War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942

‘Better three French campaigns than one Russian’

Fritz Köhler, a 20-year-old veteran of the French campaign, entered the town of Roslavl south-east of Smolensk on 3 August following a successful attack. Oil and petrol supplies had been torched by the Russians prior to leaving. ‘Unfortunately,’ he wrote in his diary that night, ‘there is practically nothing in this city to “liberate”.’ Gazing at the inferno of fire and smoke around him he declared, ‘it was a lot better in France.’⁽¹⁾

Nine days later, Obergefreiter Erich Kuby, on sentry duty with Army Group North, peered watchfully from ‘foxhole 4’ in a rain-soaked forest. His duty period was two hours by night or three by day before relief. Ahead lay a dead Russian soldier, one of several killed blundering into their position the night before. The body – some 5m away and covered only with a sprinkling of earth – reeked. Kuby resolved to bury him deeper during the next rest period. ‘Better three French campaigns than one Russian’ was the often-repeated catch-phrase voiced by the troops. ‘French beds and the lustrous surroundings were missed.’ The good days were over. ‘The expectation of finding both in Leningrad in the near future,’ reflected Kuby, ‘was replaced by foxhole positions 1, 2, 3 and 4 and so on.’⁽²⁾

Kuby and Köhler were articulating a viewpoint fast becoming prevalent among the soldiers on the new Eastern Front. This was ‘Kein Blumenkrieg’ – quite literally ‘a war without garlands’. No glory as there was after the war in France the year before, when victory parades on homecoming were deluged by clouds of flowers tossed by adoring wives and girlfriends while a grateful Reich cheered. Newsreels now mocked ‘so-called “Socialist Workers’ Paradises”’ in the newly occupied areas. Cameras dwelt on rickety filthy balustrades overlooking slum housing for Soviet city workers, while the commentary announced:

Much of the new Ostheer would have preferred that it remained so.

Russia was an unknown. Veterans of the French Blitzkrieg realised there was neither champagne, wine nor booty, nothing to ‘liberate’. The pitiless and total nature of the conflict quickly differentiated it from any other campaign experienced thus far. Any feeling this was a ‘just’ war was diluted by the pressure of excesses dubiously excused by National Socialist Lebensraum rhetoric extolling the survival of the fittest. Contemporary paternal and social democratic societies find it difficult to transfer their experience to the uncompromising ideological framework within which this war was conducted. The army that fell upon Communist Russia believed in Christ: 95% of the German population in 1939 had declared itself Christian, or from a religious order. Of 75.4 million (from 79.4 million) who had professed the faith, 41.9 million were Protestant and 31.4 million Catholic.⁽⁴⁾

Although cynical historians of religious wars would not regard this as auspicious, the Wehrmacht prosecuted the war with soldiers who had Christian caring families at home. Historical experience suggests that periods of protracted conflict are often accompanied by a certain corruption of standards of human decency. This assiduous process is often not immediately apparent to the combat soldier embarking on a campaign. Soon he is exposed to successive emotional experiences that trigger indefinable and often unrecognisable behavioural changes. It can begin by looking for battlefield souvenirs at one end of the spectrum to picking up useful military items such as binoculars and weapons and then even to stealing money and valuables from the dead at the other. This may be explained away by an incontrovertible logic that suggests a corpse has no need of possessions. Looting can in turn deteriorate to rape and organised plunder and later to murder, should the enemy get in the way.

The excesses of SS Einsatzgruppen behind the German front lines are well documented. Four of these special mobile units was formed and trained in the late spring of 1941 specifically to support Operation ‘Barbarossa’. The core of the groups were provided by Heydrich’s Security Police (Gestapo and Kripo) as well as from the intelligence apparatus (Security Service or SD), supplemented by small units of Waffen SS (the military branch of Himmler’s SS). By the middle of July convincing military successes hinted at the likelihood of total victory. Hitler, as a consequence, ordered the intensification of the planned pacification programme due to be conducted behind the rear of the advancing German armies. Security Police battalions were also attached to the Einsatzgruppen. A sociological survey carried out on one of these – Reserve Police Battalion 101 – revealed their unremarkable manning. In fact they were labelled ‘ordinary men’, consisting mainly of prewar police recruits rather than reservists. They came predominantly from the Hamburg area, considered by reputation to be the least Nazi-orientated of German cities. The soldiers were from less privileged backgrounds, 65% working class, while 35% were thought to be lower middle class. By virtue of age, all had been taught before the Nazi period but the majority were party members by 1942. According to their researcher, Christopher R. Browning, they did ‘not seem to have been a very promising group from which to recruit mass murderers on behalf of the Nazi vision of a radical utopia free of Jews’.⁽⁵⁾

War crimes, nevertheless, influenced the nature of fighting on the Russian front. The relevance had been recognised by the commander of the 58th Infantry Division laying siege to Leningrad in October 1941. The German soldier, he warned, was in danger of losing his ‘inner morality’.⁽⁶⁾ That this can degrade combat sustainability has been demonstrated by French soldiers in Algeria serving during the past colonial civil war and by American troops in Vietnam. Malaise induced by seemingly pointless, yet officially sponsored, violence reduced the justification of prosecuting the Russian war to German soldiers to one of mere survival. One veteran, Roland Kiemig, claimed after the war:

Another soldier, transport Gefreiter Hans R., gave a sobering description of mass shootings he witnessed during the advance into Russia. Accompanied by his companion Erich, the company commander’s clerk, they saw ‘men and women and children with their hands bound together with wire being driven along the road by SS people’. They decided to investigate. Aged 93, some 40 years later, his description of what happened was delivered in a precise monotone which consciously suppressed the obvious emotion he felt. Outside the village they came across a pit, 3m deep and 2.5m wide. Along its 150m length were hundreds of people, on foot and standing in open-backed lorries. ‘To our horror we realised they were all Jews,’ he said. The victims were tumbled into the ditch and made to lie in rows, alternately head to foot. Once a layer was in place, two SS men moved either side of the ditch with a Russian machine pistol firing automatic bursts into the backs of heads. Single shots rang out afterwards as they strode along the line finishing off the wounded.

The official attitude to brutality was permissive. Common decency in such circumstances was a matter of personal inclination. Right and wrong were clouded by ideological imperatives that were administratively applied. The impact of the Commissar Order, for example, became apparent through the conduct of numerous units shortly after the campaign began. Bruno Schneider from 8/IR167 was told by his company commander, Oberleutnant Prinz:

Schneider said, ‘the majority of soldiers from my unit did not follow this bloody order as closely as was required.’⁽⁹⁾ Individual inclinations were applied with variable results. Martin Hirsch, a 28-year-old NCO from 3rd Panzer Division, was castigated by a soldier from another unit while bandaging a badly wounded Russian during fighting around Brest-Litovsk. ‘What are you doing here?’ he was asked. ‘I told him I was bandaging a soldier’ but ‘he said it was not my job to look after these Untermenschen [sub-humans]’. Hirsch chose to ignore him. ‘He told me he would report me, but I never heard anything more from him.’ His view was that he was ‘quite a callous Nazi, and I was pleased that I never caught sight of him again’.⁽¹⁰⁾

In the German Sixth Army with Army Group South the Commissar Order had been passed down to battalion level. Killings after the advance began were common enough to be unremarkable. Twenty-four hours into the campaign, Panzergruppe 1 reported to the IC (Intelligence officer) of Sixth Army that both XXXXVIIIth and IIIrd Corps had each taken one political commissar prisoner ‘and handled them appropriately’. According to a 62nd Infantry Division report, nine alleged civilian irregulars and one political commissar, captured in woods north of Sztun, ‘had been dealt with appropriately as per the ordered directive’. Further shootings followed: 298th Infantry Division despatched a commissar on 1 July and 62nd Division shot five, and nine more the next day. The XXXXIVth Corps killed another with one further committing suicide after capture. Commissar executions in Sixth Army became routine: 122 had been ‘despatched’ during partisan operations in LIst Corps’ area by the end of the battle of Kiev. Shootings of 30 or so individuals were occurring throughout the advances.⁽¹¹⁾

Soldiers became accustomed to the killings, which altered values, transitioning to a form of group insanity. Combat soldiers, however, rarely kill for uniquely political or ideological convictions. Operation reports by the Einsatzgruppen and other official documents provide factual data and are designed to impress those elements in the higher commands who did possess ideological conviction. Whether they were representative of the Wehrmacht as a whole is debatable. The truth lies in between and is not as clear-cut as academics, quoting solely from documents, might suggest. Helmut Schmidt, a Flak officer, declared in an emotive interview after the war that not all soldiers were completely aware of what was happening. ‘Other people had different experiences from those generally quoted in many documents,’ he stated.⁽¹²⁾

No one is disputing the written official evidence or that atrocities occurred, but whether such experiences were universally shared at all times and at every sector of the front is not so certain. This alternative view shared by Schmidt (who was there) suggests soldiers were too young for political and ideological reflection. They were completely engrossed in the mind-numbing activity of surviving combat while enduring considerable physical hardship. Only much later did the extent of the crimes committed become hideously apparent. As such, they were unsuspecting ‘victims’ themselves of the totalitarian nature of the society to which they belonged. Soldier Roland Kiemig claims the truth dawned only after he had been captured by the Russians himself.

There was no time to think in action. In the ranks they became the victim of the common bonding required of soldiers to face adversity, and of a form of National Socialist ‘peer pressure’. Both pressures were sufficient to stifle individual predilections and often conscience. As Kiemig further explained:

Rudi Maschke, serving with the Pomeranian 6th Infantry Regiment, was even more emphatic. ‘Not following these orders,’ he stated, referring to the Commissar Directive, ‘would have cost us our lives ourselves.’⁽¹⁵⁾ Kiemig said, ‘you could get locked up and charged with a military offence’. National Socialism demanded unambiguous conformity. It preached, moreover, that only the strong should survive in a fundamentally competitive society. ‘If you were a “softie”,’ said Kiemig, ‘you would be treated very badly, ridiculed even, and I didn’t want that either.’ The only recourse was to conform.

What made soldiers accomplices?

The pressures on the German soldier

Fear for the German soldier was the same as for all fighting men through the ages: would he survive the next battle sound in body and mind? There was no shortage of time to dwell on the dubious prospect during the long journey to the front. This might last weeks as the advance progressed deep into Russia. Hospital trains offered the first disenchanting glimpse of what lay ahead, passing the troops as they moved forward on their painstaking journey to the rear. German soldier Benno Zeiser, a driver in a transport unit, started with a naïve view. During training, he and his fellows had been served a diet of victory proclamations on the radio, which led him to believe arrogantly that:

His first glimpse of a hospital train returning from the front quickly dispelled his ‘hurrah’ patriotism. ‘The orderlies began bringing in chaps with limbs missing, uniforms all blood, a mass of bandages, the linen soaked red on legs, arms, heads, trunks, and bloodless agony – distorted faces with sunken eyes.’ One of the soldiers on the train told them what to expect:

Psychological pressure builds up as the soldier approaches the front. The first visible sign is often sight of the enemy’s dead. Many young soldiers had never seen a corpse before. Werner Adamczyk, with a 150mm artillery battery near Minsk, became morbidly fascinated at his guns’ handiwork. ‘The repulsive scene caused me to shake; nevertheless, I found the guts to walk around,’ he said. ‘What I saw then was even more cruel.’ War quickly stripped the veneer of propaganda. Foxholes around him were filled with dead Soviet soldiers. ‘I shuddered and turned around to walk back to the truck’ admitting, ‘the reality of death was just too much to take’. He was troubled. What he had witnessed contradicted earlier briefings that suggested the Russian soldier was ‘poorly trained and not very much inclined to heroism’. Indeed:

Before long the German soldier realised the Russian fighting man was infinitely better than his superiors would like him to believe. ‘With this realisation,’ admitted Adamczyk, ‘my dream of going home soon receded.’⁽²⁾ German soldier Benno Zeiser was also taken aback at the sight of his first dead Russian. ‘Only such a very short time before, this must have been a living human being,’ he reflected. ‘I thought I would never get rid of the thought after that.’ Kriegsmaler (official war artist) Theo Scharf, advancing with the 97th Division with Army Group South, ‘passed a Red Army soldier, seemingly asleep in the roadside ditch, but covered in thick dust, face and all’.⁽³⁾ It was the first of many corpses they would all see. Familiarity bred a form of indifference with the passage of time. Benno Zeiser saw more and more Russian dead. ‘And it was not long before I found myself merely feeling they were lumps of soil which belonged to the earth they lay on and that they might have been there since ages ago.’ It was less upsetting to view them as if they ‘never had been alive at all’.⁽⁴⁾

Viewing one’s own dead was different, engendering an emotive mixture of bitterness, torment, fear and a feeling of acute loss. Werner Adamczyk recalled burying his first two friends in the battery. ‘That was the end; they were no more. I stood there in anguish’. Both had been blown to pieces in an exploding ammunition truck.

Zeiser felt ‘it was worse when you saw the first one in our own field grey… and you stare at him, lying there in the same uniform you wear yourself, and you think that he too has a mother and a father, perhaps sisters, he may even have been from the same parts as yourself.’ Prolonged exposure to the stark realities of combat corrupts the accepted codes of normal behaviour. Dead bodies became unremarkable. Zeiser continued:

The bizarre tenuously develops into the norm. Violence and death, cruel behaviour and the taking of life became unremarkable behaviour. Killing, on or off the battlefield, lay outside this category. Although ‘normal’ behaviour on or around a battlefield is a paradoxical misnomer, killing human beings – dispensing death – was a searing emotional experience. The impact in psychological terms is unpredictable. Such uncertainties are the only constant in this bizarre and fast-changing environment. Fear is the result.

This was the supreme pressure on individual soldiers. Not just dying but worse, becoming a meaningless and soon forgotten official statistic. Zeiser explained:

Fear of becoming a casualty was accentuated by the ‘strangeness’ of the very land the Wehrmacht had invaded. Families at home would have no idea where it was and what it was like, where they died. War correspondent Felix Lützkendorf, serving with an SS unit in the Ukraine, wrote:

War developed into a form of pseudo-tourism to many German soldiers, whose previous knowledge of the world had been cycling or walking to the next village or town. One soldier had described his campaign experiences in France in May 1940 in terms of a ‘Strength through Joy’ trip comparable to prewar sponsored Nazi party outings. Another soldier, writing in the assembly area before the start of the Russian campaign, described how his ‘long journey up to the edge of the Russian border’ had ‘enabled him to view half of Europe’ at no effort or expense to himself. Russia, however, offered few attractions. Three weeks into the Russian campaign a Gefreiter complained, ‘It’s not like it was in France here. We had everything we wanted there; here, there is absolutely nothing.’⁽⁸⁾ Another soldier observed cryptically that they had exchanged their previous ‘Polack’s (Polish) shacks’ for Russian ‘dog kennels’.

Physical conditions matched the rigours of campaigning. Soldiers accustomed to well-appointed barracks in Germany became increasingly depressed as the operation dragged on, outpacing the length and discomforts of all previous campaigns. ‘These immense plains, huge woods with a few dog kennels here and there, make a dissolute impression,’ wrote one soldier. It was ‘uninteresting to the eye’, with ‘sad-looking wooden huts, forests and marshes. Everything,’ he said, ‘seemed to lose itself in an endless expanse.’⁽⁹⁾

As the advance continued, so did apprehensions. ‘Orientation in Russia is as difficult as it is in the desert,’ remarked one soldier. ‘Only you do not see the horizon – you are lost.’ Another commented:

‘Where is this endless war driving us?’ asked 33-year-old Günther von Soheven, fighting on the southern front.

Soldiers were becoming homesick. ‘The distances grow immeasurably,’ concluded von Soheven, ‘but our hearts remain close.’⁽¹¹⁾

Determination to finish the campaign was, however, matched by an equal Russian stubbornness to fight on. It was not difficult to dehumanise an enemy who chose to resist fanatically within an alien landscape for no logical reason despite apparent defeat. National Socialist propaganda sowed the insidious seed, which fell upon the receptive minds of soldiers already exposed to racist doctrine. Unteroffizier Wilhelm Prüller, a motorised infantryman with the 9th Panzer Division, wrote on 4 July, ‘we have heard the most horrible things about what the Russians are doing to our prisoners’. The 8th Company of his Schütze Regiment 11 was badly mauled in a Russian ambush and lost 80 men. ‘The wounded Kameraden were worked over by the Russians with gun barrels until they were dead.’ Prüller’s anti-Semitic comments depersonalised the enemy. Like many German soldiers, he was surprised to encounter Russian women in uniform. Inside a Russian pocket they came upon ‘women, completely nude and roasted,’ who ‘were lying on and beside a [destroyed Soviet] tank. Awful.’ He indignantly concluded, ‘it’s not people we’re fighting against here, but simply animals.’ American soldiers similarly dehumanised their Japanese foes in the Pacific Theatre, and later the Vietcong in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s; a reaction, therefore, not unique to purely totalitarian societies. Prüller later observed, ‘among the Russian dead there are many Asiatic faces, which look disgusting with their slit eyes’. He was impressed by the strangeness of it all. In a park in Kirovograd the soldiers bathed in a small pond. ‘It’s curious to see the Russian women shamelessly undressing in front of us and wandering around naked,’ he wrote. ‘Some of them look quite appetising, especially their breasts… Most of us would be quite willing to… but then again you see the dirty ones and you want to go and vomit. They’ve no morals here! Revolting!’⁽¹²⁾

Tank gunner Karl Fuchs with the 7th Panzer Division offered a similarly maligned view of Russian prisoners of war to his wife:

German Wochenschau newsreels viewed in July dwelt on portrait shots of Mongol prisoners of war and other Asiatics. The commentary poked fun at ‘a small sample of the particularly horrible types of sub-human Bolsheviks’. These sentiments were reflected in letters sent home from the front. One signaller wrote:

Over-confidence upon meeting an allegedly ‘inferior’ foe, based purely on racist criteria, bred a contempt during the early stages of the campaign that was soon punished.

At the end of June 1941 III/IR9 was wood-clearing around a road north-east of the city of Bialystok, near the village of Krynki. A young Panzerjäger Leutnant, despite warnings to the contrary, arrogantly insisted on pushing ahead of the road clearance through woods probably infested with Russian soldiers. The Panzerjäger platoon pressed on and was barely out of sight of the supporting German infantry before the vehicles were heard to stop. Inhuman shrieks of pain soon rent the air, interspersed with shouted commands in Russian. Major Haeften, the infantry company commander, ordered a hasty assault to rescue the ambushed antitank platoon. The lead platoon led by Feldwebel Gottfried Becker encountered a scene of carnage they ‘could only gradually, very slowly, allow to sink in’. They were sickened by what they saw. ‘Here and there a body jerked convulsively or danced around in its own blood.’ The nearer the rescuing troops approached the macabre scene, the greater their appreciation of the atrocities visited upon the wretched Panzerjäger.

German soldiers ‘stumbled as if in a trance’ onto the road to survey a scene of utter desolation. ‘The swine,’ muttered one soldier while another retched into the road; a third man stood and stared, his body shaking as he silently wept. News swept quickly through the division. The regimental commander had objected to the Commissar Order, but the next political commissar captured was handed without scruple to the military police and shot.⁽¹⁵⁾

The Russian soldier, previously accorded scant respect, became on object of fear. He responded in kind to the excesses inflicted on him and his people. ‘I was always afraid of the Russians,’ admitted German soldier Erhard Schaumann with Army Group Centre, ‘not only because of that mass of humanity, but because they were so close to nature.’ Russian soldiers were the master of their environment, the forests and swamps, and were particularly adept at night fighting. ‘Whereas we,’ Schaumann said, ‘by virtue of our culture, were unable and hardly suited to react to everything like an animal, close to nature.’⁽¹⁶⁾ Ignorance of the enemy bred fear which, in turn, encouraged inhuman behaviour; as Panzer soldier Hans Becker commented, ‘bestiality breeds bestiality’. He felt, ‘there is no defence for the fantastic atrocities which we inflicted on their race.’⁽¹⁷⁾ Roland Kiemig, another German soldier, conjectured after the war:

On 1 July 1941, nine days after the start of the campaign, 180 German soldiers belonging to Infantry Regiment 35, Infantry Regiment 119 and artillerymen were captured in a sudden Russian counter-attack on the Klewan–Broniki road in the Ukraine. They belonged to two motorised infantry formations which blundered into a superior Soviet force of one and a half divisions and were overwhelmed. The prisoners, most wounded, were herded into a clover field alongside the road and ordered to undress. Gefreiter Karl Jäger hurriedly began to pull off his tunic having ‘had to hand over all valuable objects, including everything we had in our pockets’. Prisoners were generally compliant in this initial phase of capture, in shock and concerned for their lives. The wounded soldiers had difficulty undressing. Jäger recalled a fellow NCO, Gefreiter Kurz, struggling to undo his belt because of an injured hand. To his horror he saw ‘he was stabbed behind in the neck so that the bayonet came out through his throat’. Shocked, the other soldiers frantically removed their tunic jackets. Another severely wounded soldier was kicked and clubbed around the head with rifle butts. Totally cowed, the German prisoners were shoved north of the road in groups of 12 to 15 men. Many were half-naked and ‘several completely naked,’ recalled Jäger. Oberschütze Wilhelm Metzger said, ‘the Russians… grabbed everything we had, rings, watches, money bags, uniform insignia, and then they took our jackets, shirts, shoes and socks.’ Private Hermann Heiss had his hands roughly tied, like many others, behind his back. They were then forced them down into thick green clover by the Russian soldiers. Heiss described how:

‘Suddenly the Russians started to shoot at us,’ said Private Michael Beer. Bursts of automatic and machine gun fire swept through the separated groups of tied-up and semi-naked German prisoners. Karl Jäger, led north of the road, started with surprise as shooting broke out among the groups following behind. ‘Panic reigned after the first shots, and I was able to flee,’ he said. Handgrenades were tossed in among groups of officers and NCOs who had been singled out for special treatment. They suffered appalling injuries.

The next morning soldiers and Panzers from the 25th Division combed through the field: 153 half-naked bodies were found, their pale white skins pathetically outlined against a background of lush green clover. One group of 14 soldiers had their genitals hacked off. Among the corpses was a severely wounded Hermann Heiss. He was comforted by German soldiers. Glancing around the scene of total devastation, he ‘saw the head of my comrade’ who had screamed out in pain ‘was split open… Most of the others were dead’ or later died of their wounds. There were only 12 survivors.

Open trucks were driven up and stacked high with half-naked corpses. They were a jumble of tangled limbs grotesquely stiffened into untidy rigor mortis. Sunlight glinted from the hobnails of distended boots spilling over the side flaps of the lorries which had been lowered to accommodate them. A soldiers’ cemetery was established outside the church in Broniki. The effect on the soldiers of the 25th Division obliged to tidy up the scene of the massacre can be imagined.⁽¹⁹⁾ They quietly resolved to avenge their comrades.

Eye and genital mutilations were inflicted with such frequency on German prisoners during the early part of the campaign that it increased unease even further at the prospect of possible capture by the enemy. The rapidity of Blitzkrieg often punished reckless advances, so that prisoners of war were not solely a Russian phenomenon. Over 9,000 German soldiers were reported missing in July, 7,830 in August and nearly 4,900 in September 1941.⁽²⁰⁾ Although the death rate of Germans falling into Russian hands was to decline later, at this stage 90% to 95% perished.⁽²¹⁾ These numbers pale into insignificance compared to the fate of millions of Soviet PoWs, but they were enough to promote unease among German soldiers. Captured Soviet documents revealed the fate of some German PoWs. One Soviet 26th Division report dated 13 July 1941 observed 400 enemy dead had been left on the battlefield west of Slastjena and ‘some 80 Germans had surrendered and were executed’. Another captured company-level report, submitted by a Captain Gediejew on 30 August, referred to enemy dead, captured guns and mortars and ‘15 wounded men who were shot’.⁽²²⁾

Russian radio intercepts and documents provide a wide spectrum of reasons for disposing of German PoWs. Enemy soldiers who fought rather than surrendered and troublesome wounded were often shot. Unexpected tactical developments or a lack of transport to carry prisoners away might also seal their fate. Summary execution during interrogation might occur as a result of refusing to give military information or to encourage others to talk. German excesses, in short, were matched by a like response. Food was always short and therefore not readily available for prisoners. Rewards were also offered for inflicting high German casualties. Executing Nazis and officers also happened, manifesting outrage through ‘tit for tat’ killings. Resistance to the German foe was, in any case, to be prosecuted totally. A Soviet Fifth Army document dated 30 June revealed:

The practice was criticised for wasting intelligence as well as discouraging the enemy to desert. Maj-Gen Potapov commanding Fifth Soviet Army ordered his commanders to explain to soldiers that killing PoWs ‘is detrimental to our interests’. Prisoners, he emphasised, were to be properly processed. ‘I categorically forbid shootings on individual initiative,’ he ordered. Another document captured from the Soviet XXXIst Corps, signed by the Chief Commissar of the propaganda department on 14 July 1941, revealed ‘prisoners have been strangled or stabbed to death’. It argued ‘such behaviour towards PoWs is politically damaging to the Red Army and merely strengthens the will of the enemy to fight… The German soldier, when he is captured, ceases to be the enemy,’ it stated. The aim was ‘to take every measure necessary to capture soldiers and especially officers’.⁽²⁴⁾

However, the reality at troop level was that Russian soldiers – like their German adversaries – had been equally and quickly brutalised by the pitiless ideological nature of the fighting. Soviet PoW interrogations conducted by the Germans at Krzemieniec in July 1941 found:

Any doubts about what might happen upon capture by the Red Army were dispelled by the publicity that accompanied the capture of the Polish-Ukrainian city of Lvov, by the 1st Gebirgsjäger Division on 30 June 1941. Four thousand corpses were found in various stages of decomposition inside the still burning Brygidky prison and the former Samarstinov military prison. The NKVD had begun executing their inmates, primarily Ukrainian intelligentsia, within two days of the outbreak of war. Pogroms followed later, carried out by Ukrainian and Polish citizens against local Jews. The SD and SS contribution was to add a further 38 Polish professors and at least 7,000 Jews to the grim tally. Initially, however, public focus was on the disturbing crime perpetuated by the Russian Secret Police. German propaganda capitalised on an event made more convincing by the genuine horror the shooting engendered.

Maria Seniva’s husband was imprisoned by the NKVD. She said:

Jaroslaw Hawrych, similarly emotionally distraught, recalled finding her brother-in-law among ‘hundreds, thousands’ of corpses laid out by rows in the courtyard.

A medical Gefreiter with the 125th Infantry Division wrote home about the extent of ‘Jewish-Bolshevist cruelty which one would hardly deem possible’:

The soldiers were much influenced by what they had seen. It impacted upon both morale and morals. ‘If the Soviets have already murdered countless thousands of their own unprotected citizens and Ukrainians,’ wrote one NCO, ‘bestially mutilating and killing them – what will they then do to Germans?’ His own prescient opinion was, ‘if these beasts, our enemy, ever come to Germany there will be a bloodbath the like of which the world has never seen.’⁽²⁸⁾

The publicity surrounding the Lvov atrocity, reported in German newsreels and newspapers, accentuated the suspicions and unease already aroused within the public at home. Their concerns were transmitted to their menfolk serving at the front, magnifying the isolation and pessimism beginning to emerge at dubious personal prospects should the campaign become even more protracted. A Düsseldorf housewife confessed to her husband:

Classified SS Secret Service observations confirm the Ukrainian murders at Lvov ‘produced a deep impression of disgust’ during the second week of July. ‘It was often asked what fate must our own soldiers expect if they become prisoners, and what are we doing on our side with the Bolsheviks “who already are no longer human?”’⁽³⁰⁾

‘Kein Kindergarten Krieg’. Prisoners and partisans

Tens of thousands of prisoners were shown on the newsreels to cinema audiences in the Reich as commentaries gloated over victories. Of every 100 PoWs shown, only three would survive.

The first problem on being taken prisoner was to survive the engagement. The intensity of fighting often precluded this. The consequences of failure in tank-infantry engagements, for example, were normally fatal. German anti-tank NCO Kurt Meissner described what normally occurred:

The two biggest encirclement battles had netted 328,000 prisoners at Bialystok and Minsk during the first weeks of the advance and then another 310,000 were taken at Smolensk. General von Waldau, Chef des Luftwaffen-Führungsstabes, calculated that just short of 800,000 prisoners had been taken by the end of July. This was to rise to 3.3 million by December.⁽²⁾ Perhaps two million Soviet PoWs are estimated to have perished in the first few months alone.⁽³⁾ Artillery Leutnant Siegfried Knappe was astonished at the phenomenal numbers giving up:

Coping with such masses produced a pressure of its own. The 12th Infantry Division, for example, captured 3,159 PoWs between 31 August and 8 October 1941, which in numerical terms constituted about one quarter of its own effective strength of 12,000–13,000 men. The 18th Panzer Division, spearheading advances with Army Group Centre, took 5,500 Red Army prisoners during the first five weeks of the campaign, while its strength was reduced from 17,000 to 11,000 by August.⁽⁵⁾ Few soldiers were, therefore, available to guard prisoners totalling about the equivalent of 40% of the division’s own formed strength. Panzer units ahead of the infantry had to maintain the advance, hold down encircled pockets and secure masses of prisoners with ever-dwindling tank and infantry numbers.

The sheer scale of the problem can be measured against German infantry division strengths. By the end of July the Germans had to administer 49 enemy division equivalents in terms of medical care, transport and rations in addition to their existing order of battle. One single German division required 70 logistic tons per day of supplies, of which one third constituted rations.⁽⁶⁾ There were insufficient logistic resources available to maintain the advance and even less for PoWs. Little thought, apart from grim ideological intent, was given to the sudden and unexpected influx of prisoners. Artillery Leutnant Hubert Becker declared after the war:

Schütze Benno Zeiser, with a special duty Company, witnessed the outcome of officially sponsored neglect:

It was a problem that could not be ignored. Even if one German soldier was allocated to secure 50 men each, 18 battalions or six regiments were needed to administer the 800,000 PoWs taken by the end of July alone, a figure that would increase to three million by the end of the year. The requirement is not just to guard the prisoners; they have to be medically treated, fed and transported. Leutnant Knappe correctly surmised control had been lost. ‘I wondered at first,’ he wrote, ‘whether we were prepared to care for so many of them, and as the numbers continued to grow I was sure we were not.’ The resulting appalling conditions were to physically enact the planned ideological intent by default. ‘Our supply line did well just to keep the German Army supplied.’ Commented Knappe, ‘we could not possibly have anticipated so many prisoners.’⁽⁹⁾

Dehumanisation was the result. ‘Many Germans had closed their hearts to such sights,’ admitted Pionier Leutnant Paul Stresemann. ‘If I had known the rest of it… I think I would have run away.’ Despite the suffering, Stresemann argued, ‘I can say that in all my army service I never saw a single atrocity.’ Circumstances in themselves were creating insufferable conditions. ‘Of course, when so many prisoners are taken as in Russia there is bound to be some chaos in feeding etc, for everything was in a terrible mess.’⁽¹⁰⁾ Knappe thought ‘the prisoners seemed apathetic and expressionless. Their simple uniforms created the impression of a huge dull mass.’⁽¹¹⁾ Benno Zeiser recoiled from the horror of this institutionalised disregard:

Soldiers tend not to dwell overly long on upsetting sights, and the German troops were no exception, preoccupied as they were by the need to survive. Leutnant Paul Stresemann claimed, ‘I had no idea that many of the poor devils would end up starving or dead in the west after they had been marched away in vast columns many, many kilometres long.’⁽¹³⁾ Siegfried Knappe explained, ‘it was a terrible situation, but it was not that they were neglected – it was just not possible to feed them in such numbers and still feed our own troops.’⁽¹⁴⁾

He was wrong. The policy was deliberate. It was tenuously excused by pointing out the Soviet Union had not ratified the Geneva Convention Agreement of 1929 relating to prisoners. Germany, however, was bound to the general international law relating to nations, which required humanitarian treatment of PoWs in the absence of a standing agreement. Both the USSR and the Third Reich had ratified the Geneva Agreement covering wounded in 1929 obligating a clear duty to care for the sick and wounded.⁽¹⁵⁾

An OKW order on 8 July 1941 covering first aid for PoWs directed ‘Russian medical personnel, doctors and medical supplies are to be used first’ before the German. Wehrmacht transport was not to be made available. OKH insisted on further limitations two weeks later ‘to prevent the Homeland being flooded by Russian wounded’. Only lightly wounded prisoners who could be capable of work after four weeks were allowed to be evacuated. Those remaining were consigned to ‘improvised PoW hospitals’ staffed ‘primarily’ with Russian personnel using ‘only’ Soviet medical supplies. The directives were followed without question. Generaloberst Hoepner, commanding Panzergruppe 4, concurred ‘it was a matter of course that German medics treat Russian wounded after the last German wounded have been handled’. The 18th Panzer Division, part of Generaloberst Guderian’s Panzergruppe 2, ordered ‘in no circumstances’ were Russian wounded prisoners to be treated, accommodated or transported alongside German wounded. They were to be moved in ‘Panje’ wagons (horse-drawn carts).⁽¹⁶⁾

Soviet prisoners taken in the pocket battles were not only in a state of shock, many were wounded and injured. At this initial stage and thankful to be alive, they were often so tired and intimidated they did not consider escape. They depended upon sustenance from their captors while at this physical and psychological low point. This was the phenomenon that kept the massive PoW columns together. Leutnant Hubert Becker, a keen amateur movie cameraman, filmed such a concentration of PoWs and described the pictures after the war:

Becker, wryly pondering the fate of this mass of humanity filling his camera lens, admitted ‘what eventually became of these many, many, many soldiers I don’t know, and it is better that one does not know’.⁽¹⁷⁾ Some did what they could. One doctor working with the Ninth Army Collection Point (9AGSSt) spoke of ‘islands of humanity in an unbridgeable sea of PoW misery’. Nobody was able to cope. Requests for supplies, rations and medicines were completely ignored. At one camp near Uman in August 1941, some 15,000 to 20,000 Soviet wounded lay under the open sky. Schütze Benno Zeiser, guarding such a camp, gave an indication of what such neglect created:

Thousands of prisoners perished during the forced marches from the front, the wounded succumbing first. So many were shot around the vicinity of Vyazma, later in the campaign, that the commander of the rear area was uneasy about its impact on enemy propaganda.⁽¹⁹⁾ Sixteenth Army instructed its formations on 31 July not to transport PoWs in empty trains returning from the front for fear of ‘contaminating and soiling’ the wagons. The 18th Panzer Division warned its units on 17 August 1941 against allowing prisoners to infect vehicles with lice.⁽²⁰⁾ Schütze Zeiser claimed:

Conditions by early November 1941 could be described as catastrophic. Korück 582, a rear area security unit supporting Ninth Army, took over Army PoW Collection Centre 7 at Rzhev from its forward formation at the end of the month. Each single-storey accommodation block, measuring 12m by 24m, sheltered 450 prisoners. Disease was endemic because there were only two latrines for 11,000 prisoners. These had consumed all vegetation within the barbed-wire perimeter long before. Prisoners were subsisting on bark, leaves, grass and nettles until eventually isolated cases of cannibalism were reported. Watchdogs received 50 times the ration of a single Russian prisoner.⁽²²⁾ Inevitably typhus broke out in the autumn of 1941. The Health Department of the White Russian (Weissruthenien) General Commissariat recommended all infected prisoners be shot. This was rejected by the responsible Wehrmacht authorities ‘on the grounds of the amount of work it would entail’.⁽²³⁾

Such treatment was not without moral and morale implications for their captors. It accentuated the ‘dehumanisation’ of the foe which made the execution of such excesses more bearable. Soldier Roland Kiemig explained after the war:

There may have been doubts about the ‘justness’ of their cause, but they were not widespread. ‘We knew this was no defensive war, forced on us,’ admitted Kiemig, ‘it was an idiotic war of aggression and a glance at the map showed it could not be won.’⁽²⁴⁾ Pressure manifested itself in other insidious ways. Schütze Benno Zeiser stopped his friend Franzl beating Soviet prisoners. He said:

Franzl had suffered a nervous breakdown. ‘You must see it,’ he said, ‘I simply can’t stand this any longer!’⁽²⁵⁾

National Socialist propaganda had ‘dehumanised’ the enemy even before the campaign had begun. Russian commissars were separated from soldiers on capture and executed. Maltreatment and the indiscriminate shooting of Russian PoWs was not solely the result of specific orders from above, neither was it necessarily conducted in a disciplined manner. Division and other records indicate that ‘wild’ and often indiscriminate shootings of Soviet PoWs began during the very first days of the campaign. Senior officers objected to this on discipline rather than morality grounds. The fear was that excesses might lead to anarchy in the ranks and intensify bitter Russian resistance. General Lemelsen, the commander of XXXXVIIIth Panzer Corps, rebuked his troops in an order three days into the campaign, complaining:

He did not, however, question the ‘ruthless action’ the Führer had ordained ‘against partisans and Bolshevik commissars’. Soldiers interpreted his directive so liberally that a further directive followed within five days to curb their exuberance.

Lemelsen was perceptive enough to grasp that ‘scenes of countless bodies of soldiers lying on the roads, clearly killed by a shot through the head at point blank range, without their weapons and with their hands raised, will quickly spread in the enemy’s army’.⁽²⁶⁾

Excesses were commonplace. Gefreiter Georg Bergmann, with Artillery Regiment 234 near Aunus on the northern Finnish front at the end of August, witnessed the bizarre spectacle of unit vehicles driving by at high speed with Russian prisoners perched on the engine bonnet or mud-guards. ‘Most fell off because of the tremendous speeds and were “shot whilst trying to escape”,’ he said. Infantry Gefreiter Jakob Zietz spoke of six Russian PoWs captured by his 253rd Infantry Division company, who were press-ganged into carrying their ammunition near Welikije Luki. ‘They were totally exhausted as a result of the heat and their efforts and fell to the ground, unable to march any further.’ They were shot. Others died clearing mines or transporting ammunition forward into the front line.

During the evening of 27 August, thousands of Soviet PoWs were jammed into a prisoner collection point at Geisin near Uman. The compound was designed to hold only 500 to 800 persons, but with each passing hour 2,000 to 3,000 prisoners arrived to be fed and then sent onward to the rear. No rations arrived and the heat was stifling. By evening 8,000 were packed into the camp. Oberfeldwebel Leo Mellart, one of the 101st Infantry Division guards, then heard ‘cries and shooting’ in the darkness. The sound of firing was obviously heavy calibre. Two or three 85mm Flak batteries nearby had engaged a grain silo inside the barbed wire perimeter with direct fire, ‘because the prisoners had allegedly tried to break out’. Mellart was later told by one of the watch-keepers that 1,000–1,500 men had been killed or severely wounded.⁽²⁷⁾ Poor organisation and administration had resulted in chronic overcrowding, but the Stadtkommandant of Geisin was not prepared to risk a break-out.

There was no place in the ordered German military mind or tactical doctrine to deal with civilian irregulars. This had historically been the case during the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 and was repeated again during early occupation phases of World War 1. German soldiers considered it wrong or somehow unfair’ for the enemy to continue fighting in the rear after having been overrun or encircled, fighting on in a hopeless situation. In Russia, unlike previously in the west, the enemy refused to follow the convention of orderly surrender. Irregulars were termed ‘bandits’ in German military parlance and treated as such. Thousands of Russian soldiers found themselves cut off from their parent formations during huge encirclement battles. On 13 September 1941 OKH ordered that Soviet soldiers who reorganised after being overrun and then fought back were to be treated as partisans or ‘bandits’. In other words, they were to be executed. Officers of the 12th Infantry Division received guidance from their commander:

Such a command would not be considered unreasonable to soldiers sympathetic to the convention that warfare should be open and fair, giving the edge, of course, to German organisational, tactical and technological superiority.

German soldiers were incensed by snipers. Driver Helmut K___, writing to his parents on 7 July, complained his unit transporting material from Warsaw to the front had suffered 80 dead, ‘32 of them from snipers’.⁽²⁹⁾ Resulting repressive measures raised the level of violence. There was virtually no partisan activity in the Ukraine following the invasion apart from stay-behind Red Army, Communist officials and NKVD special groups. After the encirclement battle at Kiev, partisan operations in the Army Group South area considerably increased. In the Army Group Centre area partisan groups were to control 45% of the occupied area, but initially activity was on a small scale.⁽³⁰⁾ Sniping was the initial manifestation of resistance. During the advance to Leningrad, artillery soldier Werner Adamczyk was fired upon by people who were ‘not in uniform’ and ‘not shooting too badly’. He was surprised and indignant:

Any resistance in rear areas was always referred to as by ‘bandits’ or ‘civilians’. Karl D___wrote in his diary at the beginning of July:

Another soldier, Erhard Schaumann, described how:

On investigation they hauled out many people from the earth bunkers. Schaumann became reluctant to explain the subsequent course of events.

Peter Petersen remembered an old school friend, an SS Untersturmführer, on leave from the front. He had received ‘a terrible bawling out’ from his superiors for his reluctance to shoot prisoners. His personality, Petersen observed, had completely changed from his school days.

An atmosphere of uncertainty reigned behind the front. Soldiers felt beleaguered and isolated. Korück 582 – a rear-area security unit operating behind Ninth Army – was responsible for 1,500 villages over an area of 27,000sq km. It had only 1,700 soldiers under command to execute this task. No support was forthcoming from Ninth Army, which had been 15,000 men short at the start of the campaign. Partisan activity encompassed 45% of its operational area. These security units were often commanded by old and incompetent officers aged 40–50 years, compared to a front-line average age of 30 years. Korück 582 battalion commanders were almost 60 years old and their soldiers were poorly trained. Feelings of vulnerability and prevalent danger existed in these zones which, paradoxically, could be as active and dangerous as the front line.⁽³⁵⁾

Walter Neustifter, an infantry machine gunner, said, ‘you always had to keep partisans in mind’. Atrocity fed on atrocity.

Peter Neumann, an officer in the 5th SS Division ‘Wiking’, following a revenge massacre after partisan atrocities against German soldiers, explained:

‘When we marched into the Soviet Union,’ declared Hans Herwarth von Bittenfeld, a junior infantry officer, ‘we were regarded initially as liberators and greeted with bread and salt. Farmers shared the little they had with us.’ All this changed with the self-perpetuating vicious circle of atrocities and revenge attacks. Villages were caught helpless in the middle. ‘The disaster was the Nazis succeeded in driving people who were willing to co-operate with us back into the arms of Stalin,’ he said. Von Bittenfeld’s view was ‘we lost because of the bad handling of the Soviet populace’. Russian ‘Hiwis’ that worked with the Wehrmacht were not all pressed labour. ‘The idea originated,’ he explained, ‘from the soldiers, not the General Staff.’⁽³⁸⁾

Atrocities were an inescapable fact of life on the Eastern Front. Leutnant F. Wilhelm Christians also spoke of being ‘greeted with real enthusiasm’ in the Ukraine. ‘But behind the Panzers came the SD Security troops’ which was ‘a very sad and grim experience’. In Tarnopol, Christians recalled, ‘Jews were driven together, with the help, I must also say, of the Ukrainians, who knew where their victims lived. ‘My general’s reaction when I reported this to him was that it was forbidden, with immediate effect, for any member of his division to participate in these measures.’⁽³⁹⁾

There were a myriad factors that caused German soldiers to participate in or ignore excesses. They were isolated in a strange land, beset by numerous pressures and had of course to enact the disciplined violence expected of soldiers at war. Most had never left Germany or even been beyond their home districts before. They were then subjected to a form of group insanity. War corrupts, whatever the political beliefs, and a high level of culture is not necessarily a guarantor of civilised values. SS officer Peter Neumann with the 5th SS Division ‘Wiking’ recalled how a friend dispassionately executed a group of Russian ITU civilians. (These were Isspraviteino Trudovnoie Upalvelnnie – the Central Administration of Corrective Training – responsible for sending people to concentration camps.) He shot them with his Mauser rifle. Neumann observed:

Most soldiers would say that only those who were there truly understand the dilemma. The same men would have been labelled the ‘boys next door’ by their contemporaries. Police Battalion 101, responsible for grim excesses, was manned by unremarkable and ‘ordinary men’.⁽⁴¹⁾ After a soldier has killed, it is correspondingly easier the next time. There are criminal types in any cross-section of society that form part of the dark inexplicable make-up of human kind. Soldiers are not excluded. Indeed, condoned violence on the battlefield presents opportunities to those emotionally susceptible to evil and destructive acts. Artillery Obergefreiter Heinz Flohr saw mothers obliged to witness the execution of their own children at Belaja-Zerkow in the summer of 1941. ‘I had to ask myself,’ he said, visibly moved, ‘are these human beings committing such acts?’ Rape was also not always ideologically repulsive. Gefreiter Herbert Büttner stopped a medical Feldwebel molesting a Russian girl, but the same Feldwebel humiliated a group of Jews later by shaving half their beards and hair during a forcible eviction.⁽⁴²⁾

Dehumanising the enemy provided an emotional safeguard of sorts. If the enemy are not people but Untermenschen (sub-human), it matters less what happens to them. Soldiers adrift in a sea of violence within a lethal environment were answerable only to their company commanders and those immediately in charge nearby, nobody else. Perhaps it is unrealistic to expect combat troops to make moral choices. Faced with impossible human dilemmas, it is invariably easier to obey orders. Those unable to recognise there was a choice were ideologically and frequently officially absolved of the responsibility.

Dr Paul Linke, an infantry medical officer, had always thought the commissar shooting order a ‘latrine house rumour’ until his battalion commander ordered his close friend, Leutnant Otto Fuchs, to shoot one. Fuchs, a lawyer in civilian life, had his stuttering ethical protest silenced by his superior officer. ‘Leutnant Fuchs, I do not wish to hear another word,’ he said. ‘Get out and carry out the order!’ The quick-thinking doctor offered to accompany his hapless friend in his sad duty, and promptly led him to the corpse of a Soviet soldier he had earlier discovered in a ditch nearby. The Russian commissar was encouraged to change clothes and bury the corpse in his commissar uniform and then allowed to slip back to his own lines. Two pistol shots fired into the earth disguised the act. Linke ‘hoped it was clear to the [commissar] that both of us would be shot should this ruse ever be discovered’. The Russian gratefully disappeared into the night. The young doctor ‘felt the risk to maintain his honour as an officer was worth it – we do not shoot defenceless prisoners,’ he said. Fuchs had to report to his battalion commander and confirm the execution order had been carried out. ‘I’m sorry Fuchs,’ he admitted. ‘I did not want it either. In the final analysis I delegated my responsibility for the order to you.’⁽⁴³⁾ Common decency in the final resort was a matter of personal inclination. Some soldiers actually relished the culture of violence, but for the majority, the main bonding factor was the solidarity of the group with whom they lived. Survival depended upon one’s comrades. Right and wrong was not the issue, rather that there were variations in the degree of wrong.

Leutnant Peter Bamm, another medical officer, with Army Group South, observed that the Jewish massacres after the fall of Nikolaev were not approved by front-line soldiers, who felt that their victories ‘gained in grim and protracted battle’ were being used by the ‘others’ – the SS and SD. ‘But it was not an indignation that sprang from the heart.’ After seven years’ domination by the SS and SD, moral corruption ‘had already made too much progress even among those who would have denied it vigorously’. Protest was nullified by actions directed against families back home, as in the case of the wife of an Oberst in his division. Russian atrocities also had an impact upon the maintenance of emotional integrity. Soldiers would do whatever was required to survive. ‘There was no blazing indignation,’ Leutnant Bamm admitted. ‘The worm was too deep in the wood.’⁽⁴⁴⁾ There could be no turning back now. Should the enemy ever reach the Reich, there would be the devil to pay.

A degree of ethical disintegration resulted from atrocities which had a negative impact upon the moral component of fighting power within the Ostheer. Ideals, even those directed toward the ideological ends of National Socialism, were compromised. The Christian army that invaded Russia was behaving in the manner of the Teutonic Knights of the 13th century, portrayed in Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevesky. This had an immediate appeal to cinema audiences in an oppressed and threatened Soviet nation. Paradoxically, it diluted fighting power because officially sponsored brutality raised questions of a fundamental and compassionate nature, which led to a questioning of motive. This in turn affected willpower. At the same time the enemy’s moral component was strengthened. These indignities massively increased the resolve to resist. The German soldier began to realise in the absence of guaranteed success, for the first time in this war, that his very survival may be at stake. Conversely the Russian soldier knew he had no recourse but to fight to the bitter end. It was a pitiless prospect.

Unteroffizier Harald Dommerotsky, serving in a Luftwaffe unit near Toropez, was a witness of ‘almost daily executions of partisans, by hanging, by the security service of the SS’. Enormous crowds – predominantly Russians – gathered. ‘It may well be a human characteristic,’ he remarked, ‘this apparent predilection to always be present when one of your own kind is rubbed out.’ It made no difference, he continued, ‘whether it was the enemy or their own people’. Public hangings in Zhitomir often resulted in cheers as lorries drove off leaving victims pathetically hanging in the market place. One witness described how gaily-dressed Ukrainian women would hold up their children to see, while Wehrmacht spectators would bawl ‘slowly, slowly!’ so as to be able to take better photographs.⁽⁴⁵⁾

In Toropez a huge gallows had been erected. Lorries would drive forward, each with four partisans standing in the back. Nooses would be placed around their necks and the lorries driven off. Dommerotsky remembered the occasion when only three instead of four bodies were left dangling at the end of the ropes. The victim was sprawled on the ground, his rope broken. ‘It made no difference,’ the Luftwaffe NCO remarked, he was hauled up onto the lorry and pushed out again. The same happened again. Undeterred, his executioners repeated the ghastly process and yet again the victim fell onto the ground, still very much alive.

They did not. As the lorry drove away for the fourth time the rope snapped taut around the victim’s neck, and he kicked his life away as the exhaust smoke dispersed. ‘There was no wailing,’ Dommerotsky remembered, ‘it was sinisterly quiet.’⁽⁴⁶⁾

This was Kein Blumenkrieg – a war without garlands.[1]