LITMIR.BIZ

      Those on the walls joined in the lamentations, knowing nothing, but sensing unmistakably the feeling of a great calamity. (Chapter XIII)

       Bagration

      As von dem Bach and Dirlewanger were slaughtering their way through villages on what would prove to be the final day of Operation ‘Kormoran’, the regular soldiers of Army Group Centre were waiting nervously at the front. It was common knowledge that the Soviets were about to attack, but the troops were convinced that the main thrust would be directed to the south, against Army Group North Ukraine, and that they would be spared. When the young German infantryman Armin Scheiderbauer arrived in Vitebsk on 11 June 1944 he found the Byelorussian front surprisingly quiet. He was sent off to dig trenches, but felt an ominous and overwhelming ‘sense of discomfort’ out amongst the isolated platoons.

      For others the waiting was torture. Willy Peter Reese, a twenty-three-year-old Wehrmacht soldier who would die in the fighting around Vitebsk, described the reality of filling these endless hours: ‘Things and values changed. Money had become meaningless. We used paper money for rolling cigarettes or gambled it away indifferently.’ There was a feeling of impending gloom. ‘Only a few sought intimacy, most drugged themselves with superficialities, with gambling, with cruelty, hatred, or they masturbated … Our comradeship was made from mutual dependence, from living together in next to no space. Our humour was born out of sadism, gallows humour, satire, obscenity, spite, rage, and pranks with corpses, squirted brains, lice, pus and shit, the spiritual zero.’¹

      At times Red Army reconnaissance soldiers dressed in German uniform would penetrate the line. When one soldier shot at and killed some members of such a party he found ‘still clenched in their cold fists the opened razors with which they had planned to silently cut the throats of our sentries’.² At other times loudspeakers would blare at the German ranks from across no man’s land: ‘You are spilling your blood for Hitler. Nothing can save you from the carnage. Break from this army of Hitlerite oppressors, otherwise you will face destruction!’³ These messages were met by bursts of machine-gun fire. In truth, although many Germans feared that the war was lost, ‘it was widely accepted within the ranks of those fighting in the east that death on the battlefield was preferable to an unknown destiny in a Soviet prisoner of war camp’.⁴ Morale was low; sometimes new recruits would be caught ‘surreptitiously creeping along the earthworks, their hands held high in the air above the protection of the berm in hopes of receiving a Heimatschuss’ – a wound that would get them home.⁵

      The Russians were now equipped with new automatic weapons, including a short-barrelled submachine gun fitted with a high-capacity drum magazine.⁶ The ordinary ‘Ivan’ was both feared and, in a strange way, admired. The image of the Russian soldier in his loose-fitting brown tunic, with his greatcoat carried even in the hottest weather to be used as a blanket or uniform, and his boots stuffed with straw, had an almost iconic status. The Soviets were admired for other things, too. They could forage and survive on what seemed like almost nothing. General Guderian’s adjutant, Lieutenant Horbach, wrote a letter which was found by the Soviets on his corpse: ‘You ask my opinion of the Russians. I can only say that their behaviour in action is incomprehensible. The most remarkable thing about them, to say nothing of their persistence and cunning, is their incredible stubbornness … The life of the individual means nothing to them.’ Gottlob Biderman, a young Wehrmacht soldier, remembered coming across some Russians while he was searching for fuel: ‘Inside the tanks we discovered three shivering Russian soldiers who had been standing up to their shoulders in oil for several days. Having been convinced that they would be shot immediately upon capture, they had chosen to die in the freezing temperatures or face the prospect of drowning in horrible conditions rather than surrender.’⁷ Another, Harry Mielert, found two Russians hiding in a cellar in a burned-out village: ‘[They] had fed themselves on potatoes … they held out for four weeks, together with two dead bodies, their own excretions, their feet … frozen, and yet they still wouldn’t venture out.’ Erich Dwinger was amazed at the stoicism of the wounded Russians: ‘Several of them burnt by flamethrowers had no longer the semblance of a human face … Not a cry, not a moan escaped the lips of the wounded … The shapeless burnt bundles advanced as quickly as possible [for supplies]. Some half a dozen of them who were lying down also rose, holding their entrails in one hand and stretching out the other with a gesture of supplication.’⁸ But years of anti-Soviet propaganda had done their work, and not all German soldiers felt respect for their adversaries. One, Wilhelm Prüller, wrote that ‘It’s not people we’re fighting against here, but simply animals.’⁹ Another spat that the Russians ‘are no longer people, but wild hordes and beasts, who have been bred by Bolshevism in the last twenty years’.¹⁰ Erich Stahl felt that the Soviets’ ‘utter disregard for their own lives, that ruthlessness towards their enemy and themselves alike, was a riddle we had never answered’.¹¹

      The soldiers were frightened of the Russians for other reasons, too. The infantry commanders may not have reached the depths of depravity of a Nebe or a Dirlewanger, but their men were part of the same army, and had participated both directly and indirectly in the murderous policies in the east. ‘On the way we torched all the villages we passed through and blew up the stoves,’ wrote one retreating soldier. ‘We had been ordered to spread devastation, so that our pursuers could find no shelter … When we were issued a supply of cigarettes we lit them on burning houses.’¹² The Wehrmacht soldiers knew they could expect no quarter from the Red Army. Reese, who had left Germany two years before as a perfectly ordinary young man, saw how Russia ‘was turning into a depopulated, smoking, burning, wreckage-strewn desert, and the war behind the front bothered me still more, because those it affected were non-combatants’. Yet he and his colleagues made ‘a Russian woman prisoner dance naked for us, greased her tits with boot polish, got her as drunk as we were’.¹³ In Russia the normal rules of warfare no longer applied: everything was permissible, as long as any criminal behaviour was directed against the racial enemies of Germany. White flags were used to draw Soviet soldiers to their deaths; red crosses on field hospitals were used for target practice. Soviet soldiers retaliated in kind, so that the brutality and depravity spiralled out of control. Atrocities were committed by both sides in a struggle that had sunk into a moral abyss so deep that little came close to it on any other front in the Second World War.

      Despite von dem Bach’s best efforts, partisans were harassing the Germans at every turn. The ‘Banditen’ were hated and feared in equal measure, and the savagery meted out to and by them was terrible. This ‘was not fighting any more, it was butchery. In the course of brief

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