I received a deputation headed by a Russian priest with a long beard, staff and flowing robe with a request to build a Russian church. ‘God protect the Liberator Adolf Hitler who has given Russia back its God!’ he proclaimed, as I declared to him that we were giving permission. He then stooped to the ground and promised we would be eternally in the people’s thoughts and prayers. . . . Nothing can be done here without religion; it gives the elderly a real sense of belonging, which can be politically exploited, and can more easily direct the spiritually lost youth towards a moral way of living.31

Frontline divisions also played the religion card in order to placate the populations in their sectors. The 126th Infantry Division, another Army Group North formation, made a point of respecting places of worship in its area, even though it also widely used public hangings and shootings to deter resistance.32 However, a shortage of working churches and a plethora of ecclesiastical structures hindered the Germans’ efforts. Army Group South forbade its own troops to allow civilians to participate in Wehrmacht field services.33 And though the army’s religious initiatives were generally well received by the older generation and in rural areas, they brought little success otherwise. To woo younger people and urban dwellers, the Germans reopened theatres, cinemas and dance halls, but the disruptions of wartime prevented these venues from regaining their prewar standards.34 *** Alfred Rosenberg’s Eastern Ministry was in overall charge of German propaganda in the occupied Soviet Union. Its brief included trumpeting the

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‘achievements’ of the occupation. Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, the SS, and the Wehrmacht also produced propaganda. Among the propaganda messages were that the Soviets had started the war, and that the German invasion had been a pre-emptive strike against an imminent Soviet invasion of Europe. In the Baltic region and the Ukraine, German propaganda often exploited local anti-Semitism by linking Bolshevism with Jews. It also stressed the Germans’ military and political superiority, though this in particular proved an increasingly hard sell as the war dragged on. As the security situation in the occupied territories worsened, civilians were urged to support the German anti-partisan campaign or – it was implied – face German terror. Leaflets, photographs, staged exhibitions and the printed press were all deployed. For example, in the rear area of Army Group B in July 1942, Propaganda Section Ukraine produced nineteen newspapers with an overall circulation of 265,000. Similarly, the Army Group Centre Rear Area saw the production of numerous propaganda newspapers with names like The Bell and The Turning Point.35 But although copious propaganda material was produced, the size of the occupied territory, the terrain and proliferating partisan attacks limited its distribution. Radio propaganda was also employed, but because radio was banned in private homes the Germans had to rely on loudspeaker vans, of which there were only limited numbers. Public speakers were an effective propaganda method if they could be found, but the Germans often had to coerce them. Conversely, some German propaganda measures backfired. For instance, occupied civilians were sometimes taken on trips to Germany to demonstrate how wonderful it was. Although many felt inspired to offer their services as propaganda speakers when they returned, their talks often led civilians to ask why Germans were well fed while they themselves went hungry.36 In January 1943, the intelligence officer of Army Group Centre remarked: ‘Even the prettiest promises or the most impressive speech by a Russian in our service can’t make good the loss of a cow or a home.’37 Similarly, in July 1942 Emerich P. recognized that ‘here the Germans are credited with saving many people from starvation. . . . Such propaganda of deed is more valuable practically than columns of propaganda material.’38 Many commanders believed the best day-to-day propaganda was the conduct of the German soldier himself. In the autumn of 1942, for instance, officers investigating soldierly indiscipline in Army Group Centre reported: ‘If after the departure of a unit . . . all the chickens in a village are still alive, then the troops concerned have done more for our cause than perhaps an Army Propaganda Company that has held a talk lasting for hours.’39 That said, the direction that commanders received from above seemed to face two ways. On 27 May 1942, the OKH issued a directive stating: ‘the German soldier . . . should be received as the master in the east, but mastery should never express itself in

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contempt towards defenceless defeated people. The Russian is obedient and willing if he is treated in a hard but fair manner.’40 Yet the directive also stated: ‘a degree of harshness is also needed. Any weakness and softness is entirely misplaced. Where civilians act against military directives, where they act against members of the German Wehrmacht, or threaten them, or intend or carry out any violent act, they are to be immediately treated ruthlessly by order of the responsible officer in line with regulations.’41 Such mixed messages did not make it any easier for commanders on the ground to instil consistently correct behaviour among their troops. Commanders who sought to persuade or compel their troops to moderate their behaviour could face an uphill struggle, given the impact of years of antiSlavic prejudice and propaganda. Anti-Slavism was widespread among the troops, although exactly how widespread cannot be known. Even so, soldiers expressed a range of views. Unteroffizier Willy P. spoke for many who felt their prejudices to be vindicated when they experienced the Russians’ ‘primitive’ living conditions: ‘In the evenings we arrive at these Russian kennels and spend the night in the stinking holes with ten or twenty people, the majority on the floor, which is often just earth and not covered with floorboards. Not to mention the fact that they often have ten children, with cats, sheep and pigs among them. . . . They have no handkerchiefs, and they also “go” on the floor. Oh, one could write volumes about this!’42 Other soldiers encountered similar conditions, but reacted with more pity. Such for instance was the case with a soldier from the 121st Infantry Division: ‘They live as best as one can in an apathy that was reflected in their faces. Joy and pleasure were dead, the belief in a better future taken away.’43 And in April 1942, Private Fritz S. of the 25th Infantry Division described his first experience of Russians on his journey to the front: ‘The first overnight stay with Russian farmers was really great. The Russian houses just consist of one room. Fifteen people live there, and seven German soldiers were added to that. The Russians personally were very friendly towards us.’44 German soldiers relied on Soviet civilians not only for security and agricultural work, but also as black marketeers. Black marketeering was particularly rife in the Army Group North area: soldiers in Lithuania and Estonia used cigarettes and schnapps to secure better deals on the black market, and a ban of May 1942 did not deter them.45 For some soldiers, Soviet cities were not so much repellent as exciting. Unteroffizier Wolfgang S. of the 7th Panzer Division described a visit to the fleshpots of Kharkov in the spring of 1943: ‘Kharkov is one of the most interesting cities in the east. Half destroyed, yet full of bustle and a volume of traffic like Berlin in peacetime.Women à la the Kurfurstendamm, alongside bearded beggars, strumpets and their prey, rogues, spivs and honest types who go hungry. . . . A mini-Babylon for Landsers [common foot soldiers] who want to make love and spend money.’46

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The fact that occupation troops were generally older than their frontline comrades could make them more considerate towards civilians. This was not just because older soldiers were more subject to influences other than Nazism, but also because thoughts of their own wives and children could soften their treatment of Russian families.47 Relations between individual German soldiers and Russian women could often be very agreeable. Despite official bans on sexual contact between them, including measures announced by Wirtschaftsstab Ost in early 1942, Himmler estimated that over a million illegitimate babies were born to Russian women and German soldiers over the course of the war.48 It is unlikely that Himmler carried out rigorous research to arrive at this figure, but Second Lieutenant Helmut D. of the 4th Mountain Division, for one, conceded the general point. ‘Relations with the population are good,’ he wrote in a letter of May 1942. ‘But I have had to impress upon my Landsers the fact that the Russians are still our enemies. I’ve even had to send a couple of soldiers home when I’ve seen them behaving “improperly” with girls. . . . The Landser has been far from home a long time, away from his wife or girlfriend, and is in need of a bit of tenderness. Spring’s arrival has its effect too, of course.’49 However, sexual relations between German soldiers and Soviet women were often anything but tender. Rape was widespread, and a third of all cases seem to have been gang rapes. Although cases that reached military courts were usually punished strongly, there were far fewer prosecutions for rape in the occupied east than in the occupied west. German commanders and military courts did intervene if they believed that a violent sexual crime might significantly damage soldierly discipline or relations with the population. But the threshold they set in the east was much higher than it was in the west. In the east, though the policy remained unspoken, many officers seem to have turned a blind eye to such violations, believing them a necessary means of allowing their men to ‘let off steam’ following the pressures of battle. Rapes were less likely to be reported by German eyewitnesses who held Soviet women in racial contempt, and even if they were reported, that same racial contempt often stopped the military authorities from taking them seriously.50 The authorities also disregarded racial considerations concerning sexual contact with Slavic women more generally. Accordingly, they established Wehrmacht brothels in the east as in parts of the west. Their main concern was for discipline, for they believed regulated brothels gave the troops a ‘safe’ outlet through which to satisfy their sexual needs and savour the ‘fruits of victory’, without engaging in rape, gang rape or homosexual encounters. They were also concerned about security: memoranda issued by Field Marshal Keitel in the autumn of 1942 stressed that unsolicited relations between German soldiers

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and native women could lead to ‘spy activities’ and ‘a complete blurring of the necessary distance to the people of the occupied eastern territories’.51 In contrast with Wehrmacht brothels in occupied western Europe, attractive local women were often press-ganged for the brothels in the east. Brothels were also established so that the women working there could be monitored for sexually transmitted diseases. And in Russia, disease prevention sometimes took lethal form. In December 1941, XXVIII Corps, which served under the Eighteenth Army in northwest Russia, overruled an Ortskommandant to decree that over two hundred women in the local mental asylum, many of whom were suffering from syphilis, were to be shot by the SD. In November 1942, the SD shot a further fifty women infected with STDs. Fear about STDs, together with the aforementioned worries about security, may well have been behind the rise in prosecutions of sexual misdemeanours from 1943 onwards.52 Nor was there necessarily anything sweet about many of the ‘consensual’ liaisons that took place. In the words of Dieter Pohl, there was, considering occupied civilians’ often appalling economic circumstances, ‘a fluid line between loving relations and poverty prostitution’.53 Contempt for the population, or at least utter disregard for it, was also clear in the countless cases of unrestricted, unauthorized plunder that took place. Army Rear Area 582, the Ninth Army’s occupation zone, had an official policy of leaving private peasant property alone so that the population was guaranteed at least some supplies, but its troops often ignored this ruling. Its officers also disapproved of their soldiers going fishing with hand grenades.54 There could be particular problems when frontline troops took up temporary residence in the rear. In September 1942, Emerich P. wrote: ‘we are currently assembling a police troop from the locals, otherwise there’ll be no houses left by the end of winter. Whatever isn’t guarded visibly by a gun is torn up, stolen, destroyed. It is of course forbidden, but should the Landser freeze? No, he helps himself, and takes a good window casement from another house. . . . I have dark forebodings for the winter.’55 Medical supplies were often also seized, and local hospitals debilitated in the process. An April 1942 report by Einsatzgruppe A on conditions in the Eighteenth Army’s area maintained that the territory’s hospitals had degenerated into ‘centres of contagion’.56 Plunder and requisitioning, particularly of living quarters, were also widespread in urban areas where German soldiers massively outnumbered the locals. At times, for instance, the population of Smolensk comprised thirty thousand regular inhabitants, but also fifty thousand soldiers.57 Plunder and requisitioning also led to riots and, inevitably, increased support for the partisans. Yet although German commands frequently issued orders against unsolicited plunder, there is little evidence that German military courts punished it systematically. Officers often saw plunder as part of

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a survival strategy, or as another opportunity for the troops to channel their frustrations against a supposedly racially inferior population. Furthermore, so much unauthorized plunder took place that it could be immensely difficult to control.58 Overall, if the German soldier’s everyday behaviour was indeed the military administration’s greatest propaganda weapon, it was double-edged at best. *** Together with food, the bitterest bone of contention between occupier and occupied was the German drive for labour. The Germans were using native labour within the Soviet Union for their own purposes from late 1941, and rear area units were not the only ones involved in seizing it. In the summer of 1942, for instance, the 121st Infantry Division, operating under the Eighteenth Army in northwest Russia, was instrumental in rounding up and transferring labour in Pavlovsk and Pushkin for work under other German organizations in the east.59 In 1942, the Nazi plenipotentiary for labour allocation, Fritz Sauckel, was empowered to ransack the occupied territories for workers to be sent to the Reich. Sauckel initially used bribery, using promises of good treatment and of a living wage that would benefit workers’ families amid the grim economic conditions of wartime. Accordingly, Emerich P. cited a letter from one worker to her family, conveying a rosy image of life in Germany. ‘Almost all letters show,’ he wrote, ‘that Germany has exceeded the expectations of the Russian workers who have been sent there. The town is actually quite exasperated by the letters. Lots of girls are crying, who did not work up the courage at the time to go and work in Germany. It was better propaganda for us than ten trucks full of propaganda material.’60 By October 1942, nearly 700,000 eastern workers (Ostarbeiter) were in Germany, in a foreign workforce that now numbered over three million.61 Ostarbeiter often suffered appalling pay and conditions at the hands of rapacious German employers. On average, 1,200 Ostarbeiter died in Germany every month. The main killer was tuberculosis.62 When tales of maltreatment and suffering inevitably reached home, the initial surge of volunteers evaporated. Sauckel now came under intensified pressure to procure Ostarbeiter by whatever means. He was empowered to compel both army and civilian occupation authorities to deploy native representatives to ensure that the population complied with his demands. In October 1942, Feldkommandantur 197, in the Army Group B Rear Area, deplored the spectacle of female labour draft evaders being hauled from their forest hiding places as a scene ‘resembling a manhunt’.63 Sauckel resorted not just to coercion, but also to trickery: for instance, a local population might be invited to a film show and then have all its able-bodied

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members seized. Sauckel was driven by his own anti-Slavism, and by his determination to bulldoze through his demands against other agencies’ wishes. Sauckel’s greatest obstacle on this score was the army, albeit for practical rather than moral reasons. On 16 March 1943, for instance, Sauckel announced he needed a million extra workers over the next four months. The army evaded or ignored his demands, because it needed native labour for its own purposes in the east.64 Commanders such as the Second Army’s General von Weichs in early 1942 advocated a compulsory labour service, but others had grave misgivings. General von Schenckendorff wanted, at the very least, rigorous regulation and an end to excesses against Ostarbeiter. Attempts to improve conditions were indeed made. A May 1943 directive, for instance, forbade the physical abuse of Ostarbeiter and required that they receive decent food rations, sanitation, and clothing. How far these measures were enacted depended on the goodwill of German employers. Furthermore, Allied bombing made it increasingly difficult for the Germans to house Ostarbeiter adequately. General Friderici, who commanded the Army Group South Rear Area during 1942 and 1943, wanted a major drive to ‘sell’ labour service to the population. Both civilian and military authorities employed various propaganda measures to this end. Some, such as the practice of marching volunteers to the railway station with a moraleboosting musical accompaniment, were bizarre. Others were more grounded: for instance, native reporters were allowed into German firms to observe conditions. But with multiple ongoing stories of poor treatment, and the population’s growing realization, particularly after Stalingrad, that Germany was not winning the war, none of these measures remained effective.65 The labour draft was the most pressing of the many grievances that boosted popular support for the partisans from 1942 onwards. That year, the Soviet regime finally gave partisans the coordination and practical support they needed. A new Central Partisan Headquarters directed that new partisan groups comprise a mixture of activists from the local area, militia and NKVD commandos. Partisans grew increasingly adept at cultivating popular support in the areas that came under their control. The stabilized front line and the Soviet war economy’s growing output vastly improved the partisans’ supply and communications. Major challenges remained: among other things, partisans were ordered to cultivate willing popular support among the widest swathe of the population, but many partisan groups were plagued by discipline problems and often raped, plundered, maltreated, or even murdered civilians. To a large extent, Stalin’s regime itself directed partisans to be ruthless, viewing the occupied population as a tool in the cause of victory. Partisans could be particularly merciless towards collaborators, and indeed sometimes towards collaborators’ families. The State Defence Committee decreed that one family

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member’s treason was enough to implicate the rest of his family. Conversely, if one family member exhibited patriotic conduct, including support for the partisan movement, then this could exonerate his or her family from the crimes of a close relative.66 Many partisan groups wooed hearts and minds through effective antiGerman propaganda. Among other things, by September 1942, partisans were employing two-sided tactics, still going after civilian administrators with a vengeance, but also enticing members of indigenous auxiliary units to ‘come over’. They also set up administrative apparatus and provided a range of services to the populations of the areas they controlled. They flourished most in areas more accessible to supply through the front line, among swampy and forested terrain, or among populations especially hard hit by German occupation. For these reasons, the great majority of partisans operating in the armyoccupied zone could be found in Belarus, in the occupied regions of Great Russia to the east of it, or in the northeast Ukraine. German soldiers all along the front were alarmed at the partisans’ rising activity and sometimes astonished at their fortitude. In May 1942, for instance, Lieutenant Richard D. of the 7th Panzer Division wrote: ‘of the partisans who have lately been captured, two girls were shot after a lengthy interrogation. One was seventeen years old, the other nineteen. They had been captured using an anti-tank gun, and it was nothing to them to have to strip off before being shot. Neither of them cried or trembled.’67 By the end of 1942, partisans were also disrupting the economy of the occupied territories, killing agricultural leaders, cutting transportation, and attacking mills and other installations.68 For instance, Army Group North reported that agricultural activity was being disrupted across all its jurisdictions as early as June 1942.69 *** In 1942, when the German occupation was less rapacious than it would become and German victory still looked plausible, the unpredictable brutality of many partisan groups made the Germans look the least-worst option to many civilian eyes. The Germans particularly appealed to mayors and headmen to aid them against the partisans.70 Self-interested civilians became informers, or joined the indigenous auxiliary police or the Order Service (Ordnungsdienst, or OD), organizations with varied policing duties that became increasingly active in the anti-partisan campaign. This kind of native help also freed up more rear area German troops for the front.71 Overall, the German army responded to the partisans, and to the civilian populations that might or might not be supporting them, with a self-defeating mix of half-baked restraint and alienating brutality. While most conventional armies may fear and despise irregular

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warfare, the sheer scale of the body count resulting from the German army’s anti-partisan campaign cannot be attributed solely to this. Anti-Slavism and the German military’s markedly pronounced hatred for irregular warfare together increased the distrust conventional troops felt towards the civilians in an area where an insurgency was taking place. The army also developed its anti-partisan tactics during 1942. One, which General Halder promoted, was the formation of Jagdkommandos (hunter groups). These were relatively small, lightly equipped but well-armed units of highly motivated troops, designed to reconnoitre, gather intelligence, and generally move and fight as partisans did. However, Jagdkommandos were never used as extensively as they might have been. The army’s most favoured method for combating partisans became the Grossunternehmen (large-scale operation). A Grossunternehmen could vary in form, but the basic premise was the same: the Germans isolated a suspected partisan-supporting area with an outer cordon of troops, then mobile troops ‘cleansed’ the surrounded area. More often than not, however, the partisans could move faster and knew the terrain, while the German forces were too few and too pressed for time. This often enabled partisans to avoid engagements and slip the cordon. Such was the experience of the 12th Panzer Division, one of numerous frontline units that participated in anti-partisan operations. Its after-action report for November 1942’s Operation Monkey Cage remarked: ‘the troops must be trained in antibandit warfare. [Success] is dependent on a systematic combing of every nook, house, lodging, oven, cellar, floor, and so on. For this, the troops need time. With operation “Monkey Cage,” against the division’s own advice, insufficient time was allocated to comb everywhere.’72 Consequently, many anti-partisan units turned on the area’s civilian population during the course of operations, so that they could notch up a high body count that they could then pass off as partisan dead. Death tolls were also high because German troops often took little if any care to distinguish between who was a partisan and who a civilian. Difficult to make as this distinction often was, many German commanders were disinclined even to try, so ingrained were their anti-Slavic and guerrillaphobic sentiments. Considerable numbers of actual partisans may also have been killed because, being untrained in conventional combat, they were likely to come off badly against German or allied troops in face-to-face fighting. Such cases were especially common during the movement’s early phase.73 Then again, some partisans were better trained and equipped than the substandard German troops sent against them, and even more so than the Germans’ indigenous auxiliaries. Also commonplace were massive contrasts between numbers of partisans reported killed and numbers of weapons found on them. This too indicates

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that huge numbers of partisans whom the Germans were supposedly killing were indeed noncombatants. In the Vitebsk region during September 1942, for instance, the 201st Security Division killed 864 ‘partisans’ in combat, and handed over a further 245 to the GFP for execution. But it produced just ninety-nine rifles, pistols and machine guns from the entire 1,100-plus body count. The division’s own losses were eight dead and twenty-five wounded.74 Whatever other partial explanations there may be for such yawning contrasts – such as partisan units sometimes hiding their weapons – it is clear that far too many German army units did not discriminate between genuine partisans and noncombatants. In the central sector of the occupied Soviet Union alone, the anti-partisan campaign is estimated to have destroyed over five thousand villages and killed up to 300,000 people, predominantly noncombatants.75 Hideous as the civilian loss of life was, however, Grossunternehmen could bring one concrete military benefit – while they rarely destroyed partisan groups outright, they frequently disrupted them. Yet the Germans failed to follow up such successes as these operations did achieve; they did not station enough troops in the combed areas afterwards or, more generally, maintain a permanent visible troop presence among rural populations more widely. Thus, even if civilians often threw in their lot with the partisans only grudgingly, the absence of any secure, long-term German presence in their area usually left them no choice. Some anti-partisan units behaved less brutally than others. At the end of July 1942, the Third Panzer Army ordered that, whenever civilians were executed, the reasons should be made clear to the population, and that the ‘first principle . . . must be the further pacification of the land and winning the population’s trust’.76 In northwest Russia, the Germans’ relatively sensible food policy, together with the fact that partisans were thin on the ground compared with further south, enabled the Germans to pursue a relatively sensible anti-partisan policy also. For villages here often felt less of the desperation that compelled many further south to support the partisans, and were thus more likely to spurn the partisans for fear of antagonizing the Germans.77 Even in the Army Group Centre area, still the main arena of the army’s war against the partisans, some anti-partisan units showed more restraint than others. The 221st Security Division served in the southern part of the Army Group Centre Rear Area during 1942. During 1941, it had taken a harsh line against Jews, refugees and any other real or imagined threat to security. But by the summer of 1942, the 221st’s divisional command was appreciating that unbridled terror was likely to increase the partisans’ support in the long term. The 221st’s change of commander from the eastern German Lieutenant General Johann Pflugbeil to the western German Major General Hubert Lendle may have helped,78 but what seems particularly to have brought the 221st to its

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senses was its situation: at times, the struggle against partisans was not intense enough to prevent the slower but more effective approach of appealing to the population’s hearts and minds. Particularly far-sighted, relatively speaking, was its policy on deserters. On 3 December, the 221st’s intelligence section criticized the higher-level decree that partisans surrendering during or after an operation should be shot: ‘an enemy with only the prospect of death staring him in the face will fight bitterly, and tenaciously, to the end’.79 The 201st Security Division makes for a brutal contrast with the 221st. During the winter of 1942–43, the 201st executed a sequence of operations at the northern end of the Army Group Centre Rear Area. This was a region more strategically important than the 221st’s, and with more partisans. Under greater high-level scrutiny, and anxious to demonstrate its ruthless credentials compared with the SS and Police units operating in the region, the 201st’s operations killed far more people than the 221st’s did. One telling statistic is that forty-three partisan deserters came over to the 201st between mid-June and the end of December 1942; during the same period, ten times as many came over to the 221st.80 Anti-partisan units might also exercise restraint because they often lacked the manpower and firepower even to attempt destructive Grossunternehmen. Such was the case, for instance, among the especially poorly provisioned security divisions of Army Group North. In May 1942, for example, Soviet partisan reports in the Idritsa area acknowledged that the Germans were not just threatening peasants with violence for aiding the partisans, but were also rewarding peasants with ‘money, provisions or . . . land’ in return for their help against the partisans.81 Conversely, a particularly well-equipped unit could try something more ambitious than a bludgeoning, indiscriminate Grossunternehmen. In April 1943, the 281st Security Division carried out Operation Spring Clean in the southern sector of Army Group North’s areas. Against four partisan brigades, it committed five thousand troops, including Cossack cavalry, artillery, antiaircraft guns, a limited amount of armour and, apparently, air support. The 281st was able to encircle large numbers of partisans, and though the partisans were eventually able to evacuate some of their men, they suffered heavy losses in the process.82 This was still a brutal operation, for the division also seems to have killed many noncombatants. But the operation did apparently despatch a large number of real partisans, and the loss to the Germans and their local auxiliaries of sixteen killed and sixty-six wounded further shows they had something of a proper fight on their hands.83 Yet although some anti-partisan units were less brutal than others, this remained, overall, a brutal, indiscriminate and ultimately counterproductive anti-partisan campaign. During the second half of 1942, Hitler and the OKW issued a sequence of anti-partisan directives that, though giving some nods to

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winning hearts and minds, generally hardened the anti-partisan campaign further. For instance, many anti-partisan operations were accompanied by propaganda troops, who employed leaflets and loudspeakers to encourage partisans to desert, but the OKW’s Combat Directive for Anti-Partisan Warfare in the East of November 1942 merely stipulated that partisan deserters be treated as POWs ‘according to circumstances’. This gave the troops ample leeway to shoot them. Confusingly, it stated, on the one hand, that ‘unjust punishment shakes the confidence of the population and creates new partisans’, but, on the other, that ‘the severity of our measures and the fear of expected punishment must restrain the population from aiding or supporting the partisans’.84 Units in the field replicated such confusion in their own orders. For Operation Monkey Cage, the 12th Panzer Division spared the lives of partisans who deserted during the fighting, several months before the OKW would eventually issue a similar directive to all anti-partisan units. Yet the division also made clear that ‘brutal ruthlessness towards the bandits, their helpers or their helpers’ helpers is to be hammered into every man’.85 Any moderating effect higher-level directives might have had, then, was limited by the decidedly mixed messages those directive were sending out, as well as by other directives that were straightforwardly ferocious. In particular, on 16 December, Hitler ordered ‘the most brutal means . . . against women and children also’, declared any scruples in the matter as treasonous to the German people and forbade officers to punish their troops for any ‘excesses’ against the population.86 *** Two occupied populations whom the Germany army particularly tried to cultivate were the Muslim peoples of the Crimea and the Caucasus. The Sunni Tatars comprised a quarter of the Crimea’s population, and German army administrators saw them, as they would also come to see their Muslim brethren in the Caucasus, as presenting an opportunity to woo Islam in the Soviet Union for political and military gain. The Germans granted the Tatars religious rights and concessions and reintroduced major religious holidays, and Manstein’s otherwise infamous November 1941 order required his troops to treat the Tatars with respect. Following the Germans’ final conquest of the Crimea in the summer of 1942, the Nationale Zeitung got the following quotation from Manstein: ‘The Tatars welcome the liberation from Moscow simply because the blasting of the chains has returned to them the free religious practice of Islam.’87 Mosques and prayer halls were reopened, religious education was reintroduced into the school curriculum and the Germans appointed a Muslim committee to re-establish the religious infrastructure. The army also wooed the Tatar

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population as a potential security force; it eventually employed over twenty thousand Muslims in anti-partisan operations across the Crimea.88 The army viewed its occupation of the northern Caucasus as a further opportunity to woo a people genuinely opposed to Communism. An instruction sheet to the troops stated: ‘[The] religion, and the religious customs and conventions of the Caucasians, must be respected and not be ridiculed. . . . Even though they may appear odd.’89 The first commander of Army Group A, Field Marshal List, pursued this policy, and his successor, General von Kleist, developed it further. In December 1942, Kleist stated: ‘of all of the German army groups, Army Group A is advanced the furthest. We stand at the gates to the Islamic world. What we do and how we behave here will radiate deep into Iraq, to India, as far as to the borders of China. Thus constantly be aware of the longrange effect of our actions and interactions.’90 The Germans also used public holidays as a propaganda weapon. They arrived in the Caucasus at the end of Ramadan, and seventy days before the Festival of Qurban Bayram?. The Sunni Balkars and Kabardins in Nalchik held Qurban Bayram? on 18 December. Otto Bräutigam, a senior official in the Eastern Ministry, recorded that at the heart of the event was a religious ceremony on a stage in the local cinema: ‘kneeling with the body bent forward, around 50 leading figures of the community performed their prayers. The move to the clerics was solemn and controlled, and the religious ceremony took place in dignified seriousness.’91 The religious representatives at the ceremony thanked the Germans for their ‘liberation from Bolshevism’, and presented them with gifts, including carpets, clothing, and copies of the Koran for Hitler, Kleist and Keitel. The German representatives reciprocated by distributing captured weapons, lighters and watches, together with small Korans as a token of German respect for Islam.92 The Germans also promised the rapid abolition of Soviet collective farms. Yet the failings of German occupation were soon apparent to these Muslim peoples. The army drew the line at the Eastern Ministry’s suggestion that a mufti for the Crimea be appointed, fearing he would be a powerful figurehead who might incite rebellion in the Tatars were their condition to deteriorate. The SS often executed Crimean Muslims in the crass belief that, because they were circumcised, they must be Jewish. The Tatars eventually became alienated as the depredations of German occupation, particularly anti-partisan operations and economic plunder, grew more severe. The Germans, meanwhile, grew increasingly concerned that Tatar communities were being infiltrated by partisans.93 In the northern Caucasus also, German policy eventually proved a damp squib at best and a ruinous bane at worst. Officially, no more than 20 per cent of the land was supposed to be redistributed to farmers in the Germans’ agricultural reform, and the curtailing of the military campaign in the Caucasus

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eventually prevented the Germans from achieving even that. And as the military campaign turned against the Germans, and their own supplies faltered, they ransacked the local economy and unleashed mass hunger in the process. Little further time elapsed before the Germans faced growing partisan activity and reacted with their usual ferocity. Army administrators also connived in enabling the SS and Police to slaughter the Jews of the northern Caucasus as surely as they did Jews in the Crimea and elsewhere.94 *** From the start, the baleful ideological and economic agenda that the Nazis had set for the Soviet Union, the plethora of competing Nazi interest groups and the practical barriers facing an underresourced military administration all hindered any attempt to establish a constructive occupation regime. Overall, the first of these factors had the most debilitating effect of the three, because only a saner agenda at the top would have assured the resources needed for saner occupation initiatives on the ground to have any significant effect. The increasingly voracious demands of the German war economy reinforced the exploitation and oppression that the occupied Soviet Union suffered. The breakdown in the population’s food supply during the winter of 1941–42 was a harbinger of the occupation’s moral and practical failure, and of the scale of misery that resulted. Even the army’s policy towards the ‘favoured’ Islamic populations of the Caucasus and Crimea failed in the end. Although military administrators on the ground often lacked insight into the occupied populations, many at least tried – for moral or, more usually, pragmatic reasons – to temper their prejudices and alleviate the population’s suffering. After all, many hailed from an older, less Nazified generation. Moreover, the army’s occupation troops interacted with the population in ways that were shaped not just by their prejudices, but also by the conditions they experienced and their close proximity to civilians. Similarly, the great majority of rear area troops belonged to the older age groups from which the army drew its rank and file. All other things being equal, then, they themselves were also less Nazified than their more youthful frontline comrades. The fact that many were men with families gave them a further insight into the adversity that afflicted occupied civilians. Thus did many occupation units and commands seek to cultivate the population more, and terrorize it less. They were more likely to think this way, however, if the pressure from partisans was not so severe that it prevented them from developing a more considered approach to their occupation duties. By contrast, units under severe pressure from partisans, or from the expectations of their superiors, were in more desperate need of immediate results, and more

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likely to resort to terror in order to achieve them. Nor, of course, were rear area units immune from anti-Slavic prejudice and harsh military perceptions themselves. Many reacted to their taxing circumstances, and to their sometimes chronic underresourcing, by treating the population with brutalized frustration and contempt. This in turn, of course, only intensified the alienation and resistance that the German occupation provoked among the population.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

FACES OF OCCUPATION, 1942–43 WESTERN EUROPE AND THE SOUTHEAST EUROPE

D

uring  and the early months of 1943, the German army’s occupation of western and southeast Europe pulled in contradictory and, ultimately, ever more destructive directions. In France and Belgium in particular, the army made further efforts to maintain relations with native collaborationist administrations and keep the general population onside. In 1943, following the battle of Stalingrad, some saner elements within the Reich’s leadership came to believe that it needed more than ever to command the support of occupied European populations if it were to have any chance of enduring in the war, let alone winning it. With this aim in mind, such elements tried to promote an image of the war as an ‘anti-Bolshevik crusade’ behind which all Europe could and should unify. Even as prominent and fanatical a Nazi as Goebbels sought to harness propaganda in this cause, asserting in February 1943 that ‘to secure victory we must mobilise not only all the available energies of the German people, but also those nations which inhabit the territories which have been occupied and conquered by us in the course of the war. All the forces of the European continent . . . must be deployed in the struggle against Jewish Bolshevism.1 The army’s occupation authorities in the west were generally at one with such views. At the same time, however, the German occupation as a whole undercut its rhetoric by placing ever greater stress on exploiting occupied Europe’s economies than on cultivating its peoples. Göring, in his capacity as head of the FourYear Plan, encapsulated this brutish view when he addressed a conference of Reich commissioners and military governors in Berlin in August 1942: ‘I have the reports of what you are planning to deliver in front of me. When I contemplate your countries it seems like nothing at all. I could not care less if you tell me that your people are collapsing from hunger. They can do that by all means so long as no German collapses from hunger.’2 The acrimony generated by the ransacking of the continent became a new burden for the army’s occupation

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forces, because it increased resistance to German rule. So too did the fact that Germany began to look ever less likely to win the war. And such was the economic and political chaos that increasingly engulfed the German army’s occupied Balkan territories that the occupiers had little prospect of cultivating their populations anyway. The resistance that emerged, particularly in Yugoslavia, was all the fiercer for this. The army’s main answer to this challenge was another underresourced, often brutal counterinsurgency campaign. The other momentous development across occupied Europe during this period, one in which the army was again heavily involved, was the fullscale, continent-wide onset of the Final Solution. *** By 1943, the economic burdens the Germans were imposing upon France’s economy, together with the effects of the British blockade, had reduced the country’s output by a third compared with prewar levels. In January of that year, daily calorie consumption in the country was 1,080, compared with 1,980 in Germany.3 Thus did one Parisian woman record her thankless search for food in May 1942: 7h30 – To the bakers. Buy bread. There will be biscuits at 11h00. 9h00 – It is a meat day today, but the butcher says there won’t be any until Saturday. 9h30 – To the dairy shop. No cheese before 5 p.m. 10h00 – To the tripe shop. My ticket is number 32, I will be served at 4 p.m. 10h30 – To the grocers. There will be vegetables at 5 p.m. 11h00 – Back to the bakers. There are no biscuits left.4

In Belgium, particularly dependent upon food imports since the war’s start, food kitchens were in action as early as the beginning of 1942. While more affluent bourgeois circles could afford the black market, one survey conducted that year concluded that more than 50 per cent of workers were already five kilograms below their normal body weight. Malnourishment precipitated a rise in death rates and, towards the end of the occupation, in infant mortality.5 Then, in October of that year, Göring’s Office of the Four-Year Plan dragooned German occupation administrators into squeezing as many foodstuffs from their territories as possible. Across western Europe, the military authorities at least set maximum quantities for the goods that German soldiers themselves could send or take back to Germany. By the autumn of 1942, however, these restrictions were being limited to ‘Germanic’ countries – Denmark,

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Norway and the Netherlands. And even these were suffering. In particular, Norway faced continued demands from the Wehrmacht to finance its massive construction projects in the country.6 Western Europe, unlike parts of eastern and southern Europe, did not starve during the war. But from 1942, the economic pressure that the Reich was exerting upon occupied Europe, western Europe included, escalated once more. This latest economic assault was upon the continent’s labour force. Drawing labour from occupied western Europe became important to the Reich once it was clear that Britain intended to continue the war and that the Reich would therefore need to draft more German workers into the armed forces. The need for European labour increased again following the invasion of the Soviet Union. Initially, the German occupation authorities in France and Belgium, as with other German occupation authorities in much of Europe, sought to secure labour voluntarily. In France, the Military Government established recruiting offices in major cities and offered high wages and health insurance benefits. Its efforts met with considerable success: by the spring of 1942, 275,000 French workers were building airfields and fortifications along the Atlantic coast, and 400,000 were working for the Germans in French armaments factories. French volunteers for work in the Reich itself also rose in number.7 But, in January 1942, Göring’s Office of the Four-Year Plan, increasingly set on squeezing Europe’s economies for all they were worth, called upon all German occupation administrations to mobilize more manpower for the Reich. Fritz Sauckel’s appointment as Reich plenipotentiary for labour allocation heralded this new phase. It did not result in a sudden tidal wave of pressganging in western Europe any more than it did in the Soviet Union, but it did intensify the Reich’s economic demands upon western Europe, to a degree that eventually drove up resistance to German rule. In France, for instance, it was clear by September 1942 that Sauckel’s intensified drive for workers had failed to attract enough volunteers. That month, the Military Government imposed the first compulsory labour measures upon the French population, requiring men between eighteen and fifty and unmarried women between twenty-one and thirty-five to work at least thirty hours per week. Workers were frozen in their current jobs, and firms seeking to hire new workers now needed permission from the French authorities. Such measures still fell far short of pressganging, but they certainly represented a stringent labour-regulation scheme. The Military Government took part in negotiations between Sauckel and the Vichy regime as the latter attempted to prevent full-blown labour conscription. Eventually, Sauckel agreed to grant leave of absence to one French POW for every French worker sent to the Reich.8 Meanwhile, Otto von Stülpnagel’s resignation as military governor in February 1942 had seen his replacement by another aristocratic conservative – his own

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cousin, Carl-Heinrich. But though Hitler clearly considered military administrations useful in some way – otherwise he would have scrapped them altogether – he no longer considered the Military Government in Paris capable of dealing firmly enough either with the ‘Jewish question’ or with the ongoing resistance to the occupation. This gave the SS and Police the opportunity for an extensive power grab in France. In June 1942, Himmler appointed Brigadeführer Carl Oberg senior SS and Police leader in France, at the same time as appointing other such leaders for Serbia, Norway, and the Netherlands. Oberg assumed extensive powers over and above those of the Military Government, that of reprisals included.9 Oberg’s appointment did not unleash an unbridled reign of terror. He generally worked well with Stülpnagel, having served alongside him during the First World War.10 He also eventually recognized that mass executions were no longer viable, if only for the pragmatic reason that there were no longer enough ‘foreign’ Jews or Communists left to kill, and that executing ‘ordinary’ Frenchmen or even naturalized French Jews en masse might inflame rather than stifle resistance. But Oberg’s appointment exemplified a growing trend in both east and west from 1942 onwards, as the SS and Police increasingly muscled in on the army’s security turf, and infused the occupation overall with a more ruthless character. Indeed, most GFP groups in France were disbanded that year, and their personnel transferred to the SS and Police.11 Over the following two years, the SS and Police would periodically expand its power in France further still, opening main branches in Paris, Auton, Dijon and Rouen, and employing approximately two hundred personnel in each office by 1944.12 In the middle of these negotiations over labour conscription, relations between Vichy and the Reich turned dramatically when Vichy French forces folded before the Allied invasion of French North Africa in November 1942. Hitler now ordered the Wehrmacht to take direct military control of the southern ‘free zone’ of France. The region was now redesignated as ‘Coastal Sector Mediterranean’. Rather than coming under the Military Government’s jurisdiction, however, it became the charge of OB West, the German army command in the west, which had operational command of the German defences in France. Heading OB West from March 1942 was the newly reactivated Field Marshal von Rundstedt. The Germans needed to retain the Vichy government, for they still could not control France themselves without the apparatus of an indigenous administration. But now more than ever, the Germans treated the Vichy regime as a pliable executor of their will. Anxious to prove its collaborationist credentials and suffused by ever more extreme political elements, in February 1943, the Vichy regime introduced the Compulsory Labour Law (Service du Travail

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Obligatoire, or STO).13 This required all French workers between twenty and twenty-two, unless they were essential to the French economy, to work in Germany. Failure to comply would bring fines and internment. Initially, a quarter of a million workers were sent to the Reich by the end of March, but Hitler wanted another million. The STO destroyed what remained of the Vichy government’s standing in the population’s eyes, and fuelled an exodus of draftdodgers into the countryside. Sauckel tried to compensate to some extent by offering more POWs a brief furlough in France, improved wages, and the same rights as voluntary French workers if they renounced their prisoner status and became voluntary labourers themselves. This measure enabled him to raise a further 600,000 workers for service in the Reich. But the surge of draft-dodging increased when Hitler demanded yet another million workers for 1944. Only 32,000 workers would be procured during the occupation’s final seven months.14 The German army in France had not been instrumental in agreeing the STO. However, the fugitive population that had now established itself in the less penetrable regions of the French countryside, particularly in the mountainous areas of the south, would form a bedrock for a growing rural resistance movement, the maquis, during 1943 and 1944. In time, this would prove to be a development that was certain to concern the army. Meanwhile, thanks in large part to Charles de Gaulle’s representative on the ground, Jean Moulin, connections between French resistance groups developed considerably. Among other things, Moulin was instrumental in setting up joint services for the resistance, including the Bureau d’Information et de Presse in April 1942. The BIP was a clearing house of material from and for the resistance, and circulated articles to the underground press or to the foreign press, particularly in Britain and the United States. Moulin was also extensively involved in the negotations that led to the creation of an umbrella organization for the main Resistance groups, the Mouvements Unis de la Résistance (MUR) in January 1943. By now, the resistance was being supplied with small arms and other equipment by the British, and was operating escape lines that eventually enabled around 33,000 Allied personnel to be returned safely to Britain over the war’s course.15 They also gathered intelligence for the Allies on such matters as German troop movements. The majority of resisters came from the poorer sections of the population, who were particularly susceptible to the anti-conservative message of the resistance groups operating under the aegis of the Parti communiste français (PCF). But the resistance generally also drew on other diverse groups including professionals, the petty bourgeoisie, and some aristocrats. Nevertheless, the German occupation authorities enjoyed considerable success in their efforts to suppress the French resistance during 1942-43. The PCF leader responsible for liasing with de Gaulle’s forces was positively boastful about the effects that German reprisals shootings were having upon the

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Communist resistance. He claimed to his Free French opposite number that ‘as soon as the news is given out that five or ten of our men have been shot, we get fifty or a hundred new recruits.’16 But these were exaggerated figures, and though the PCF was adept at attracting new recruits, the German and Vichy government forces proved almost as adept at killing them. Perhaps the Germans’ biggest coup against the resistance came in March 1943 after they seized a suitcase full of documents in Lyon containing the names, many of which were uncoded, of 163 members of the MUR and the Armée Secrète, the fledgling armed wing of the resistance in the erstwhile ‘free zone.’17 *** In both France and Belgium, the end of the battle of Stalingrad and the obvious turn in Germany’s military fortunes further emboldened young men and women to dodge the labour draft. Groups such as the Jeunesse ouvrière chrétienne (Young Christian Workers) in Belgium helped them, and many French and Belgian policemen, charged with assembling workers for the draft, now instead covered for draft-evaders.18 The Military Government in Brussels was more active in the labour drive than the Military Government in Paris. Brigadeführer Reeder’s concern for the Military Government to look dynamic and proactive in the eyes of Berlin may have played a role here. A particular pace-setter for the Military Government seems to have been the civilian administration in the Netherlands, which imposed compulsory labour measures upon the Dutch population as early as February 1941. By July 1941, the Military Government in Brussels was seeking to ‘encourage’ Belgian civilians to work in Germany by threatening them with the alternative prospect of setting them to particularly undesirable labour tasks for public works projects in Belgium. In March 1942, it passed a decree empowering it to direct civilians to designated workplaces in Belgium. In October, it then announced that all men between eighteen and fifty and all women between twenty-one and thirty-five were liable for labour service in Germany. This measure in particular was deeply unpopular with the population, because it awoke bitter memories of the deportations the Germans had inflicted during the First World War. The Military Government was unreceptive to pleas by collaborationist groups and government figures to allow Belgian workers to remain working in Belgium on the Germans’ behalf.19 In the spring of 1943, the Military Government began calling up workers by age group; this measure was successful during its first six months, with over 100,000 Belgian workers departing for Germany. However, the number being recruited for work in Germany began to drop in May 1943; from then until December, fewer than 49,000 were recruited. Too much of Belgium’s rural

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landscape was flat and open for a maquis-type movement. But the labour draft certainly drove large numbers of young Belgian men and women underground. Moreover, together with other stifling regulations upon daily life, the draft made the population more restive and resentful and thus fuelled more clandestine types of resistance indirectly.20 In general, given its small size, concentrated population, developed transport infrastructure, and largely flat and open terrain, Belgium was particularly ill-suited turf for a large, visible, and active resistance organization. Belgian resistance to the occupation was therefore sensibly low-key. Its two main military organizations were the pro-Communist Front de l’Indépendance, and the Armée Secrète, – not to be confused with its French namesake – an organization that was run along military lines by former professional army officers. Like all western European resistance movements for much of the war, neither group sought to provoke the Germans excessively, knowing full well the price the civilian population would pay in reprisals. Instead they sought largely to build their forces in secret in preparation to assist in their country’s eventual liberation. Neither group was initially enthusiastic to cooperate with the governmentin-exile in London, for fear of the control that the government-in-exile might seek to exercise over them. Over time, however, both came to cooperate with the government-in-exile, albeit reluctantly. They recognized that they needed access to weapons and other forms of military assistance which only the governmentin-exile, through the Allies, could provide. For its part, the government-in-exile needed a force on the ground with which it could show the Allies that it would be able to assist in the eventual liberation of Belgium. But resistance on the ground was highly dispersed and decentralised. As well as the aforementioned Young Christian Workers, the Belgian resistance also encompassed such groups as welfare organizations; intelligence networks, some of which had been created by the British; and escape groups for fugitive Allied servicemen.21 In its efforts to combat the Belgian resistance, the Military Government, still mindful of the need not to alienate the population unnecessarily, sought to keep the Security Police and SD on some kind of leash. In February 1942, for instance, Reeder authorised them to detain people for up to seven days, but required them to obtain written permission from the Military Government for any longer than that.22 Compelled to rely less on terror and more on investigative policing methods, albeit buttressed by the liberal use of torture, the Security Police and SD were able during the summer of 1943 to infiltrate and wipe out most of the leadership of both the Belgian Communist Party and the FI.23 But the winter of 1942-43 had already ushered in a decisive change in the German occupation of Belgium. As the tide of war slowly turned, the Military Government sought to exploit the Belgian economy more extensively, and the established Belgian administration increasingly dragged its feet in

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implementing the Germans’ wishes. Extremist collaborators, on whom the Germans had already been increasingly relying to raise Belgian military volunteers for the eastern front, now became a mainstay of security and administration for the Military Government.24 *** By the spring of 1942, the deportation of Jews from across occupied Europe to the extermination camps in the east was in full swing. Such deportations had their own momentum, for each time one was carried out, it made further deportations look increasingly viable. Also, the SS felt a particular urgency in getting Jews onto the trains during the spring and early summer of 1942, because the sooner they were deposited in the east, the sooner the trains could be reused for the German offensive in the southern Soviet Union. Initially, the military authorities in the occupied territories tried to hold onto Jews as a source of labour. However, this was a pragmatic rather than a humane stance. In any case, the army lost control over the matter after July 1942 when the SS took charge of all Jewish forced labour.25 Indeed, the entire Wehrmacht was compelled to accept this change when Field Marshal Keitel formally endorsed it in September, invoking Hitler’s words: ‘Evacuation of the Jews must be carried out thoroughly and its consequences endured, despite any trouble it may cause over the next three or four months.’26 As commander of the Seventeenth Army in the Ukraine in 1941, CarlHeinrich von Stülpnagel had explicitly singled out Jews as reprisal victims. On his arrival in France, he ordered that future reprisals should take the form of deportations of Jews to the east; in March, over 1,100 were sent to Auschwitz.27 Yet in other respects, Stülpnagel showed himself less anti-Semitic in the west than in the east. Perhaps the campaign in the Soviet Union brought his anti-Semitism particularly to the fore because he strongly associated Jews with Bolshevism. In France, Stülpnagel used creative accounting to reduce the number of actual executions.28 From the spring of 1942 onwards, Stülpnagel can have had no doubts about the likely fate of Jewish deportees. Yet he also refused to provide military assistance for deportations organized by the SS; indeed, in July 1944, Himmler claimed that Stülpnagel’s difficult, obstructive behaviour was preventing the complete annihilation of the French Jews.29 That same month, Stülpnagel would play a key role in the anti-Nazi coup that the military conspirators tried to orchestrate following their attempt to assassinate Hitler. All this suggests that at least part of his motive for complying with some high-level decrees against Jews was a double game to maintain appearances.30 Generally, albeit not always, indigenous police forces, collaborators and administrators did the main legwork of processing and assembling Jews for

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collection across the western occupied territories. For its part, the Vichy regime was happy to exploit at least some of the anti-Semitism that contaminated French society, and see the back of Jews who were not of French citizenship. March 1942 saw the first group of deportees from France arrive at Auschwitz to be gassed. In July, French police and collaborators swept up thirteen thousand stateless Jews in Paris in the particularly notorious Vel d’Hiv round-up. By the end of the year, 42,000 Jews had been deported from France.31 The Military Government’s hands were far from clean in these matters. Though Stülpnagel did not want military personnel dirtying its hands in the deportations, the army head of the French railways, Lieutenant General Otto Kohl, was a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite who expedited the deportations as much as he could.32 More generally, the Military Government sought to minimize its involvement in the deportations, not only to avoid sullying the army’s image, but also because it feared that mass deportations would disrupt the French economy. And the Vichy regime, while ready to deport non-French Jews, feared that deporting assimilated French Jews to the extermination camps would dangerously unsettle the wider population. Hitler and Ribbentrop got to work on Pierre Laval, the Vichy prime minister, exploiting his intense antiCommunism and his fear of Anglo-Saxon hegemony, to secure his support for the rounding-up of French Jews. Laval remained reluctant, not for principled reasons, but because he feared public unrest and because he failed to secure any diplomatic concessions from the Germans in return. He acquiesced nevertheless, and by the summer of 1943 probably realized that, although Germany was likely to lose the war, his own life would be forfeit if he tried to change course.33 Overall, fewer French Jews died during the Holocaust than might have been the case. The proportion for France was 25 per cent, an awful indictment of the German occupation and the Vichy regime, but far short of the proportion for the Netherlands at 75 per cent.34 From 1 June 1942, the SS had authority to bypass the Military Government over the deportations, but without extensive native and interagency help, there was a limit to what it could do. From 1943 onwards the French authorities, from government ministers down to policemen, increasingly dragged their feet over the deportations. In April 1944, Standartenführer Knochen, no longer concerned about accommodating the Vichy regime, ordered the SS, assisted by new French paramilitary organizations, to arrest all remaining Jews in France irrespective of age or citizenship status. Fifteen thousand Jews were sent to their deaths between January and August 1944. However, this was the final surge in the campaign to murder the Jews of France; it fell far short of the 42,000 who had been deported for extermination in 1942.35 ***

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Efforts to exterminate the Jewish population of Belgium displayed some significant differences. Most importantly, the absence of a senior SS and police leader in Belgium meant that it was the Military Government in Brussels that set the pace. And though it did not comport itself with special anti-Semitic zeal, neither did it try to obstruct th deportation of Jews in the way Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel did. In April 1942, German Jews living in Belgium were declared stateless and their property forfeit, and the next six months saw foreign Jews deported to the extermination camps. A directive Reeder issued that summer indicates very strongly that the Military Government knew what the Jews’ eventual fate would be, however euphemistic his language: ‘With these measures the legislation dealing with the Jews and Belgium may be considered complete. The Jews have extremely limited ways of earning a living. The next step now would be the evacuation from Belgium which will, however, not be initiated locally, but will be started by the competent offices in the Reich within the context of the general plan.’36 Reeder calculated correctly that the Belgian authorities were not prepared to see Belgian Jews deported, but also that they would not stand in the way of German efforts to deport ‘emigrants and other foreigners’, as long as the German police rather than the Belgian police did the job. Foreign Jews comprised 90 per cent of the 10,000 Jews who were deported in September 1942.37 By the end of the month, Reeder was seeking to deport all remaining non-native Jews, save those in mixed marriages and a few other exemptions. But Reeder’s motive for such ‘leniency’ was probably practical rather than moral, as probably was his motive for seeking to keep Jewish families together as much as possible during the evacuations: ‘It is the task of the German Security Police to carry out the action in a way that keeps as low a profile as possible and arouses no sympathy among the population for the Jews.’38 From November onwards, the German police hunted down those nonnative Jews who had escaped the net. Falkenhausen, fearful of the damage that deporting assimilated Belgian Jews might do to peace and order, did not authorize this next step until July 1943. By then, large numbers of Belgian Jews had used the delay to disperse or go to ground. In the event, an incident took place that threatened to precipitate the very unrest that the Military Government feared: 145 Jews were rounded up in Antwerp and piled into a furniture van destined for Brussels. When the truck finally arrived, nine people were dead, eighty were unconscious and several had gone mad. Reeder now scaled back the hunt, forbade further large-scale ‘cleansing’ actions and arranged for a number of Belgian Jews already in captivity to be released. Eventually, 25,000 Jewish men, women and children were deported by the German police, with limited help from the Wehrmacht’s gendarmerie but more extensive help from Belgian collaborators. By the war’s end, 40 per cent of the country’s prewar Jewish population had been deported for extermination.39

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The Military Government’s involvement in the murder of Belgium’s Jews was damning. In this as in most other areas of its operation, it was Reeder rather than Falkenhausen who was the driving force. At best – and this may well be stretching things – both men may have considered it a necessary price of discouraging Hitler from replacing the Military Government with a Reich commissar and a stronger SS and Police presence. By this, they may have hoped to assure more tolerable conditions for the bulk of Belgium’s population. But even if this was their motivation, they were making a putrid moral compromise. Nevertheless, the fact that both French and Belgian Jews still had a better chance of surviving the Holocaust than Dutch Jews was partly due to both countries being under military governance. The SS and Police in Belgium had no senior SS and Police leader who might have coaxed still firmer action out of the Military Government in Brussels. Though the SS and Police in France did have a senior SS and Police leader at their head, the Military Government in Paris still managed largely to drag its feet over the deportations. Other reasons for French and Belgian Jews’ greater survival chances had much less to do with the army, however. The SS and Police in the Netherlands also had a greater number of zealous anti-Semitic collaborators at their disposal. Furthermore, in the case of Belgium, Jews were thin on the ground, had retained a fringe presence in society and had made less effort to integrate. They were therefore less enmeshed in the Belgian state’s administrative records, and harder to locate. It also helped that Reeder generally deemed it unnecessary for Jews to be marked out in public.40 It is also worth stressing that the German army’s occupation forces in the Netherlands were not passive bystanders in the much more comprehensive annihilation of that country’s Jews. Under the Wehrmacht commander in the Netherlands, Luftwaffe General Friedrich Christiansen, the army was not a driving force behind anti-Semitic policy there. Nevertheless, it provided logistical support for Jewish round-ups, and also helped hunt down and apprehend fugitives who had escaped.41 *** At the other end of Europe, in Greece, the German army and the Wehrmacht more widely played a more active role in persecuting and deporting the country’s Jews. Until September 1943, the direct German occupation of Greece was restricted to certain islands and mainland enclaves. Well before that date, however, the Germans had wiped Jews from their Greek territory. Many nonJewish Greeks took the courageous action of aiding and sheltering Jews, but ultimately only around 22,000 of the country’s eighty thousand Jews escaped deportation or managed to survive it.42

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The Germans’ efforts to deport the Jews of Athens in early 1943 largely failed because most of the city’s Jewish population took a lead from the chief rabbi and escaped into the hills to join the partisans. It was a different story in Salonika, however. The SS and Police, with assistance from the Greek police and logistical help from the Wehrmacht, deported the city’s Jews in the spring of 1943 and The previous year the army itself had subjected Salonika’s Jewish population to exploitative and degrading treatment. In July 1942, General Kurt von Krenzski, the Wehrmacht commander in Northern Greece, ordered the Feldkommandantur in Salonika to set the Jews in its jurisdiction to hard labour repairing roads and airfields. Officers on the spot used the order as an opportunity to humiliate the Jews. Before being assigned to work details, Jewish men were forced to stand in the sun in the main city squares. The most humiliating aspect of this action was that it forced the men to stand for hours on a Saturday without being allowed to wear hats, in callous disregard for Jewish religious etiquette. The episode also further highlighted the contempt in which many ordinary German soldiers held the Jews. For, at the same time as Salonika’s male Jewish population was being publicly degraded, German troops were ransacking Jewish property in the city, destroying Jewish cemeteries, blowing up synagogues and requisitioning other synagogues as makeshift stables for their horses.43 Partisan resistance in Greece began developing on the mainland in 1942, in large part as a reaction to the dreadful famine conditions of the previous winter. It initially centred on the Pindus region. The Pindus mountains run from the Greco-Albanian border down to the northern Peloponnese. The region had a long tradition of resisting central governmental control and, by the winter of 1942–43, it saw a flowering of partisan groups, many of which were centred on local warlords. The partisans were bitterly split between the National Republican Greek League (Ethnikos Dimokratikos Ellinikos Syndesmos, or EDES) and the Communist National Liberation Front (Ethniko Apeleftherotiko Metopo, or EAM), together with the front’s military wing, the Greek People’s Liberation Army (Ellinikós Laïkós Apeleftherotikós Stratós, or ELAS), Yet partisans still became increasingly numerous and active. They were able to establish themselves across Greece’s rural areas all the more easily because, until September 1943, the bulk of the country was occupied not by the Germans but by the Italians. Belying the amiable celluloid image beloved of movies like Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Italian units stationed in Greece often destroyed purportedly pro-partisan villages, and sometimes killed civilians en masse. However, they were rather less effective than the Germans when it came to killing actual partisans. On their own turfs, such as Athens and Salonika, the Germans were shooting hostages en masse by early 1943, hoping that this measure would strangle popular support for the Greek partisans as it apparently had

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strangled that of the Partisans in Serbia in 1941. Yet though the shootings were immensely brutal, they did not prevent instances of sabotage and assassination from rising alarmingly that summer, or total partisan numbers increasing to over 25,000.44 The Germans had misunderstood why conditions in Greece made a successful reprisal campaign far less likely there than in Serbia. General Boehme’s reprisal policy in Serbia in 1941 had put destructive pressure upon the already fragile alliance between Chetniks and Partisans. This had then enabled the Germans to discount the Chetniks and defeat a Partisan force foolish enough to try to take them on in conventional battle. But in Greece, there was no enemy alliance to split, and neither EDES nor ELAS were employing the sort of fighting methods that played obligingly into the Germans’ hands. By the summer of 1943, partisan resistance was continuing to spread across Greece. The total number of Greek partisans did not approach Communist Partisan numbers in Yugoslavia. But their knowledge of the land, their levels of support, and – particularly in the case of ELAS – the effective measures of social, economic, and political organization that they introduced into the areas they controlled, together made them elusive, resourceful, and dangerous opponents. In response, a growing number of hardened German army units, from both the army and the Waffen-SS, was now arriving in Greece with the task of subjugating partisan resistance permanently. They were about to subject much of the country to even worse terrors than before. *** Yet the scale of partisan action, Axis counterterror and general chaos in Greece was dwarfed by what was happening in Yugoslavia. Serbia did not remain entirely quiescent during 1942 and 1943: it was dotted with pockets of Partisan and occasionally Chetnik resistance. But Serbia was no longer the main hot spot for anti-Axis resistance in Yugoslavia; the NDH was. In the NDH as elsewhere, economic misery did much to fuel resistance. Because the NDH was officially a sovereign state, the Germans were unable to exploit its economy as heavily as they could Serbia’s. Nevertheless, they were able to pressure the Ustasha regime into relinquishing tens of thousands of workers for labour service in the Reich. They also gained access to a large portion of the NDH’s oil and minerals, including its bauxite mines. They imposed massive occupation costs on the NDH, as elsewhere, compelling the Ustasha regime to print more money and triggering runaway inflation in the process. If anything, the Italians plundered their parts of the NDH with even more gusto, as well as seeking to assimilate them culturally. The majority of

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Croats not only groaned under these burdens, but also grew increasingly warweary, as well as fearful that they would be blamed collectively for the Ustasha’s atrocities should the Axis lose the war.45 Yet there were further reasons why anti-Axis resistance there became so strong, many of them the result of the particular ethnic make-up of the NDH. In 1942, Tito’s Partisans reconstituted and regenerated their movement amid the NDH’s mountainous terrain, most prominently in Bosnia. They had bitter rivals in the Bosnian Serb Chetniks; indeed, the war in the NDH soon developed into a struggle not just between occupiers and occupied, but also between ethnic and political groups among the occupied. The Bosnian Chetniks sought to assert Serb supremacy in the region, and often terrorized, expelled or slaughtered Croatian and Muslim communities. The cycle of ethnic terror and counterterror, and the further blight they inflicted upon Axis attempts to administer and exploit NDH territory during 1942, were attested to by the 718th Infantry Division. Its operations section reported: ‘There is hardly a Serb, Croat, or Muslim in the whole of eastern Bosnia, who does not have some kind of blood feud to settle with another’;46 while its intelligence section commented: ‘Ustasha, Partisans, and Chetniks are, as before, competing to carry off the Strife Cup.’47 ‘They’re all as bad as each other’-type sentiments notwithstanding, Partisan units were more disciplined than those of the Bosnian Chetniks and the Ustasha, and terrorized civilian communities to nothing like the same extent. Indeed, they pledged to shield Muslims from Chetnik attacks, at the same time as impressing ethnic Serbs with their military effectiveness which was considerably greater than that of the Chetniks. Partisan propaganda vilified the allegedly treacherous, reactionary nature of the NDH and Nedić governments.48 The Partisans also introduced political and economic reforms in the growing number of regions they controlled, showcasing the socially and ethnically egalitarian society they were pledged to create. All this boosted Partisan support and recruitment levels across the NDH’s ethnic groups. Tito boosted the Partisans’ appeal further when, in autumn 1942, he brought them into a ‘popular front’ association, the Anti-Fascist Council of the People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia, (Antifašističko Vijeće Narodnog Oslobođenja Jugoslavije, or AVNOJ), with non-Communist groups. Meanwhile, the Partisans used their increasingly secure geographical bases to augment their military and political power. Among other things, they reorganized and retrained their forces, concentrating their best troops into elite units, the well-disciplined and mobile ‘proletarian brigades’.49 There was cynicism behind the Partisans’ way of operating, for Partisan units too perpetrated bloody sectarian excesses. Moreover, when they finally assumed power at the national level in 1945, they would subject thousands of

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opponents real or suspected to a vast, bloody purge. But by at least keeping their brutality within certain limits during the war itself, they reaped the reward of growing interethnic support when it mattered most. The Partisans’ progress during this period was far from smooth. Almost from the moment Tito’s forces arrived in the NDH, Axis forces launched a series of offensives against the Partisans that inflicted intermittently massive disruption. For a variety of reasons, however, the Axis failed to deliver a truly decisive blow. *** Although the Wehrmacht tried to occupy Yugoslavia without investing large resources, Wehrmacht Command Southeast’s army formations in the NDH increasingly recognized they could not rely on the Italians, the Ustasha or the Bosnian Chetniks to keep the Partisans in check. The Italians were frequently unreliable, sometimes to the point of failing to support German anti-Partisan operations to which they had previously pledged troops.50 In June 1942, they widened the power vacuum by scaling back their own military commitment in the NDH. The Italians also worsened matters by organizing Chetnik forces into an Anti-Communist Volunteer Militia (Milizia Volontaria Anti Comunista, or MVAC),51 for use in a proxy war against the Partisans. Even some German units toyed with this idea. But the Chetniks proved less adept in irregular warfare than the Partisans; arming them merely stoked interethnic strife further. The NDH forces, with the exception of some elite Ustasha units, were of an even shoddier military standard. The NDH army was crippled by low morale, and by shortages in clothing, equipment, arms and ammunition.52 All this of course made the army’s rank and file more likely to desert and respond to Partisan influence. The regional- and local-level NDH administration was generally too corrupt and ineffective to maintain order. The Germans nevertheless kept the Ustasha regime in power, partly because Hitler admired the Ustasha’s radicalism, and partly because to some extent the Germans could use the Chetniks as leverage against the Ustasha. Moreover, the Ustasha regime hated the Italians for their arrogance and greed, and this made it easier for the Germans to present their own economic demands upon the NDH as being more reasonable. The same grubby power-political considerations that kept the Ustasha in power nationally, of course, enabled Ustasha militias to continue spreading mayhem on the ground.53 Because the NDH was officially allied to the Germans, executing hostages en masse as an anti-Partisan measure was not an option. During 1942 and into the first half of 1943, therefore, the Wehrmacht tried to destroy the Partisan movement directly in a succession of Grossunternehmen similar to those the

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Germans practiced in the east. The Germans did not rely completely on such bludgeoning tactics: for instance, the army also converted its core occupation divisions in Yugoslavia – the 704th, 714th, 717th and 718th Infantry – to betterequipped, more mobile light divisions. For part of 1942 at least, moreover, officers showed some restraint; apart from anything else, this enabled them to look better next to the Ustasha in the population’s eyes. For August 1942’s Operation S, for instance, the 718th declared: ‘every opportunity must be taken to make clear to the population, in word and deed, that this action is directed entirely against the Partisans, and that those who are willing to work will enjoy the protection of German and Croatian arms. It is therefore forbidden i) to burn down houses unless the battle makes it unavoidable; [and] ii) to deprive the population of its livestock or food supply.’54 And the 117th’s Lieutenant General Benignus Dippold was among the commanders who urged proper treatment for captured Partisans, asserting: ‘one must view the enemy as poorlyequipped troops, but not as bandits.’55 It was not long, however, before brutality outweighed imagination and restraint. The army still employed too many substandard units, despite the introduction of light divisions; among other things, it still had to deploy some indigenous and allied units in their operations. Most importantly, the Germans continued to rely on Grossunternehmen. Just as in the Soviet Union, and for similar reasons, the Grossunternehmen that the Germans conducted in the NDH failed to destroy Partisan concentrations conclusively and killed enormous numbers of noncombatants instead. In Yugoslavia, again as in the Soviet Union, the Germans also failed to follow up such successes as they did score with sustained pressure on the Partisans or sufficient troops on the ground between operations. Moreover, their brutality – particularly their widespread practice of shooting Partisans who were trying to desert – boosted both the Partisans’ support and their determination not to fall captive. German-led offensives certainly caused massive disruption to the Partisans. For instance, the Trio operations of the spring of 1942 pushed Tito’s main force into a ‘long march’ from eastern to western Bosnia.56 But because the Germans regularly set targets that were overambitious for forces that were inferior, they could not stop large numbers of Partisans from escaping and reforming elsewhere. The German economy’s growing demand for labour also lent some anti-Partisan operations the character of the press gang. Such was the case with the 714th Infantry Division’s Operation Kozara in June and July 1942.57 German units also acted brutally because the vast, mountainous regions of the NDH, especially Bosnia, were the perfect environment for bringing out the regular soldier’s fear and hatred of guerrilla warfare. Lieutenant Peter G. of the 714th Infantry Division wrote a succession of letters during the second half of 1942 giving voice to this. ‘Yesterday . . . the battalion exterminated 650 Partisans

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in combat,’ he wrote on 6 September. ‘The first time any battalion in West Bosnia achieved this! But we lost our best NCO, whom the scum managed to capture. We found him that evening. They’d pulled his fingernails out while he was still alive, chopped his fingers and his genitals off, sawed off a leg, and then finally they shot him. I also told you a lieutenant had gone missing. The enemy had nailed him alive to a door and then tortured him to death with a red-hot iron!’58 The ghoulishness of the account may reflect its writer’s own nervous state more than what was actually taking place. Even so, Partisan units’ capacity for savagery towards their prisoners is well attested.59 In any case, by describing such atrocities, G. showed that he was slipping into a mind-frame that justified all manner of brutality in the anti-Partisan campaign. Later in the year, as the Partisans grew more powerful, his letters exude a growing sense of helplessness. ‘Today things were black,’ he wrote in mid-December. ‘The Partisans surprised our battalion, there were six dead, sixteen wounded, two missing and 28 dead horses! Naturally this is again an enormous blow, of the sort we won’t be able to withstand much longer. If we don’t get German reinforcements soon then we will all be in the shit.’60 Officers who did try to place the anti-Partisan campaign on a more constructive footing received no effective help from the centre; they were subject not only to the brutal injunctions emanating from Hitler and the OKW during the second half of 1942, but also to the similarly brutal injunctions of Balkan theatre commanders. General Walther Kuntze, the Athens-based Wehrmacht Commander Southeast, declared in March 1942: ‘captured rebels are in principle to be hanged or shot. If they are to be used for intelligence purposes, this should only be a brief postponement of their death.’61 Kuntze’s successor from August 1942, the Austrian-born Luftwaffe general Alexander Löhr, was of a like mind. In late October, he issued a Balkan-specific version of Hitler’s Commando Order, with ruthless additions of his own: ‘All visible enemy groups are, under all circumstances, to be exterminated to the last man. Only when every rebel realises that he will not escape with his life under any circumstances can the occupation troops expect to master the rebel movement. . . . I expect every commander to commit his entire person to ensuring that this order, without exception and in a brutally harsh spirit, is executed by the troops. I will investigate every transgression and bring those responsible to account.’62 Certain commanders and units in the field were anyway particularly viciously disposed. Among the worst offenders were the higher-quality formations the Germans employed from 1943, in a series of bigger, more powerful operations launched by the Wehrmacht against the Partisans during the first half of that year, in the hope of annihilating them once and for all. The 7th Waffen-SS Division ‘Prinz Eugen’ was a particularly well-equipped unit composed almost entirely of ethnic Germans from the Yugoslav regions; so

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grievously did its barbaric conduct alienate the civilian population that it cancelled out much of the division’s military contribution. And in May 1943, the army’s own 1st Mountain Division displayed a ruthlessness that would increasingly characterize elite army formations participating in anti-Partisan operations in Yugoslavia, by shooting around 80 per cent of the prisoners taken during Operation Black.63 Frank Deakin, a British SOE operative in Yugoslavia, conveys in miniature both the Germans’ callousness during these operations, and the human cost they exacted, in his description of an incident during an anti-Partisan operation in Bosnia: In one cave, where ninety men, women, and children huddled together, a German patrol approached within ten yards, without perceiving the entrance. At that moment a newborn baby began crying, and the mother sought to calm the child. The wailing continued, and panic seized hold of the people. A voice whispered to kill the baby, and the mother held out the infant in silent resignation. Even in terror no one had the will to commit the act. The mother strangled the infant. The Germans appeared at the mouth of the cave, shot down some of the aged occupants, and moved on their way. A child’s cradle has remained in the cave since that day.64

By the spring of 1943, the more powerful units the Germans were at last committing were no longer able to defeat the Partisans decisively. In April, Second Lieutenant Peter G. testified to the Partisans’ growing fighting power: ‘The Partisans have made a sudden and unexpected strike against us, which regrettably cost us a lot of blood. By day they threatened a neighbouring town. The imperative was to counterattack as quickly as possible to exterminate them. I was part of the assembled Jagdkommando. We only got back this morning. It was a hunt in the truest sense of the word. Unbelievably hard and bitter, and the Partisans were hiding in unknown strength. We lost twentyseven dead and forty-four wounded.’65 Around the same time, the Partisans thrashed their Chetnik rivals in open combat at the battle of the Neretva. By now, over 150,000 Partisans were operating in the NDH.66 Since early 1942, their various strengths, and the weaknesses and mistakes of their opponents, had enabled the Partisans to survive, endure and expand. By the spring of 1943, they had reached a critical mass that enabled them to withstand the stronger blows the Germans were now finally able to land on them. This in turn set the stage for a still more dramatic increase in Partisan strength during the final months of 1943. ***

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During 1942 and the first half of 1943, the German army’s occupation of western Europe and the Balkans took a turn even harsher than that of late 1941. The turn took different forms, and the non-Jewish populations of the army’s occupied western European territories were terrorized to nothing like the same extent as the peoples of Yugoslavia and, increasingly, of Greece. Nevertheless, the army’s behaviour showed ruthless resolve in both regions. In the west, the occupation hardened in large part because the Reich sought increasingly to exploit the region’s economic resources, particularly its labour, as the demands of the German war economy grew more severe. Yet the Military Government in Brussels was more proactive in dragooning its territory’s workforce than the Military Government in Paris was. Indeed, the main push to this end in France came from negotiations between the Vichy regime and the Office of the FourYear Plan, negotiations to which the Military Government itself was not especially party. It was a similar story when it came to the Military Governments’ involvement in the extermination of the Jews. Neither Military Government considered this a top priority. But the Military Government in Brussels, in large part for its own power-political reasons, now gave the task more attention and energy than it had done before, or than the Military Government in Paris continued to give. In Salonika, the army’s eventual involvement in the extermination of the Jews in 1943 was prefaced by the degrading treatment to which it subjected them in 1942. This was not only the work of higher-level commands, but also of units on the spot taking gratuitous advantage. It was yet another sign of how far anti-Semitism had permeated the army’s various levels. In the Balkans, the effects of economic plunder were only one reason why resistance was on the rise. Resistance movements in both Greece and Yugoslavia were also engaged in a civil war fuelled by internecine hatred. The Reich leadership could be blamed for the rise in resistance, however, not only because it plundered its Balkan territories, but also because it had sought to occupy Greece and Yugoslavia on the cheap, relying heavily upon allied, satellite and indigenous forces of dubious worth to help keep order. In Yugoslavia as in the Soviet Union, some of the army’s anti-partisan units were sensible enough to appreciate the value of cultivating hearts and minds. But the German response overall showed much more ruthlessness than restraint. This was partly for the same reasons as in the Soviet Union: the response was carried out by overburdened security forces, subject to an antipartisan doctrine coloured by ideology and guerrillaphobia. They faced an elusive, dangerous and sometimes barbaric partisan opponent, in terrain that was a gift to guerrilla warfare, and succumbed to profoundly brutalizing frustration in the process. The anti-partisan campaign also became more vicious

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because of the succession of radical directives issued by the high command during the second half of 1942. Some of the worst offenders of all were the better-equipped units that the army committed to anti-partisan operations. This was an early example of a pattern that would appear repeatedly during the anti-partisan warfare the army would wage into 1944. In turn, it would reveal ever darker truths about its soldiery.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THE INITIATIVE LOST, 1943

T

he german army could still throw the Allies off balance during the first half of 1943, but no more than that. Through the spring and early summer, it suffered further disastrous defeats in the Mediterranean and eastern theatres. These did not turn the tide against Germany; that had turned already. But, together with the tilting balance against the U-boat in the battle of the Atlantic, they hastened Germany’s overall defeat. Among other things, it was during this period that the German army clashed for the first time with the US army, in North Africa. The US army of early 1943 fell far short of being a fully effective fighting force, but the battles between the two would show that, ultimately, the Germans’ operational skill and high-quality hardware were not enough to overcome an opponent possessing superior firepower and resources. And all this at a time when events reaffirmed Hitler’s determination to take Germany to final victory or to ultimate destruction. For in January 1943, the Western Allied leaders agreed to fight alongside the Soviet Union until they had secured the Axis powers’ unconditional surrender and, in President Roosevelt’s words, imposed ‘punishment and retribution in full upon their guilty, barbaric leaders’.1 In the wake of this announcement and of the Stalingrad calamity, Goebbels sought to persuade the Germans to accept that national defeat and national destruction were now a real possibility, and that they must adopt a true ‘total war’ mentality in order to drive up armaments production and save Germany from catastrophe. *** As the battle of Stalingrad drew to a close, German troops along the entire eastern front were already increasingly fatalistic about the course the war was taking. From 1942 onwards, Major Freiherr von Lersner of the OKH paid a succession of visits to the troops on various fronts, and his reports provide

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numerous insights into how junior officers and their men regarded National Socialism and the war. Visiting the Sixteenth Army in northwest Russia in late January 1943, Lersner noted one discussion with an officer who simply declared: ‘I understand nothing any more. Stalingrad is madness. I had to get that off my chest. I need to go back to work now.’2 More generally, Lersner reported ‘long, endlessly repeated discussions about the dishonesty of our propaganda’.3 The troops’ overwhelming feeling was that, while Germany might delay or even avert defeat, it could no longer achieve victory. The best the longterm future seemed to offer was an increasingly debilitating stalemate.4 ‘There’s no way we’ll be finished with the Bolshevik colossus this year,’ wrote Wachtmeister Josef L. of the 129th Infantry Division.5 Unteroffizier Wolfgang S. found it ‘really depressing, being absolutely powerless to do anything about a situation that seems to have no end. This is how a convict must feel.’6 Numerous field commanders began calling for the troops to receive more intensive ideological instruction. General Heinrici, now commanding the Fourth Army in the Army Group Centre sector, identified five subjects that he believed the troops’ education should cover: ‘1) the meaning of the war, 2) our enemies’ aims, 3) winning total war, 4) there can be no compromise, and 5) why do we fight?’7 One of the more hardline ideological commanders, set for ever greater prominence during the war’s final two years, was General of Infantry Lothar Rendulic, who commanded XXXV Corps. He judged the troops’ ideological instruction as ‘poor and inadequate’, and maintained that being tested in physically and psychologically demanding situations was the only way for the soldier to ‘become the exponent of this nation’s will’. From April 1943, Rendulic instructed his divisions to organize three fourteen-day courses, ‘giving all participants a solid base of political knowledge’.8 Calls such as these, from senior commanders at the sharp end, proliferated during 1943. They would eventually help precipitate the greatly intensified indoctrination drive that high command would announce at the end of the year. Yet there was no escaping the fact that, in Catherine Merridale’s words, ‘the Germans . . . were facing a kind of anti-progress, losing one by one the things that made them feel human. Red Army men, by contrast, were getting their first scent of real success.’9 Buoyant from its success at Stalingrad, the Red Army immediately sought to repeat it with another massive encirclement of German forces in the southern Soviet Union. By stopping Operation Winter Storm, the Red Army had already driven a wedge between Manstein’s Army Group Don and the remnant of Weichs’ Army Group B to its north. The Red Army’s next targets were Army Group Don itself, and Army Group A in the Caucasus. The Germans were able to avert further calamity, if only temporarily. General Zeitzler had already managed to persuade Hitler to allow Field Marshal von Kleist’s Army Group A to pull out of the Caucasus. For the troops in

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the Caucasus, the retreat could not come quickly enough. ‘An eight-day-long snowstorm,’ wrote Unteroffizier Dieter S. of the 4th Mountain Division on 20 January. ‘When it abated, the damned Russians attacked, they were 150 metres [500 feet] from us, and we had our hands full throwing them out with carbines, hand grenades and machine pistols. I copped one in the head.’10 Kleist had been planning a retreat from the Caucasus for some time; the Red Army’s Transcaucasus Front pursued the Germans somewhat feebly, and the Luftwaffe was able to keep open an escape route through Rostov. Army Group A was thus able to escape the Caucasus just before the Soviet jaws closed. Hitler had not abandoned his intention of conquering the region, so he insisted the Seventeenth Army retain control of the Kuban bridgehead. But in deciding on general withdrawal otherwise, Hitler showed he was not entirely blind to the lessons of the Stalingrad campaign, and not always guilty of the blinkered refusal to withdraw of which Manstein and others later accused him. Then the Soviet offensive against Army Group Don began running low on fuel and supplies, and Manstein was able to stabilize his line on the River Mius. Manstein now sought to salvage something further. He maintained that the disasters in the south demonstrated that the eastern front needed a separate commander-in-chief, someone able to give that theatre his full attention. Hitler responded badly to this argument, but rather better to the argument that the Germans should not simply stand and hold in the south: he gave Manstein free operational manoeuvre and allowed him to abandon the eastern Donbass. He also appointed Manstein commander of Army Group South.11 During the first half of March, Manstein drew the Red Army in to a point north of his forces where its supply lines became even more dangerously overstretched, all the while withdrawing his own troops and waiting for the moment to counterattack. The bulk of the troops he committed to this counteroffensive were grouped under a reinforced Fourth Panzer Army, now augmented by LVII Corps, XLVIII Panzer Corps and the new SS Panzer Corps, which had been formed in the autumn of 1942. Manstein calculated that recapturing Kharkov would animate the SS troops, who had been driven out of it the previous month, and believed it would act as ‘a magic stimulus for the fighting troops and less senior command staffs’.12 The Luftwaffe helped to delay and soften up the Soviet armour. Then, having picked his moment, Manstein turned his troops against the Soviets and hit them in their overextended southern flank below Kharkov. The Soviets had to withdraw to escape annihilation. This third battle of Kharkov, following the Germans’ capture of the city in 1941 and the Soviets’ failure to retake it in 1942, showed that, even after Stalingrad, the German army’s operational art was still superior to the Red Army’s. The Soviets’ defeat showed they had some way to go in planning an effective offensive against sturdy German opposition rather than against

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mediocre allied and satellite forces. The Red Army’s general overoptimism, and its poor intelligence – both of which had convinced it that Manstein’s forces were in headlong retreat – had proven particularly damaging. Helped further by the spring thaw, the third battle of Kharkov enabled the Germans to stabilize the hitherto perilous situation in the south and straighten out the front line. However, because Manstein lacked reserves and his victorious troops were now exhausted, this was all the battle achieved; there was no means of exploiting the victory further.13 Indeed, Manstein himself saw this, writing: ‘one should not let oneself be influenced by momentary situations’.14 Kharkov had indeed merely achieved something momentary – a brief German recovery – from the wreckage of the winter campaign. If the Germany army was to stabilize the eastern front for a longer period, it needed a more spectacular victory. Something special was also needed to strengthen the resolve of Germany’s increasingly jittery Axis allies. The greatest worry here was Italy: the Italians had not only suffered fearful losses during the Stalingrad campaign, they also faced the prospect of Allied invasion from North Africa. *** In late 1942, while Rommel’s forces retreated out of Egypt and Anglo-American forces converged on them from east and west, newly arrived German and Italian formations were trying to shore up the Axis presence in North Africa. The Axis had abandoned any ambition to hold on to Libya, let alone renew the offensive into Egypt. Its priority now was to maintain a bridgehead in Tunisia, and to keep the two Allied advances separate and thereby force them to use double the number of supply lines. Hitler believed this bridgehead was essential to keeping the Allies away from Italy, and in keeping Italy in the war. While Field Marshal Montgomery continued his somewhat stately pursuit of Rommel in the east, the joint Allied force advancing from the west was slowed by the mountainous terrain of northwest Africa. Newly arrived Axis forces were thus able to establish a bridgehead well before the Allies reached Tunisia. The first German commander on the spot was Lieutenant General Walther Nehring. Nehring was placed in charge of the newly formed XC Corps, later renamed the Fifth Panzer Army, on 17 November, even though its initial strength comprised fewer than 25,000 German and Italian troops.15 Nehring countered the Allies’ initial attacks on the Tunisian bridgehead. The time bought enabled stronger German forces under Colonel General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim to reinforce the bridgehead. By the start of February 1943, over 100,000 Axis troops had arrived, including three new German army divisions and the remains of Rommel’s German-Italian Panzer Army. Facing them along Tunisia’s Western Dorsal were the British First Army, US II Corps and the

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French XIX Corps, which consisted of Free French colonial troops from North Africa. The Axis had temporary numerical superiority. This would disappear, however, as soon as Montgomery’s Eighth Army arrived from the east.16 The Axis forces were at the very end of a very, very precarious supply line, across a Mediterranean Sea that the Allies now dominated unassailably. They had to go to desperate lengths to conserve what got through to them or what they already had. At one point, the 15th Panzer Division had to step in to forbid its men from trading pieces of uniform for goods from local Arabs, reminding them: ‘the uniform is the soldier’s robe of honour, and not some civilian rags to be chucked away’.17 Indeed, because Tunisia’s greater population density threw up new day-to-day challenges, the 15th Panzer Division produced a poem for its men fighting Allied ‘Panzers’ (tanks) the better to ensure they avoided firing on the locals accidentally: Firing in Tunisia Can bring trouble on your head! You might not hit a Panzer But an Arab’s hut instead. Wear spectacles to help you, And make sure you’ve got the nous To fire on a Panzer, And not an Arab’s house.18

Rommel’s arrival in Tunisia caused friction between himself and Arnim, a stiff old-school Prussian who was contemptuous of the Nazi regime. Rommel, though his disillusionment with Hitler had already begun, was Arnim’s opposite in nearly every respect. Field Marshal Kesselring had his work cut out trying to get them to cooperate. Yet the Axis forces in Tunisia did hold advantages. Among them was a small number of the new heavy Mark VI Panzer, the Tiger, whose 88mm gun was much superior to the Sherman’s 75mm.19 The Tigers were a headline product of Germany’s now greatly improving armaments output. From late 1942, the top priority was armoured fighting vehicles. In September, Speer announced a monthly production target of 50 Tigers, six hundred of the new Mark V Panther medium tanks, 150 light tanks, and a mix of six hundred mobile assault guns and self-propelled artillery pieces. Tank factories were ordered to go over to a 72-hour working week.20 Favouring the defenders even more was the Tunisian terrain. This was no longer war in the desert, but war across mountains and ravines. The Germans were particularly adept at placing their artillery and machine guns in commanding positions on ridges.21 Tunisian terrain guaranteed heavy losses for any army attacking it.

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Even more so if that army was at the foot of a steep learning curve. The US army in Tunisia, under the overall charge of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, learned from its mistakes faster than the British learned from theirs in the Western Desert, but the process was still painful. The starkest contrast between German and US forces in Tunisia was that the German forces contained a large core of hardened combat veterans, particularly among the Afrika Korps, whereas the US army was overwhelmingly an army of newly recruited, uniformed citizens. The United States’ isolationist stance following the First World War, and the financial priorities of the interwar years, not least during the Great Depression, had debilitated the country’s armed forces. The danger of war and the German triumphs of 1939–41 had jolted the US army into developing an armoured-warfare capacity. However, the US army relied much less than the Germans on skilful manoeuvre and operational art, and much more on General Ulysses S. Grant’s eighty-year-old doctrine of grinding down the enemy with superior resources.22 In order to do this as effectively and efficiently as possible, the US army organized itself along scientific management lines. This approach had advantages: for one thing, it did not suffer the adverse effects of having two highcommand offices. However, the scientific approach also created a top-down command style that required officers to weigh up all relevant factors in any given battle situation before deciding which course of action to take. This left them little room for surprise, improvisation or initiative.23 US army basic training was shorter than its German equivalent, and placed less importance on developing the men’s psychological and physical attributes. Instead, it sought to develop their skills in particular tasks, breaking down those tasks into smaller components. Nor, on the whole, were US soldiers placed in regionally based units, as German soldiers were. This extensively deprived the US army of the benefits to morale of raising, training and deploying soldiers from the same region together in the same unit. US NCOs were particularly inferior to their German counterparts, for the interwar US army had enjoyed far less social kudos than its German equivalent, and had failed to attract high-quality recruits in the numbers needed to create a core of high-quality NCOs.24 On the other hand, at least private soldiers who proved themselves in battle were not held back from being promoted to NCO. And even before the United States entered the war, the army was taking further steps that would better enable it to meet the challenges of combat. There was colossal benefit, of course, in the industrial output of the globe’s most powerful economy. The army reduced the size of its infantry units, but buttressed their firepower, equipping them with extra machine guns and mortars, together with the highly effective ‘bazooka’ anti-tank rifle. Infantry divisions also became motorized with

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half-tracks and largely self-propelled artillery, while the Americans aped the Germans by making their armoured divisions less tank-heavy and more balanced.25 Nevertheless, the Tunisian campaign harshly exposed the US army’s continued shortcomings. The Americans felt compelled by the terrain to disperse their armour rather than concentrate it. They had far to go before they could practise combined-arms warfare as proficiently as the Germans. Furthermore, because the Americans’ grasp of manoeuvre warfare was found wanting, they often tried to compensate with an offensive-minded attitude, leading to some recklessly ill-advised attacks. The Americans’ lack of experience in interservice cooperation was clear in the ineffective air support they provided for their ground troops. Nor, as yet, did they concentrate their artillery in the mass that was needed.26 The Germans’ initially contemptuous view of the US army was coloured not just by their military judgment, but also by Nazi racial stereotypes about the ‘degenerate’ multicultural United States. ‘We fought the Ami [American] a few days ago,’ wrote Lance Corporal Siegfried K. of the 15th Panzer Division in mid-February 1943, ‘and destroyed over ninety of his tanks. We’ll blow him and all his Negroes and trash races to perdition.’27 Ironically, however, the severe racial segregation that characterized the US army at this time kept its AfricanAmerican personnel away from frontline combat units. Alongside the US troops in North Africa were Free French forces, including skilled mountain fighters from France’s North African colonies. Such soldiers posed acute danger to Axis troops in the mountainous terrain of Tunisia. The other Allied contingent was the division-strong British First Army, under General Kenneth Anderson. The First Army was a formation drawn from the Home Forces, troops who had been trained in Britain while the Eighth Army had fought Rommel in the Western Desert. It exhibited several of the weaknesses in the Home Forces’ training and doctrine. For one thing, its troops suffered the shortcomings of the new British innovation of battle drill. Useful though this was, it was imparted to uneven standards across the different regiments. This was yet another symptom of the British army’s failure to create a system that disseminated good practice throughout its units. Nor did battle drill in itself enable British soldiers to achieve effective manoeuvre and firepower dominance on the battlefield. The British army’s inadequate dissemination of best practice was also apparent in the First Army’s failure to concentrate its artillery more effectively, and in its poor air support – defects the Eighth Army had suffered from but had since corrected. However, the Americans and the British First Army would prove faster learners than the Eighth Army. Further, General Alexander, in overall charge of the British land forces in North Africa, smoothed the learning process by alternating and coordinating attacks

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on the Axis from east and west after Montgomery’s forces arrived from the east. This helped the Allies to maintain constant pressure on the Axis while giving their own formations the opportunity both to reflect and to recuperate.28 In mid-February, Rommel and Arnim buried their differences long enough to mount a two-pronged counterattack against the Americans. Arnim unleashed Operation Spring Breeze, employing two Panzer divisions against US formations along the main Allied line of the Eastern Dorsal. At one point, 1,500 American troops were encircled and captured, and the Americans pulled back their whole line to the Western Dorsal. Rommel’s forces, the 15th Panzer Division and the Italian ‘Centauro’ armoured division now launched Operation Morning Air from the south, against US defences in the Kasserine Pass through the Western Dorsal. Rommel’s 88s beat off US counterattacks, and by 20 February, US defences at the pass had collapsed, the troops manning them fleeing with the loss of two hundred tanks. Then, however, the Americans began their ascent of that steep learning curve; their resistance stiffened, their artillery exacted heavy losses on the Panzers and Rommel was unable to exploit his success further. The field marshal later credited the Americans with the improvement they showed over the course of the battle: ‘Although it was true that the American troops could not yet be compared with the veterans of the Eighth Army. . . . They made up for their lack of experience by their far better and more plentiful equipment and their tactically more flexible command.’29 Hans von Luck concurred, asserting in his memoirs that the Americans ‘adapted immediately to a changed situation and fought with great doggedness’.30 Rommel was also let down by Arnim; his Prussian colleague had refused to release part of one of his Panzer divisions to support him, even when Kesselring had ordered Arnim to do so. Nor, this time, had Rommel helped himself: rather than concentrating his attack on the Americans’ weakest point, as timehonoured German practice directed him to do, he had dissipated his offensive power by attacking at three different points.31 Another sign that Rommel’s touch was wobbling came when Montgomery’s recently arrived Eighth Army repulsed his attack at Medenine on the Mareth Line on 6 March. Medenine was essentially an action replay of Alam Halfa, but with even higher German losses. ‘The Marshal has made a balls of it,’ Montgomery reportedly remarked.32 The Eighth Army was helped, as it had been since the summer of 1942, by complete air superiority, and by Ultra decrypts revealing exactly where the Germans would attack.33 Furthermore, the advent of the six-pounder gun had boosted the British army’s anti-tank capability.34 The British had yet to master combined-arms operations fully. Among other things, their artillery was still not targeting the full depth of the enemy’s defences effectively enough, and they were not deploying their forward

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anti-tank guns quickly enough.35 Yet the Tunisian campaign was enabling the British, like the Americans, to climb the combined-arms learning curve. Indeed, by now both the British and the Americans were firmly shedding their initial gung-ho attitude to armoured warfare, providing their tanks with vital infantry cover, and coordinating their tanks and infantry increasingly effectively.36 In the air, the appointment of Air Marshal Sir Arthur Conyngham as head of the whole of the Northwest African Tactical Air Force enabled him to transfer best practice from his old command of the Desert Air Force and greatly improve air-ground coordination.37 By mid-March 1943, the German army in North Africa had run out of road. The Axis supply basis in North Africa was already increasingly threadbare, and now Rommel and Arnim’s offensives had used up all the remaining fuel. The Axis forces, despite further reinforcement, were now outnumbered two to one. Such reinforcements as the Germans could get across to Tunisia could not alter the campaign’s impending outcome; rather, they were ‘committed to the flames’, as General Guderian later put it.38 A sign that the Germans knew the game was up was the German-Italian Panzer Army’s latest and last name change, as it was redesignated the Italian First Army and placed under the command of General Giovanni Messe; both this and the Fifth Panzer Army were now placed under Rommel’s command as Army Group Africa.39 Further attacks by Montgomery, and by US II Corps, now under General George S. Patton, did not make a decisive breakthrough, but did make good progress. With the collapse of the Mareth Line, abandoned by the Axis when the Italian First Army fled from it in disarray, the Allied armies in east and west linked up. The Luftwaffe in the Mediterranean theatre, meanwhile, was being ripped to shreds. Between November 1942 and May 1943, it lost nearly 2,500 aircraft. This comprised over 40 per cent of the Luftwaffe’s entire strength as of 10 November 1942.40 Losses of this magnitude could not fail to affect the performance of the Luftwaffe in the east either, but in the Mediterranean they had the immediate effect of stripping Axis shipping of air cover. As a result, 623 Panzers, 1,719 vehicles, and 1,413 artillery pieces earmarked for the Germans in North Africa ended up on the bottom of the sea.41 The Germans on the ground did not give up. In the middle of April, Corporal Karl B. of the 334th Infantry Division, a Kriemhild formation comprising Replacement Army units from various locations,42 wrote: ‘Our neighbouring regiment was at the wire and destroyed a breakthrough attempt. Now we’re expecting a visit in our sector too, but we’ll show the enemy what’s what. Up to now we’ve had no anti-tank weapons, but our poor bloody infantry have stood up to iron and steel.’43 But fierce as the Germans’ resolve was, they could achieve no more than a holding action. By the standards of the North African campaign, the Germans’ losses were calamitous. ‘In the Wehrmacht

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report, my regiment was referred to by name: “Grenadier Regiment 754 particularly distinguished itself,” ’ wrote Lance Corporal Karl B. two weeks later. ‘There isn’t much of the unit left now.’44 By early May, the Tunisian campaign, and with it the German army’s war in North Africa, were over. Around 250,000 Axis troops went into captivity.45 Rommel, already back in Germany, was not among them, though Arnim was. The end of the North African campaign, like the campaign as a whole, was more than a sideshow. More Axis troops surrendered in Tunisia than had surrendered in Stalingrad, even though only about half the 250,000 captured were combat troops, and only half the combat troops were German. The British army in particular had used the North African campaign to improve its tactics and organization, while the US army had used its final phase as an opportunity to begin tempering its troops in battle. Moreover, the Americans’ effective use of artillery presaged the overwhelming firepower that they and the rest of the Western Allies would employ in future campaigns. Both the British and US armies, then, had benefited greatly from North African ‘rehearsal space’. The campaign’s closing phase also further exposed the new limits to the German army’s capability. Above all, its mastery of manoeuvre warfare could only achieve so much against an opponent with superior intelligence, air power and land-based firepower. Strategically, the German army now faced a likely Italian collapse and an Allied invasion of Axis-controlled Europe from the south. Axis hopes of a complete triumph in North Africa had been based on shaky foundations from the start, but equally, the Axis need not have been defeated quite so massively as it was. That the German army lost so many men and so much valuable equipment in Tunisia was ultimately the fault of Hitler and the high command, albeit the OKW rather than the OKH this time. Hitler had made his small OKW staff, particularly General Jodl, responsible for the Tunisian bridgehead, largely as a way of further putting the OKH more firmly in its place. Given the pressure the German army was under on the eastern front in early 1943, it is questionable how many more troops could have been spared for Tunisia. But the OKW could at least have done a better job of timing the reinforcements, still more of timing a withdrawal, the disruption from Allied air power notwithstanding. Ultimately, however, nothing the OKW might have done differently would have altered some even more basic truths about the Tunisian campaign. The task of supplying and coordinating a binational expeditionary force by sea was not one that naturally fitted the German military.46 It fitted even less when that same sea route was exposed to air attack so devastatingly. Yet the only alternative – conceding the field to the Allies in North Africa and allowing Italy to collapse – was one Hitler would not countenance. ***

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Meanwhile, the Wehrmacht in the east was preparing that ‘something special’ needed to stabilize the front there. German armaments production seemed to weigh in its favour. However, the German army still faced serious obstacles. Tank production was now being prioritized, but the cuts to aircraft production that this compelled harmed the army indirectly, by reducing its air support. Further, there were more models of tank and armoured fighting vehicle in production than were needed. This was a particular challenge for General Guderian who, in March 1943, having pulled various strings to get back into Hitler’s favour, was appointed inspector general of armoured troops. This gave Guderian authority over the formation, activation, and training of armoured units, including those of the Luftwaffe and Waffen-SS as well as of the army. Thus was Guderian able to achieve real progress in rationalizing armouredvehicle production. He also oversaw considerable improvement in gunnery practice. But he worsened the spare-parts situation by unequivocally backing Hitler’s call for expanded Panzer numbers.47 Nevertheless, German production of armoured fighting vehicles had reached impressive levels by the summer of 1943: German industry had replenished Panzer losses such that German forces in the east now had as many Panzers as at the start of Operation Barbarossa. It coupled this with a rise in munitions productions by one third between January 1943 and January 1944.48 The army’s Panzer divisions still practised the flexible tactics of old. Similar to the mobile ‘box’ formations adopted by Rommel’s Panzer units in the desert, the divisions were now usually organized into battle groups, each focusing on its own allotted task. The divisional commander concerned himself with the overall picture, only altering a battle group’s composition if it aided the overall battle plan. Thus did junior commanders continue to enjoy considerable freedom of action. On the other hand, the losses of the past two years had led to a dearth of sufficiently skilled and experienced commanders. Furthermore, numbers of armoured fighting vehicles did not tell the full story. By July 1943, the German army on the eastern front deployed over 3,500 Panzers and selfpropelled assault guns, but fewer than half were actually with the army’s Panzer divisions; the remainder were allocated to divisions that had been redesignated as combined-arms Panzer grenadier divisions, as well as to independent Panzer and assault-gun units. Furthermore, most of the army’s Panzers were still Mark IIIs and Mark IVs, rather than the new, heavier models. These – the Panthers and Tigers – together with a further huge number of vehicles, were largely being allotted to the ever more favoured Waffen-SS.49 Hitler and the OKH were less concerned about whom the Panzers were allocated to than about having enough to allocate in the first place. They hoped to regain the initiative in the east, or at least surrender it no further, by launching a massive new offensive under the codename of Operation Citadel. The

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operation’s target was to be the Kursk salient. The salient, which straddled the front lines of Army Group Centre and Army Group South, had been formed by the Soviet advance of the previous winter. It now resembled a huge bulge in the German line. The plan for Citadel, penned by General Zeitzler, was to pinch out this bulge, destroy the Soviet forces within and straighten the German line. This success would also dissuade the Reich’s increasingly jittery European allies from having any ideas about leaving the Axis. As Hitler grandiloquently put it in April: ‘the victory at Kursk must shine like a beacon to the world’.50 That said, the fact that the operational scale of victory at Kursk’ would constitute no more than a local success was a measure of how straitened the Germans’ means were now becoming compared with those of the Red Army. Such were the strategic motives; there were also political and psychological ones. Field Marshal von Kluge, commander of Army Group Centre, believed the operation would give his army group a chance to wrestle back at least some of the limelight from Army Group South.51 Army Group South itself had been reformed from its constituent army groups of the 1942 campaign. Manstein, fresh from his triumph at Kharkov, wanted to replicate that success by letting the Soviets attack first and then hitting them hard with another backhand blow. However, this would have meant giving up the Donbass, something Hitler was loath to do even temporarily. Manstein feared that delaying Citadel increased the danger of the Western Allies pre-empting it by landing on the European continent.52 He also feared that delay would give the Red Army time to build up its defences in the salient. ‘Everything depends on not letting the initiative pass out of our hands,’ he wrote on 8 March.53 Hitler ignored Manstein on this score also, instead heeding the more cautious view of General Model, commander of the Ninth Army, that the offensive should be delayed. This might appear to have been one of those attacks of nerves that afflicted Hitler, according to Manstein’s memoirs, when the Führer should have been bolder. Yet just as a rapid strike had something to recommend it, so too did delay. The rasputitsa caused by the spring thaw compelled some delay, and there was an argument for building up the forces for the offensive further. And with numbers no longer favouring the Germans, it would be essential to weigh up carefully which other sectors of the eastern front could afford to shed troops and armour for Citadel. The downside of delay, of course, could be summarized as the bigger the build-up, the smaller the surprise. And another motive for delaying that Hitler may have harboured was more selfish than pragmatic: a desire to clip Manstein’s wings a little after Kharkov.54 Allowing an alerted Red Army to build up its defences in the salient also posed a grave danger, simply because of the scale of material now at its disposal. Impressive as Germany’s rearmament efforts were in 1943, Soviet armaments output continued to outdo them. In 1943, the Soviets produced 24,000 tanks

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and 48,000 heavy guns to the Germans’ 17,000 and 27,000.55 The Red Army’s tank force not only outnumbered that of the Germans, but also increasingly rivalled it for quality. From 1943, a new version of the T-34 came on stream, with a modified hatch and larger turret; this increased its visibility, and made room for an extra crew member who could relieve the tank’s commander of some of his burdens. The training of tank crews had also improved: for instance, each man was trained not only in his own specialism, but also in that of one his fellow crew members so that he could take over smoothly if needed. Tanks often attracted the best recruits, partly because they looked so formidable, and partly because they appealed to soldiers who were technically minded.56 Soviet arms factories were also producing more aircraft. The Sturmovik fighterbomber was an excellent piece of equipment, and even if it did not match the Stuka for quality, it narrowed the gap; meanwhile, the Luftwaffe’s heavy losses were compelling it to cut corners in training. This expedient, of course, was inherently destructive to the Luftwaffe in the long run because it rendered its pilots less effective and more likely to get killed.57 Soviet intelligence sources, not to mention the build-up of German forces north and south of the Kursk salient, gave the Red Army ample warning that an offensive was coming. Furthermore, the Germans gave the Red Army ever more time to prepare as the scheduling of Citadel slipped and slipped again. Not only did the dampness of the ground following the spring rasputitsa compel delay; the fall of Tunisia caused Hitler to dither about whether or not to send some of the Panzer divisions to southern Europe. Speer, fearing the disruption the offensive might inflict upon the flow of armaments production, called for Citadel to be cancelled altogether. This did not happen, but so legion were the technical problems besetting the new Panthers and Tigers that Hitler did postpone it yet again.58 By July 1943, the Soviets had used the four-month lull in the fighting along the eastern front to construct deeply echeloned defences along the entire front from Moscow to the Black Sea. They had paid special attention to the Kursk salient. They not only fortified it formidably, but also assembled huge reserves behind the front line.59 The Red Army forces in the salient now totalled about 1.8 million troops and five thousand tanks – about double the number of tanks the Germans were committing to attacking it. Even if the operation succeeded, the cost of victory to the Germans might well be too high to be worthwhile. Several generals voiced their doubts, with even Manstein’s resolve wavering as the offensive approached.60 Guderian – with Speer’s agreement – wondered what the point of the offensive was at all, and it seems even Hitler was now plagued with doubts. Guderian’s postwar memoirs provide an account of an exchange with Hitler and Keitel, which, given that several eyewitnesses were still alive when Guderian was writing, is probably accurate. ‘ “How may people do you think even

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know where Kursk is?” ’ Guderian asked Keitel. ‘ “It’s a matter of profound indifference to the world whether we hold Kursk or not. I repeat my question: why do we want to attack in the East at all this year?” This was Hitler’s reply: “You’re quite right. Whenever I think of this attack my stomach turns over.” ’61 The omens, then, were bad. But with Italy in particular needing a fortifying signal that the Wehrmacht was still in the game, and with so much psychological and material investment having gone into preparing the operation, cancellation was not an option. At the most basic level, there may also have been an element of ‘something must be done’ at work, and Operation Citadel was something. The alternative was increasingly to surrender the initiative to a Red Army whose strength now burgeoned ever more ominously. *** Eventually, finally, Operation Citadel commenced on 5 July. The principal field armies committed to the attack were, in the north, the Ninth Army and the Second Panzer Army, both of which General Model commanded for the duration of the operation, and, in the south, General Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army. The entire force comprised 650,000 men, 2,600 tanks and assault guns, and 1,800 aircraft.62 Facing it, with their aforementioned solid advantage in manpower and armoured fighting vehicles, were the Central, Steppe, and Voronezh fronts. Hoth and Model attacked in different ways, both flawed. Hoth sent in his armour ahead of the infantry, hoping to engage the Soviets’ armoured reserves in a decisive engagement. However, he also wanted two northerly thrusts. This protected his eastern flank against Soviet counterattack, but it also dispersed his armoured strength and made him less able to force the decisive armoured engagement he was seeking. And Manstein failed to overrule him. Model, in contrast to Hoth, sent in his infantry first. In principle, sending in the infantry first to clear the way for the armour was a sound approach, but the Soviet defences in the Kursk salient were arrayed especially formidably.63 The root problem both commanders faced was that the Germans did not have enough armour. The army’s field commanders made every effort to impress the importance of the operation upon their troops. The 12th Panzer Division, for instance, conveyed Hitler’s message that the ‘operation that is about to commence will not only strengthen our own people, but above all infuse the German soldier himself with new self-confidence. Our allies’ faith in final victory will be strengthened, and neutrals will be reminded not to intervene against us. The Russian defeat that this offensive will achieve will, in foreseeable time, rob the Soviet leadership of the initiative.’64 But Unteroffizier Wolfgang S. of the 7th Panzer Division, considered himself ‘pretty sceptical about our chances . . . and

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judging by past experience, we can have little faith in either our company commander or our section commander. The Russian defences have been prepared in advance and kitted out with all types of weapon.’65 Furthermore, the Germans’ air support came under massive direct pressure before Citadel had even started, as Soviet air strikes hammered Luftwaffe airfields during the weeks leading up to it. Soviet aircraft and artillery likewise blasted the German forward areas just as Citadel was beginning. From the battle’s start, the legion technical problems that beset the new Panzer models were clear. Hauptfeldwebel Willy P. of the 167th Infantry Division, serving in the southern sector of the eastern front, venerated the Tiger as a ‘marvellous machine, without equal’.66 But technical problems would plague it until later in 1943. Also in action at Kursk was a Tiger variant produced by Porsche. It was inferior to the Henschel Tiger variant that the Germans eventually selected, but its chassis formed the basis of the ‘Ferdinand’, a hybrid heavy tank destroyer and mobile assault gun. The Ferdinand’s 88mm gun could destroy any opposing armoured vehicle, but it was vulnerable to infantry attack because it lacked a machine gun.67 Two hundred Panthers were also employed at Kursk. The Panther was faster than the Tiger but had only a 75mm gun, compared with the Tiger’s 88mm. Its entry into active service had also been particularly rushed. Its engine was defective, something that would not be corrected until 1944, and its poorly protected fuel system made it alarmingly likely to catch fire. Once its defects were overcome, the Panther would prove the finest tank Germany produced during the Second World War, but that lay in the future.68 The Panzers made painful, often negligible progress against Soviet anti-tanks nests and artillery. ‘We’ve got hard days behind us,’ wrote Private Franz M. of the 7th Panzer Division on 10 July.‘Our hearts were beating right up into our throats. This pack of gangsters would sooner be killed rather than surrender. . . . The landscape’s hilly, with one defence line after another. Plenty of comrades, who enjoyed life as much as we did, have fallen in the past few days.’69 Army Group Centre’s forces managed only 6.5 kilometres (4 miles), and by 12 July they had been halted. ‘We’re in the shit,’ wrote Private Helmut P. of the 198th Infantry Division that day, ‘guarding the flanks as the Russians attack fiercely again and again.’70 By the end of the month, only fourteen men of his company would be left standing.71 Army Group South, however, penetrated further, because it was deploying the majority of the German armour. On 8 July, Lieutenant Heiner B. of the 12th Panzer Division wrote: ‘the Wehrmacht report reads: Russian attacks being repelled. In actual fact, we are the ones who are attacking – we are having good successes, above all the Luftwaffe. And also our TIGERS.’72 Indeed, for all their defects, the Panthers and Tigers held advantages over the T-34. Each had a crew of five, to the T-34’s four. Though all Panzers had radio, only in 1943 did the Soviets properly address the lack of radio

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communication in their tanks. Soviet tank units were organized more hierarchically, which could cause chaos if a battle took an unexpected turn; Soviet tank crews remained less rigorously trained, and the Red Army was still developing its combined-arms abilities; in particular, it had yet to employ Panzer grenadier-type armoured infantry. Little wonder, then, that, tank for tank, the Germans came off better at Kursk than the Soviets. Soviet AFV losses during Citadel, at around 1,600 vehicles, were more than double those of the Germans.73 Indeed, it was superior doctrine, training and equipment that enabled the Germans’ main workhorse at Kursk, the Mark IV, to perform well even against the T-34.74 And the bulk of Mark IVs at the battle belonged not to the Waffen-SS, but to the army. But if the army’s Panzers fought better at the battle of Kursk itself, the Waffen-SS edged the army in the battle of perceptions that followed. The three Panzer grenadier divisions of II SS Panzer Corps were better supplied with troops and artillery than any such army division, save the Grossdeutschland.75 However, they did not perform appreciably better. They suffered losses that were heavy, but not abnormally so for formations that, after all, were Army Group South’s mechanized spearhead during the battle. However, by stressing its losses at length after the battle, the Waffen-SS further underlined its fanatical spirit and cultivated an image as a fighting elite that, though not unjustified, was somewhat overdone. One veteran of the SS Panzer Grenadier Division ‘Totenkopf ’ stated after the war: ‘we didn’t feel like an elite. We were turned into one.’76 But the disproportionate amount of decorations that the three Waffen-SS divisions received, not least the Knight’s Cross with Oakleaves awarded to their corps commander, SS-Obergruppenführer Paul Hausser, was for propaganda purposes rather than an objective measure of the divisions’ quality. The months following Kursk would see the Waffen-SS increasingly lauded and resourced at the army’s continued expense. On 13 July, the day after a massive armoured clash at Prokhorovka, Hitler called off Operation Citadel. The offensive had made slow progress and at heavy loss, but the final straw for Hitler was that much of the armour committed to Citadel was suddenly needed elsewhere: three days earlier, the Allies had invaded Sicily, and Germany’s ally Italy was now under direct threat. Despite a numerical victory that would slow the Red Army’s westward advance over the following months, the Wehrmacht had failed in its key objective of straightening out the German front line.77 Citadel’s failure was not the turning point of the war on the eastern front as is sometimes claimed. The Germans had inflicted higher losses upon the Soviets than the Soviets had on them. While their own losses too had been heavy, they were not irreplaceable: the Germans lost 1,100 Panzers during the battle, yet such was their rate of Panzer production that another 8,900 arrived on the eastern front over the rest of the year.78 Nor, for the record, did Citadel

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spawn the largest tank battle in history, as has also sometimes been claimed. Its largest armoured engagement, at Prokhorovka, was a fierce clash of arms, but not the battle of titans that the Soviet commander there, General P. A. Rotmistrov of the 5th Guards Tank Army, later claimed it to have been.79 Yet if Citadel was not a complete failure, neither was it anything like the success the Germans desperately needed. It had failed to pinch out the Kursk salient, straighten the German line or hold the now disintegrating Axis coalition together. With its still considerable operational skill, the Germany army might inflict heavy losses and score local successes, but its most Herculean effort had not been enough, even temporarily, to wrest the initiative back from the Red Army. Despite its superior strength during Citadel, the Red Army had not defeated the Germans, but it had held them, and that was what mattered. Such by now were the Soviet Union’s feats of armaments production, aided by Lend Lease, and such also was the steady improvement in the Red Army’s training and doctrine, that time was emphatically on the Red Army’s side. Furthermore, such was the shifting balance of strength in the east that Citadel was the Germans’ last major offensive there. Indeed, even before Hitler cancelled it, the Red Army was launching its own counteroffensive against German forces to the north of the Kursk salient. This was a more alarming development than the failure of Citadel itself, because it significantly confirmed that the initiative now lay firmly with the Soviets. *** The fact that Hitler eventually cancelled Citadel in direct response to the Allied invasion of Sicily demonstrated that the Germans in the east were now also being assailed by events on other fronts. The invasion once more exposed the failings of German military intelligence and counterintelligence. The Allies deceived the Axis into believing an invasion of southern Europe could come anywhere between Sardinia and the Peloponnese, and compelled the Axis to disperse its forces accordingly. The landing itself succeeded thanks to the Allies’ overwhelming air and naval superiority – comprising 2,590 vessels and 3,600 aircraft – and to the innovative amphibious landing techniques they employed. This achievement foreshadowed the Normandy landings of 1944. The Allies, with Eisenhower in overall command, also attacked the Germans on Sicily from two sides: the British Eighth Army landed at Syracuse in the southeast, the US Seventh Army at Palermo in the northwest – a total of 180,000 men.80 But above all, the Allies were confronting the Germans with a type of warfare which they were barely used to and to which they had no viable answer. Lieutenant General Fridolin von Senger-Etterlin, who commanded German forces on the island, put it succinctly in his memoirs: ‘A large part of the strata of

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German political and military leaders thinks only in terms of land operations, not in the three-dimensional terms of forces of all arms. . . . [T]he issue could no longer be in doubt when one side possessed virtually only one branch of the armed forces while the other could employ all three branches in sufficient strength to gain the objective.’ He also recalled his own reaction when he first saw the Allied armada: ‘On July 12, 1943, I was only a few kilometres along the coast from Eisenhower, and having witnessed the same spectacle I can completely endorse the words he then spoke to the United States chief of staff: “I must say that the sight of hundreds of vessels, with landing craft everywhere, operating along the shoreline from Licata . . . was unforgettable.” Unforgettable it was, but differently so for me than for Eisenhower!’81Against all this, a large part of the Italian force on Sicily rapidly fell apart – a course of action for which, by now, it could hardly be blamed.The 28,000-strong German force on the island comprised the 15th Panzer Grenadier Division, reconstituted using new recruits and remnants of the old 15th Panzer Division, and the Luftwaffe’s ‘Hermann Göring’ Panzer Division. They were grouped under Lieutenant General Hans Hube’s XIV Panzer Corps. Hube’s corps tried to react to the landings with the German army’s traditional operational method of a rapid, concentrated attack on the enemy’s weak points. The Hermann Göring Division tried to destroy the American beachhead. What success it did achieve, however, swiftly brought its own problems. When the division made headway in the direction of the beach, it was hammered from a direction against which it had no answer whatsoever – Allied naval firepower. Sicily was the first time the Allies combined their unanswerable naval superiority with air strikes and artillery to overwhelming effect against German land forces. Once the Allies were firmly ashore, the Americans’ rapid progress showed their growing proficiency. While the British advanced more slowly, they too continued to innovate and improve. Among other things, they used spotter aircraft to call down devastating firepower on German counterattacks. Aerial spotter observation from the air was immensely useful in the mountainous terrain, and it was something the Germans themselves lacked.82 The 15th Panzer Grenadier Division described some of the effects Allied firepower had upon the German defences: ‘The mounting destruction of telegraph wires by phosphorus bombs and enemy air activity massively hindered the transmissions of orders,’ it reported on 12 July. Three weeks later, it described how the route east of Randazzo was coming under ‘constant, rolling air attack, then later artillery fire also’, so much so that the division’s troops called it ‘the road of death’. As far as possible, they had to move at night, or during the ‘enemy’s tea break’ between the hours of 4pm and 6pm – after which Allied fighter-bombers harried them until darkness fell.83 However, both army and Luftwaffe troops on Sicily distinguished themselves in the tenacious fighting retreat they conducted in order to escape the island. The

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Germans would seize a position on the high ground, wait for the Allies to attack, inflict heavy casualties, then retreat to the next similar position. For example, on 17 July, the 15th Panzer Grenadier Division ordered its rearguard units to delay the Allied advance, while the rest of the division withdrew to new defensive positions. Units from its two regiments, the 104th and 129th, dealt out heavy losses to Allied tanks and trucks with artillery and rocket-launcher fire, demolished the roads at numerous points, and repelled several Allied attacks over the following week. The 15th Panzer Division mauled the 1st Canadian Division particularly severely; indeed, so embittered were the Canadians that, according to the 15th’s after-action report, they shot the prisoners they took from one of the 104th’s rocket-launcher batteries. The whole of the 15th Panzer Grenadier Division was informed of the incident, and whatever the truth of the matter, it can only have reinforced the division’s determination to resist. The Allies’ advance, already heavily reliant on overwhelming firepower to break German resistance, became more cautious still against the 15th’s spirited defence.84 Such actions gave General Hube the time he needed to organize the evacuation of the German troops on the island. Once the evacuation was under way, the Allies did not try to stop it. They feared German anti-aircraft fire across the Straits of Messina between Sicily and Italy, their air power was already preoccupied with bombing the Italian mainland and they did not want to offer up their warships as easy targets in the Straits.85 Kesselring’s memoirs claimed that ‘the enemy failure to exploit the last chance of hindering the German forces crossing the Straits of Messina, by continuous and strongly coordinated attacks from the sea and the air, was almost a greater boon to the German Command than their failure immediately to push their pursuit across the Straits on 17 August.’86 Just as Montgomery had failed to pursue Rommel more ruthlessly after El Alaimein, then, the Allies on Sicily had failed to press their advantage while their foot was on the enemy’s throat. Sicily was a grievous loss to the Axis, nonetheless: it robbed the Luftwaffe of key bases, exposed Italy itself to the imminent prospect of Allied bombing and invasion, and enabled the Allies conclusively to reopen the Mediterranean as an east-west shipping route. Over the course of July, moreover, the Luftwaffe lost 711 aircraft over the Mediterranean. Indeed, together with the loss of 558 aircraft on the eastern front that month, July 1943 did more damage to the Luftwaffe than any other month over the course of the entire war.87 The German army too, of course, would feel the effects sorely. *** During the spring and early summer of 1943, the Germany army’s angle of descent towards eventual, total defeat grew alarmingly steeper. This was despite

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6. The defeat of Germany, 1943–588

its continued displays of tactical and operational flair, as at Kharkov, and its impressive resilience and resourcefulness in defensive warfare, as on Sicily. In Tunisia, the Allies’ deficiencies and the ideal defensive terrain helped the Germans to slow the Allied advance, but no more. Nor could they conceal the fact that the US- and British-led forces were no longer the leaden-footed amateurs of wishful German thinking, if indeed they ever had been. For despite ongoing defects in the Allied coalition armies, they were now not only well resourced, but also increasingly well organized and led. That German soldiers still refused to recognize this is illustrated by the (possibly apocryphal) story of a British squaddie bundling German POWs into the back of a truck after the end of the Tunisian campaign. ‘British army, no good!’ his captives cried. ‘Who put you in the back of the fucking cattle truck?’ was his reply.89 Similarly, when the German generals in the east prepared Operation Citadel, they refused to recognize that the Wehrmacht’s remaining technical, tactical, and operational strengths were no longer enough to deny the strategic initiative to an increasingly powerful and proficient Red Army. Hitler’s vacillation over Citadel’s start date shows that he instinctively recognized the offensive’s

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fundamental limitations more than Field Marshal von Manstein did. Citadel’s failure exposed the German army’s new limitations even more mercilessly, as did the Allied invasion of Sicily. This brought to bear Allied strength in all three dimensions of the battlefield – on land, at sea and in the air – against German defenders who, valiantly though they fought, could only marshal strength in one dimension. July 1943 was also the first time Allied success in one theatre directly affected the Germans in another, and it also heralded a tug of war for resources between the OKH in the east and the OKW in the west. This dispute would go on to highlight the nonsensical dysfunction of a high-command system with two heads. The Germans’ painful predicament would worsen over the following ten months. However, the German army would fight ever more desperately, both to defend the battlefronts and to maintain its hold over Germany’s dwindling territory. It would continue to be aided by a war economy that was producing quality weaponry and equipment on a scale that, though it could not alter the war’s eventual outcome, could at least delay it considerably.

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PART IV

Beleaguered

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

TAKEOVER IN SOUTHERN EUROPE, 1943–44

A

fter mussolini was deposed and Sicily fell, the new Italian government under Marshal Pietro Badoglio tried, unsuccessfully, to switch the country’s support from the Axis to the Allies. The Allies had decided to invade Italy as a means of attacking German-occupied Europe via, in Churchill’s infamous phrase, the ‘soft underbelly’ of the Axis. The attritional slog of a campaign that was to follow would make a mockery of Churchill’s words. Matters might have been different, however, had the Germans not moved so swiftly to take over the entire peninsula and deprive the Allies of any easy progress. The German takeover forced the Allies to reassess all their strategic hopes in the Mediterranean. But the manner in which the Germans conducted it also shone a harsh light on the mentality of senior Wehrmacht commanders as they entered the fifth year of war, and the lengths to which they were prepared to go in order to plug a gap in the Reich’s now beleaguered front lines. The Germans took over not only Italy itself, but also the Italian-occupied territories of southern Europe. In addition to the mounting pressures they now faced on the battlefronts, then, the German army and the Wehrmacht as a whole now had to take on a greatly magnified occupation commitment in areas that, particularly in the case of Italy’s former Balkan territories, were slipping dangerously from Axis control. They sought to meet this challenge with a baleful mix of divide-and-rule measures and sometimes savage terror. This did nothing to arrest the decline of German control in the Balkans; it did, however, fuel the havoc that was engulfing the region and its civilian population. *** In the event of all Italy trying to change sides, the Germans had devised Operation Axis. This was to be a full-scale military takeover of Italy and its southern European territories, intended to secure communication lines,

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disarm Italian forces and organize the region’s defence against Allied attack. The Badoglio government’s shambolic failure to conceal its negotiations with the Allies prompted the Germans to initiate the operation immediately. The majority of Italian formations at most command levels allowed themselves to be disarmed, and their personnel interned. General Balck, in Italy as acting commander of XIV Panzer Corps, claimed in his memoirs that ‘during the disarmament operation one Italian officer told us that he could only hand over his battery once he had fired it. “Why don’t you aim 50 metres to the right and fire into the air?” He did that and then surrendered his battery. Another battery commander shot himself. His people cried and wailed for him, and started a huge lament. Then they happily dispersed.’1 Farcical as this account may seem, such was Balck’s generally balanced post-war judgement of Italian troops’ fighting power that it is unlikely he was concocting such stories. In any case, the majority of Italian formations ‘went quietly’. This was despite the fact that most of the Italian army’s rank-and-file troops, less so its officers, were now thoroughly ill-disposed towards Fascism and the Axis. But on the several occasions when Italian units did refuse to comply with orders to lay down their arms, they were overpowered violently and often without mercy. Some of the most ruthless treatment the Germans dealt out to the Italians was the work of elite troops that did not belong to the army: Waffen-SS, paratroopers and ‘Brandenburger’ special forces.2 Many army-led commands acted swiftly and ruthlessly against the Italians, but not murderously. On Corsica in the previously Italian-occupied zone of southern France, for instance, Field Marshal von Rundstedt informed Italian troops that they would be ‘treated as irregulars and shot if after twelve hours they did not give themselves up’. He concentrated their minds further by bringing forward the deadline by two hours, and reminding them that ‘from Turin, the “Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler” is marching [on your rear]’.3 At least Rundstedt was giving the Italians an opportunity to surrender. In southeast Europe, and particularly in parts of Greece, the Germans sometimes failed to observe any such niceties. Responsibility for disarming Italian forces fell to the new commander-in-chief southeast, Field Marshal von Weichs. This new post, which had originally been created in December 1942, invested Weichs with greater powers than standard territorial Wehrmacht commanders. The importance attached to Weichs’s post reflected the particular size of the partisan threat in southeast Europe. In view of this, and of the region’s potential exposure to Allied invasion, the prospect of hundreds of thousands of armed, anti-Axis Italian troops at liberty this was not one that Weichs wished to entertain. When Operation Axis commenced, he ordered that, because Italian forces in southeast Europe had formally agreed to surrender their weapons, any of their troops failing to do so must be punished with all severity.4

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It was in the Greek islands, also within Weichs’s remit, that the Germans sought to make the most terrifying example of any Italian units that resisted. Such was the strategic position of these islands that the Germans feared the Allies would take them over amid the confusion of an Italian surrender, and threaten the entire German position in the eastern Mediterranean. They thus subjected any resisting Italian soldiers there to particular ferocity in order to deter their comrades from similar actions. In the Dodecanese, the Germans gave the Italians the option of surrendering beforehand. They overcame fierce Italian resistance on Rhodes, but Lieutenant General Ulrich Kleemann, the garrison commander, initially refused to execute captured Italian military personnel. However, his superiors then compelled him to do so. In the Ionian islands, XXII Mountain Corps likewise gave the Italian troops on Corfu the option of surrendering, but the 1st Mountain Division still seems to have shot many Italian soldiers who tried to surrender after the fighting.5 Nowhere was German conduct worse than on the Ionian island of Cephalonia. The army units that attacked the Italians there were the 104th Light Division, Fortress Grenadier Battalion 910 and, again, the 1st Mountain Division. On 18 September, the OKW informed Field Marshal von Weichs that, ‘due to the cruel and treacherous conduct on Cephalonia, no prisoners are to be taken’.6 Two days later, General Löhr got in on the act, re-emphasizing the exceptional nature of the situation and the need for a total lack of consideration.7 There is no evidence that the German formations attacking the Italians on Cephalonia even made them aware of what awaited them if they did not surrender. The most exhaustive study of the massacres on Cephalonia has concluded that about 2,500 Italian soldiers perished. Some were killed in the initial bombardment and fighting, but the great majority were murdered after being taken prisoner.8 In some cases the Germans did not even bury the bodies, but weighted them with stones and threw them out to sea.9 The 1st Mountain Division and the 104th Light Division had both fought at length in the Yugoslav anti-Partisan campaign; indeed, the 1st Mountain Division had also fought extensively in the east. The ferocity with which the war was waged in both theatres made the soldiers of such divisions more likely to be in full agreement with the ferocity expected of them in Operation Axis. However, some Italian soldiers from the groups that were massacred were able to drag themselves away, wounded, and find the help of the Greek resistance. Moreover, the Germans eventually spared a number of Italian soldiers on Cephalonia, together with medical officers and military priests.10 None of this, however, detracts from the fact that approaching 2,500 Italian soldiers were massacred after they had surrendered. This death toll comprised by far the biggest portion of the approximately 6,500 Italian soldiers who met this fate, the majority of them in the former Italian occupation zones of Greece and

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Yugoslavia. Around the same number were killed in the fighting during Operation Axis. Another thirteen thousand drowned when the transport ships they were on either capsized through overloading or were bombed by the Allies.11 Although the ruthlessly swift character of Operation Axis was in large part driven by strategic necessity, further influences gave the Germans’ conduct an even sharper edge. There was widespread anger among the military leadership that Germany had been knifed in the back by an erstwhile ally. Italy’s attempt to change sides in 1943 awoke memories of 1914, when Italy had shirked its commitment to the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary before later joining the side of the Allies.12 General Balck, for instance, bitterly raked over the embers in his memoirs, remarking that ‘for the second time in just a few decades Italy had broken treaty with its allies’ and even appearing to question its future commitment to NATO.13 It also reinforced the contempt many German officers and soldiers had felt Wilk regard to the Italians since their entry into the current war. For one thing, although the Italians had frequently inflicted cruel treatment upon the ‘subjects’ of their Balkan empire, still more so upon those of their African colonies, German officials had long regarded Italian imperial aspirations as a bad joke. Major General Edmund Glaise von Horstenau was the Wehrmacht’s official representative to the NDH government. In June 1941, he told Field Marshal Keitel: ‘if this laughable, inflated Italian imperialism is not liquidated during this war or on its conclusion, the war will have had no meaning’.14 German soldiers themselves often regarded their Italian comradesin-arms, however unfairly, as lackadaisical, slovenly and unsoldierly. Typical was the view of Unteroffizier Karl R. of the 5th Panzer Division when he described a brush with Italian soldiers in Greece in May 1941: ‘Yesterday we were in Patras. There we saw our first Italian soldiers. Correction – we’ve seen quite a few who had previously been captured. And these Italian types please us even less. A street patrol, for instance, of about eight men with machine guns and so on, was just walking through the streets, larking about, singing arm in arm, a civilian among them. That would be forbidden with us.’15 Of course, perceptions such as this helped feed the equally widespread, equally unjustified view that Italian troops were useless in the field. And during Operation Axis, the two German army group commanders in Italy itself – Rommel in the north and Kesselring in the south – issued a joint declaration along similar lines; it maligned the Italian soldiers and officers who opposed German orders to surrender as ‘riff-raff ’.16 Operation Axis was not about unbridled slaughter, however. For one thing, Rommel and Kesselring were at least giving the Italian troops the opportunity to surrender. In the northern Italian jurisdiction of Rommel’s Army Group B,

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Italian troops were disarmed more swiftly than they were elsewhere: in ten days, the army group disarmed eighty-two generals, thirteen thousand officers, and over 400,000 NCOs and rank-and-file soldiers. They almost certainly committed criminal executions as wel