War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942

The Soviet counter-offensive

Soviet ‘Shock Armies’ were originally conceived as being particularly heavy in armour, motorised vehicles and automatic weapons. First Shock Army to the east of Yakhroma and the others created during the winter of 1941–42 were not so well equipped. When Kuznetsov, the First Shock Army commander, took over on 23 November, he expanded it from a single rifle brigade to one division, nine rifle brigades, ten independent battalions, a regiment of artillery and a contingent of Katyusha rocket launches. About 70% of the soldiers were over 30 years old. Likewise Twentieth Army was brought up to a similar strength. Tenth Army was approximately 100,000-strong, consisting of seven reserve rifle divisions recruited from the Moscow region. It had been on the march by rail and foot from Syzran on the Volga, some 480km away. Four other newly formed reserve armies were brought forward from the line of the River Volga at the end of November. Twenty-fourth, Twenty-sixth and Sixtieth were placed east of Moscow and Sixty-first was newly located behind the right flank of the south-west front.

Stalin passed over control of the newly formed strike element First Shock, Twentieth and Tenth Armies – from STAVKA Supreme Command to Zhukov on 29 November. Even without the addition of the reserve armies, the Soviet forces opposite Army Group Centre on 5 December were greater than when Operation ‘Taifun’ began, two months before. The German army group had been unable to replace its considerable losses in troops, equipment and especially leaders. Soviet armies in the Moscow sector, by contrast, acquired one third more rifle divisions, five times more cavalry divisions, twice as many artillery regiments and two and a half times as many tank brigades by 5 December than they had on 2 October.⁽¹⁾

Zhukov’s Chief of Staff, Lt-Gen V. D. Sokolovskiy, calculated the West Front armies numbered over a million men, slightly under the German figure (ie 1,100,000 against 1,708,000), but the latter also included its rear area elements. Massive losses of German ‘teeth arm’ personnel, tanks and weapons had seriously depleted the combat strength of its divisions. Artillery and mortar numbers were similar at 13,500 as also were 1,170 Panzers to tanks, but fewer were running on the German side. The Soviets had an overwhelming preponderance of 1,370 aircraft to about 600 German, with the further advantage of hardened Moscow airfields.⁽²⁾

The Soviet plan was to attack either side of Moscow and bite off the encircling fingers of the German advances from the north-east and south-east. Having eliminated the threat to the Moscow-Volga canal, First Shock Army was to strike west toward Klin and, in conjunction with the Thirtieth and Twentieth Armies, attack Panzergruppe 3 and the German Ninth Army in the north. Twentieth Army, supporting First Shock and combined with Sixteenth Army, was to assault from Krassnaya Polyana and Bely-Rast towards Solnechnogorsk (see map on page 225), capture it from the south and drive towards Volokolamsk. Guderian’s Second Panzer Army salient would be attacked by Fiftieth Army in combination with the Tenth, which were to drive due west, south of the River Upa. The initial intent was to eliminate the immediate German threat to the Soviet capital: as expressed by Lt-Gen Sokolovskiy, ‘to break up the enemy’s attack conclusively and give him no opportunity to regroup and dig in close to our capital’.⁽³⁾ Just under half the Soviet tank strength, 290 of 720 tanks, was placed at the main point of effort against Klin, Solnechnogorsk and Istra – the nearest German penetrations to Moscow. The Russians were not totally confident of success; a major Russian counter-offensive had yet to succeed in this war. There was, however, an instinctive appreciation that the enemy was probably sufficiently exhausted to be caught off balance.

This lack of balance was hinted at by Generalfeldmarschall von Bock, who declared on 3 December, ‘if the attack is called off then going over to the defensive will be very difficult’. The last card had been staked on Moscow’s fall. In fact, von Bock admitted, This thought and the possible consequences of going over to the defensive with our weak forces have, save for my mission, contributed to my sticking with this attack so far.’ Within two days Panzergruppe 3 reported ‘its offensive strength is gone’. It could only hold its positions if the already decimated 23rd Infantry Division remained under command. Von Bock was also informed by General von Kluge, the commander of Fourth Army, that Hoepner’s planned attack with Panzergruppe 4 should not go ahead.⁽⁴⁾ Late that same day Generaloberst Guderian advised that his Second Panzer Army should ‘call off the operation’. He said the ‘unbearable cold of more than −30°C was making moving and fighting by the tired, thinned-out units extremely difficult’. German tanks were breaking down while the Russians, did not.

Oberstleutnant Grampe, commanding a tactical headquarters with the 1st Panzer Division, reported the same day that his Panzers had been put out of action by low temperatures, which had dropped to −35°C. ‘The turrets would not revolve,’ he stated, ‘the optics had misted up, machine guns could only fire single rounds and it took two to three crew members to depress tank gun barrels, only achievable if they stamped down on the main barrel where it joined the turret block.’ His unit was not equipped to cope with such conditions. Cases of first- and second-degree frostbite were beginning to emerge. ‘The division,’ he assessed, was practically immobile.’⁽⁵⁾ The German front went over to the defensive, frozen inert at the very moment the Russian offensive was about to strike. Temperatures plummeted from −25°C on 4 December to −35°C on the 5th and to −38°C the following day. Co-ordinated operations appeared impractical. German troops sought only shelter.

The new Soviet armies had been assembled together for only two to three weeks. They were a mixture of fresh Siberian units, burned-out veteran formations and briefly trained militia or reservists. Many lacked equipment and there were shortages of ammunition. Officers and NCOs were inexperienced. Tanks were dispersed among about 15 tank brigades with about 46 machines in each. A high proportion of the units were fresh and unbloodied in battle, and, unlike the enemy, they were warmly clad. Their motivation was superior to that of the German, whose moral component of fighting power had bled profusely, perhaps mortally, since September. As in the case of the original ‘Barbarossa’ invasion, Soviet counter-stroke formations had deployed in such numbers that, even if they were discovered, the difficulty of moving troops and equipments to oppose them was impractical. A‘checkmate’ configuration had been created in these Arctic conditions. They possessed massive local superiority and, above all, total surprise.

In mind-numbing, freezing conditions during the early morning hours of 5 December, the Soviet Twenty-ninth Army attacked across the ice-covered Volga west of Kalinin. They penetrated the German Ninth Army line for up to 10km before they were checked. On the following morning, which dawned clear with temperatures of −38°C, the soldiers of the West and South-west Fronts went over to the offensive. Drifting snow and near-Arctic conditions seriously impeded the final build-up, resulting in piecemeal attacks which gradually achieved a cumulative and unstoppable momentum.

The IInd Battalion of Schützen Regiment 114, part of 6th Panzer Division, in the village of Stepanowo immediately east of the Moscow-Volga canal line, reported on 6 December:

A visit by General Model, the corps commander, to 6th Panzer Division headquarters at 10.00 hours, ‘produced a surprising direction,’ admitted the operations officer (1a). Model assessed Panzergruppe 3 had insufficient strength to hold the present line ‘against an enemy who had introduced an astonishing infusion of strength’ and was directing his main efforts against the northeastern flank. ‘As a consequence,’ Model directed, ‘the front must be shortened.’ Engineer rear area route and obstacle reconnaissance was ordered ‘at once’. The logistics (1b) officer was told to ferry back wounded and to begin the necessary reorganisation of the logistic rear support services.⁽⁶⁾ Model’s corps was about to embark on its first retreat of the war. It was the third disappointment the 6th Panzer Division had experienced short of victory. They were halted at Dunkirk in 1940 and again before Leningrad in September 1941. Moscow was also to be denied them.

Artillery soldier Pawel Ossipow took part in the barrages that preceded the Russian attack on 6 December. As the infantry moved forward, their inexperience became increasingly apparent. ‘Particularly the youngsters,’ he said, were exposed to a lot of blood and witnessed the horror of war for the first time as wounded men died in deep snow at temperatures of −30°C.’ Pjotr Weselinokov also recoiled at the sights of‘our first battle’. He likened it to an abattoir. ‘The worse thing of all,’ he reflected,‘were the freshly killed bodies of soldiers left steaming’ where they lay in the frozen temperatures. ‘The air was filled with the peculiar stench of flesh and blood.’⁽⁷⁾

On the second day of the offensive, attacks gathered momentum. Thirty-first Army joined the stalled Twenty-ninth Army grappling with the German Ninth Army to the north, on the Kalinin front. They failed to force a passage across the Volga south of Kalinin. Thirtieth Army, however, made a deep 12km penetration into the Panzergruppe 3 flank north-east of Klin. First Shock and Twentieth armies crashed into both Panzergruppen 3 and 4 on a front from Yakhroma to west of Krassnaya Polyana. Some gains were made south of the latter in desperate fighting. Tenth Army, meanwhile, struck Second Panzer Army at the east point of the Tula bulge with one rifle division and two motorised infantry regiments. The rest of the army was still marching up from Syzran. South-west Front’s Second and Thirteenth armies began to apply pressure at Yelets at the southern base of the Tula bulge.

Michael Milstein, attached to Zhukov’s staff, remembered that‘gradually confidence came, the first counter-attacks were showing results’. But this was at considerable cost. Artillery soldier Pawel Ossipow said:

‘One could actually see signs,’ said Michael Milstein, ‘that it may be conceivable the Hitler Army might be defeated.’ This was not expressed in the typical inflated ‘Great Patriotic War’ rhetoric. Milstein, a staff officer, objectively assessed the achievement as being ‘no miracle’, rather ‘it was the result of planned operational preparation… Certainly there were losses and disadvantages,’ he concluded, ‘but it was a properly executed operation.’ Lieutenant – and later historian – Dimitrij Wolkogonow, observed that the German Army ‘appeared out of breath,’ and that ‘the Soviet Army counter-offensive was fully unexpected’. This was also the case for the civilian population. Pawel Ossipow grimly pointed out, ‘we also saw a lot of dead civilians, old women and children.’ They were completely caught out by the sudden resurgence of operations in such terrible weather. ‘Many of them ran naked into the open during the attack,’ said Ossipow. ‘It was awful.’⁽⁸⁾

On 5 December German medic Anton Gründer was on duty until 06.00 hours in the Ninth Army sector.

Caring for the wounded in the confusion of the retreat was an almost unsupportable burden. ‘Dreadful scenes were played out before our eyes,’ admitted Gründer. Many wounded presented themselves for treatment with emergency bandages that had been applied more than a week before.

The German retreat took many forms, varying between disciplined order and panic-driven flight. Whatever the recriminations and debates between army group and higher headquarters over its extent, it continued to run. Motorised formations, which had achieved the glory of the advance, were fortunate in being able to withdraw to a plan of sorts. They had a chance. The infantry, who through sheer brute strength and willpower had underpinned the offensive and arrived last, were the most exhausted. Being foot-borne, their survival chances were correspondingly less. Caught in the open, with no prepared bunkers to their rear, many perished anonymously in hard-fought rearguard actions.

^{The Soviet counter-stroke before Moscow in December 1941 achieved complete strategic and operational surprise. By Christmas the Germans had lost all the ground they had won during the final drive following the Orscha conference. The first phase of the Soviet counter-offensive cleared the Germans before Moscow, but the second phase did not succeed in destroying the Ostheer. Soviet operational inexperience resulted in some reverses before a tortuous yet continuous German front was shored up by April 1942. Army Group Centre had lost its offensive capability.}

Leutnant Heinrich Haape’s leave train was halted, just as he was departing for Germany. ‘Every man is to return at once to his unit and report for duty,’ they were told. Muttered protests stopped when it was announced the Russians had broken through at Kalinin. ‘There was silence among the men now,’ Haape recalled, ‘nobody swore – the matter was too serious for swearing even.’

‘And where are the Russians?’ asked Haape, when he rejoined his division. ‘Everywhere,’ was the response, ‘nobody seems to know precisely where.’⁽¹⁰⁾

In the north the deepest Russian advance was made by General Lelyushenko’s Thirtieth Army. It soon reached the Moscow-Leningrad highway, jeopardising the link between Panzergruppe 3 and von Kluge’s Fourth Army. On 13 December Klin was reached, threatening a partial encirclement with First Shock Army advancing due west. It took two days of fierce fighting to clear the town. Sixteenth and Twentieth Armies, meanwhile, captured Istra on the original Army Group Centre axis of advance toward Moscow. Solnechnogorsk was abandoned by the Germans on 12 December. South of Moscow, Guderian’s main supply artery, the Orel-Tula line, was menaced by advancing Soviet forces as the Fiftieth and Tenth Armies succeeded in separating Second Panzer Army from von Kluge’s Fourth Army to its north. During the first phase of the Soviet counter-offensive, which lasted until Christmas, the Russian armies took back all the ground the Germans had won during their final drive on Moscow after the Orscha conference.

Pawel Ossipow pondered the cumulative impact of successive German setbacks:

Devastating villages was universal practice across the front for both sides. It had already occurred during withdrawals around Leningrad. Gefreiter Alfred Scholz, with the 11th Infantry Division, had participated in the systematic wasting of territory whereby civilians were pitilessly set outside in cruel freezing temperatures down to −30° and −40°C.

‘I personally saw,’ he admitted, ‘Russian women and children lying frozen in the snow’. As the withdrawal started in the central sector, the excesses visited on the population during the advance were repeated during the retreat. Obergefreiter Wilhelm Göbel, with Infantry Regiment 215 (part of 78th Division) south-west of Moscow, recalled the pain of constant withdrawals. ‘While accommodated in these villages,’ he admitted, ‘the Germans were taken in hospitably by the civilian population. They washed our underclothes, cleaned our boots and cooked potatoes for us.’ When his IInd Battalion commander, Major Käther, received the order ‘to burn down various villages and pollute wells,’ he remonstrated, stating that he ‘disagreed with such senseless destruction.’ But duty and an in-bred sense of order and discipline overcame his doubts. ‘An order is an order,’ he resolved. ‘We had to do our duty as soldiers and had strictly to obey’⁽¹²⁾ Each rearguard was instructed to torch villages as it withdrew. When Pawel Ossipow reached his own village near Volokolamsk he found his own house had been burned to the ground and his family had fled. There was some compensation in the fact that ‘liberated villagers always welcomed us and offered hospitality, which pleased us’.⁽¹³⁾

The Russians were winning and beginning to realise it. Infantry platoon commander Anatolij Tschernjajew, contemplating the pitiful state of German prisoners, assessed ‘to a certain extent they had been unprepared for a war against Russia.’ In his view:

The moral initiative was passing to the Russians. It was coincidental with a diminution of the moral component of German fighting power. A reversal they themselves were beginning to recognise.

The German soldier does not go ‘Kaputt!’… The crisis of confidence

By 7 December von Bock had appreciated that ‘the orders for the ruthless pursuit of the enemy’ were justified only if ‘the ultimate sacrifice’ demanded by his Army Group was against the very last of his forces’. This was demonstrably not the case, and this ‘mistake’ had forced his army group to go over to the defensive ‘under the most difficult conditions’. On the telephone the normally ebullient Generaloberst Guderian had described his situation ‘in the blackest of terms’. He told von Bock that ‘a crisis of confidence was taking hold’ among the troops and NCOs. When closely questioned against whom, he declined to answer, but constantly asked his C-in-C whether OKH and OKW were being given a clear picture of what was happening at the front. Visibly affected by this exchange, von Bock passed on his concerns to General Halder a few hours later. The Chief of Staff told him ‘not to take Guderian’s comments to heart’. When von Bock admitted he could not stand off a determined attack anywhere on his front, Halder speculated it was likely that the Russians were using cadres and untrained troops which they would otherwise have held back until the spring. ‘I suspect,’ he said, ‘that it will continue until the middle or end of the month and then tail off into a quieter period.’

‘By then,’ remonstrated von Bock, aghast at Halder’s insensitive appreciation of what was going on, ‘the Army Group will be kaputt [finished].’ Halder coolly responded: ‘The German soldier does not go “Kaputt!”‘ Von Bock ordered his planners to begin working on the practicality of a 100–150km withdrawal along a line stretching from Rzhev through Gzhatsk to Kursk.⁽¹⁾

Guderian was merely articulating the moral transformation that had occurred from the Ostheer’s high point at the beginning of ‘Barbarossa’ to the present crisis before Moscow. He viewed it in physical terms. ‘We are faced with the sad fact,’ he wrote on 8 December, ‘that the supreme command has over-reached itself by refusing to believe our reports of the increasing weakness of the troops and by making ever new demands on them.’ A typical product of the analytical German General Staff, Guderian concentrated on the tangible manifestation of the physical component of fighting power. They were insufficient in numbers and not equipped for the cold. Even after failure at Rostov, Guderian complained, ‘the same old business went on as before’. His criticism was directed at a failure of the General Staff to present clearly an accurate picture to the political leadership, Adolf Hitler. His men, meanwhile, carried the burden. He complained:

The ordinary German soldier, who had awaited the order to attack on the eve of ‘Barbarossa,’ was not the same man being ordered to fall back from Moscow now. Of his nine peculiar characteristics identified at the beginning of the operation,⁽³⁾ six were transformed in the crucible of the campaign. Change had accelerated between September and the end of the year. Success in previous campaigns had created an idealistic zeal that diminished with casualties. Atrocities across the front drove a wedge between those who retained decent personal standards versus a peer pressure to conform with National Socialist ideology. Resistance to the Commissar Order had come from liberal Weimar-educated older officers and NCOs who had been decimated by casualties or retired through illness brought on by physical and nervous exhaustion. Confidence following near-victories at Leningrad and Rostov ebbed with the realisation of failure. The surge in the size of the Wehrmacht following its victorious campaigns in the west had diluted previous quality, which was parcelled out among smaller but more numerous Panzer divisions. Casualties by September, followed immediately by crippling losses in the autumn and winter offensives, had removed the cream of the combat-effective and experienced leadership. The ‘teeth’ had suffered in disproportionate terms to the specialist ‘tail’, breaking up the combined operations characteristics of divisions. The ‘seed-corn’ of Blitzkrieg was dead.

The characteristics that had not changed during this process of disintegration were those related to the continued existence of the Nazi totalitarian state. Its ‘endless pressure to participate’ and its acceptance of ‘order and duty’, regimentation and acute sense of responsibility to ‘orders’ was holding the core of the army together during this crisis. Faith in the Führer remained, but would be increasingly questioned in the future on both the home and fighting fronts as the fortunes of war deteriorated.

The Russian war was to prove a catalyst for the German nation. There would now be a certain intangible conflict between those who clearly fought for the Führer and Nazi ideology, and those who did their duty for their country. Men who had been prepared to storm Warsaw, Rotterdam, Paris, Athens, Belgrade and now Smolensk and Kiev, questioned whether Moscow was really worth the price. The decline of the moral component of the Ostheer’s fighting power can be charted within Halder’s Diaries, adding weight to Guderian’s assertion that the signs had clearly been evident, but the Supreme Command, over-confident in its assessment of German fighting power, had ‘over-reached’ itself. As early as 3 November Halder was admitting that Army Group South was pessimistic’ and losing drive, and that ‘some energetic persuading would be in order to kick them’. On 22 November he assessed that the troops on the southern wing and centre of Fourth Army are finished’. The commander of the 13th Panzer Division and one of his ablest regimental commanders have had complete nervous breakdowns,’ he observed on 1 December. Nine days later he commented on Guderian’s ‘serious breach of confidence’ in the field commands, and that the ‘commanding General of the XXVIIth Corps is said to have failed completely.’⁽⁴⁾

The crisis of confidence is also reflected within the Feldpost. Soldiers, aware of censorship in the Nazi State, were still wary of free expression when they sent letters home. Gefreiter Fritz Sigel, complaining of frostbite in the fighting around Tula in temperatures of −32°C, echoed his commanding general’s concern when he wrote on 6 December:

Gustav Schrodek, stalled with the 1st Panzer Division one hour’s Panzer drive from Moscow, had written four days previously in his diary that ‘the troops’ trust in the higher command had quickly disappeared’. In his view, ‘morale has collapsed’.⁽⁶⁾ Failure to reach Moscow, which the troops keenly felt to be their due by virtue of casualties and pain, was deeply disappointing. One Leutnant from 258th Infantry Division claimed their lead unit had penetrated to within 30km of the city, ‘an indication of the heroism and readiness and effectiveness of our soldiers’. Casualties were not unexpected, and those that were lost were all loved’.

Front letters covered a myriad concerns, primarily discomfort, survival and an emotional reaching of hands back home. Most accepted the abrupt reversal with resignation. But the fire of June 1941 had gone. The retreat has taken a lot out of us,’ wrote a Gefreiter with the 262nd Infantry Division, with constantly overstretched nerves, sometimes I do not want to go on.’ He longed for a little peace at Christmas and particularly my post!’ But he would fight on. ‘My dearest,’ he continued, some very hard days lie behind us, but now we have overcome all that.’ Realising his letter was unlikely to arrive home until the New Year, he concluded on an optimistic note. ‘The political situation nevertheless is now crystal clear,’ he wrote, ‘it can only result in victory!’ Whatever the blind faith, the Soviet offensive had come as a brutal surprise. Soldiers were irritated that the ‘higher-ups’ could have got them into such a mess. Oberleutnant Karl Moltner, a Panzer corps staff officer, stated indignantly in a postwar interview:

There was now a parting of ways. The moral component would never be restored to its original state of June 1941. One fought for survival or the Führer, occasionally together, but never with the same idealistic purpose with which the campaign had begun. As the retreat gathered momentum only one objective preoccupied the German soldier – to live.

The German Army in retreat

The potential for the complete destruction of German divisions was unprecedented in this war and the deep Soviet penetrations of Army Group Centre’s flanks either side of Moscow threatened to achieve just that. Leutnant Georg Richter, having departed Putschki, 30km from Moscow, on 6 December, recorded two days later, until now, the retreat is proceeding to plan.’ It was easier for vehicle-borne troops. On the road moving west with Panzergruppe 4 there was constant danger from their northern flank that Russian spearheads would break through in the direction of Klin. Temperatures varied between −6°C and −15°C, with fog and snowfalls. Petrol shortages necessitated frequent halts. Richter observed ‘a seemingly endless column of vehicles stretching before him’ on 13 December when they came across lines of blackened German vehicles, burned out during a recent Russian break-through. From the edge of the wood, Richter was suddenly aware of a sinister ‘Urra! Urra!’ sound.

Some of his own men were crawling back along the roadside ditch. ‘One of them, the oldest man in our battery, was shot and killed, it was a sorry affair.’ Richter gathered about 10 men together and tried to fight back, but the German armoured cars escorting the convoy ‘did not show their brave side’. They merely ‘blazed away from where they were,’ according to Richter, ‘at the edge of the wood, where there were no more Russians’. The group fell back to a neighbouring village. Nothing could be done. After darkness fell it was suddenly illuminated by the flash of an exploding ammunition lorry, which had been smouldering for hours. ‘We could not rescue our vehicles,’ said Richter, at least 25 others were littered about, criss-cross around the road.’

The following day the route was reported as fought clear. Passing the ambush site they noticed food and other items scattered about the road. ‘Anything usable had been taken by the Russians,’ Richter observed, or snatched up by our own Landser passing by.’ The march continued over subsequent days. Abandoned vehicles were burned where they stopped. ‘It was such a shame,’ Richter commented. ‘One often saw how the crew would gather together the essentials and then set off on foot.’ He was especially depressed, as an artillery officer, by the abandonment and destruction of guns. Superhuman effort had been expended to get them this far. ‘In front of Petrowskoje is a sea of vehicles,’ he wrote on 16 December. They had driven out of the town and parked in columns. At first there were 10 rows, then 15 and so on, with the 5th Panzer Division, the 1st Panzer Division, 2nd Panzer Division, 14th Infantry Division and everything else all in between.’

Ar attacks became increasingly persistent as the march continued. ‘Single and very daring Ratas grazed the treetops and then turned and dived on us, this time with twinkling machine guns blazing at us.’ Everyone sought cover until the infantry mustered courage to fire back with machine guns. ‘One stood with his legs apart, his companion placed the machine gun on his shoulder and “rattattatt”a Rata is shot down,’ said Richter. Traffic jams built up around vehicles which broke down either because of the cold or lack of petrol. They were burned. ‘Why has the column stopped?’ Richter would ask. ‘It was always the same, one went forward to investigate and found, after walking past a kilometre of vehicles, the driver asleep in his cab.’⁽¹⁾

Opinion concerning the retreat varied with individual experience. Horst Orlov, a Panzer company commander who had been close enough to Moscow to see its towers ‘lit by the sun’, was emphatic about the disciplined nature of the retreat. He declared during a postwar interview:

Leutnant Adolf Stamm with the Flak artillery recalled ‘awful days in front of Moscow, suffering in temperatures below −35°C and sometimes even −40°C.’ But he remembered the retreat was generally under control.

There was total unfamiliarity with the tactical handling of a withdrawal. The German Army had never practised it in the prewar period and until now had never experienced the need to execute it. Scenes observed by Leutnant Richter, retreating with Panzergruppe 4, were repeated along Panzergruppe 3’s route. ‘Discipline is beginning to let up,’ the latter observed in a later operations report.

Leutnant Richter’s unit, moving steadily westwards, had begun to speed up by 17 December. ‘But one misses the orderly hand of the High Command,’ he stated. Everything was mixed up. ‘Every vehicle is from another unit, another division.’ Morale was falling. ‘One heard the private soldiers often asking: “Where are the commanders? Will nobody create some order here?”‘ Richter felt they had a point because‘you seldom saw a high-ranking officer’. His sentiment was echoed by the Panzergruppe 3 headquarters staff:

High Command was barely able to interpret and cope with a constant stream of reports across the front, all identifying previously unreported new Russian units. An advisory OKH letter was despatched to staffs to counter alarmist reports. It read: ‘The large number of enemy units identified sometimes had a paralysing effect on our leadership,’ and instructed, ‘the leadership must not be allowed to fall into a numbers psychosis’. More assessments were required. Staffs were directed to measure the combat power of often poorly trained and equipped Soviet reserve units instead of counting off the quantities, while ignoring the underlying qualities of opposing divisions. ‘Intelligence officers must be trained to be discriminating,’ the report insisted. Troops at the front meanwhile felt neglected. Leutnant Richter complained, ‘the trouble is that nobody feels responsible if the Russians come.’ When they did, we’re off! was the solution’.⁽⁴⁾

Still the ragged German columns fell back. One 7th Panzer Division officer said we had set off from Suwalki on 22 June 1941 with three complete battalions (Abteilungen) numbering 270 tanks, now we have only 10 fighting vehicles led by the regimental commander himself.’ There were no heavy PzKpfwIVs: ‘the last one had broken down and was blown up’. The signals battalion had lost 70 vehicles since the campaign began. Its second company had only 10 of 23 signal detachments left, the rest lost through breakdown or enemy action.⁽⁵⁾ Another veteran claimed the division ‘hardly looked like a military formation’ marching back on 10 December. Some men rode, others were on Panje sledges, the mass were on foot. The Panzer regiment had converted some tank crews to infantry. Only the bare necessities were carried: emergency rations and a rifle. Many fell out of the line with frostbite. One infantry officer from the 6th Schützen Regiment described the exhausting routine resisting constant Russian attempts to cut the Klin-Jaropoletz road near the River Lama.

Another Panzer officer ruefully admitted, ‘this breaking contact with the enemy and then retreating through a region long regarded as the administrative rear zone was not to the taste of the German soldier.’ Morale plummeted because, as the 20th Panzer Division officer explained, ‘being required to fall back long distances created fertile ground for encouraging panicky and disturbing rumours.’

The lot of motorised formations paled into insignificance compared to that endured by the infantry. ‘One look at the infantry,’ declared a 20th Panzer Division soldier, ‘was enough to change our minds if we ever felt compelled to complain.’ He added:

Infantry Unteroffizier Rolf Müllender said‘nobody had reckoned on’ the sudden counter-offensive on 6 December. His unit north of Moscow was quickly bypassed. ‘A ski battalion whooshed by and we did not have a clue what had happened,’ he said.

Infantry rearguards, such as the remnants of Leutnant Haape’s Infantry Regiment 18, faced formidable problems. Strongpoints were established around villages and some attempt made to interlock weapon systems. Soldiers adapting to extreme conditions realised that weapons, once thawed out and dry-cleaned of lubrication, could fire more reliably. Small arms were kept warm in village ovens until needed. ‘In any case,’ a wiser Haape assessed, ‘it’s damned difficult for troops to attack over open snowfields in the face of an alert enemy.’

These more effective German tactics contributed to rising casualties among attacking Soviet units. Russian officers and NCOs were tactically amateurish compared to their German counterparts. Commanders tended to assign wide frontages, as much as 9–14km for a rifle division, dispersing forces, equipment and tanks evenly across the front. Tanks were placed in support of infantry, in preference to concentrating on narrow breakthrough areas or massing on main advance routes. Such shortcomings diluted combat power and weakened the Russian capacity to strike swiftly into German rear areas with sizeable mobile forces. Snow, ice and near-Arctic conditions impeded cross-country mobility. The consequence was frontal headlong assaults against flimsy German positions, which could have been infiltrated or simply bypassed.

The Russians were well aware that ‘the German soldier was poorly clad for winter operations’. A later staff report observed, ‘he sat most of the time in warmed shelters or in buildings prepared for defence; he preferred to die in the warmth than to die in the cold.’⁽⁹⁾ Russian artillery was generally employed to demolish this essential shelter. But the inevitable bunching of infantry on the objective, a feature of inexperience, was severely punished by the interlocking fire systems the Germans faultlessly created. General Zhukov felt obliged to issue a curt directive to West Front commanders within three days of the offensive to desist from profligate frontal attacks. ‘Especially created shock groups had been drawn into heavy and bloody frontal attacks,’ he later complained. The advance of the Thirtieth and First Shock Armies was held up in the Klin area due to such tactics. He called on commanders ‘to persuade their troops to bypass strongpoints of the enemy and pursue him relentlessly.’⁽¹⁰⁾

Primitive attempts to encircle German units often missed, or breakthroughs were not followed up by commanders fearful of German counter-measures on their flanks. The strongpoint system maximised German resources and experience, effectively networking their automatic weapons and artillery with a few Panzers in a way the Russians could not. Many German units owed their subsequent survival, despite a considerable mauling, to Soviet tactical failings and inexperience at the higher operational level to combine resources effectively enough to create successful encirclements.

German soldiers were driven by a stark philosophy simply to survive. Leutnant Haape’s regimental commander explained:

A ‘scorched-earth’ policy was conducted as rearguards retreated from village to village behind Kalinin. The falling darkness was lit from the bright flames of burning villages,’ observed Werner Pott, writing a letter home, ‘in a house which would be up in flames in half an hour.’ His unit was holding ‘a long thin wedge’ sticking out into the enemy line.

‘Filth, vermin and other unpleasantries’ pervaded their lives. But beyond this it was the sight of the civilian population condemned to death by hunger or freezing that affected Pott the most, as they burned all villages through which they retreated. He described the scene:

Werner Pott, a 19-year-old former Hamburg student, concluded his philosophical letter with a terse statement. ‘Now we’re off again to fight on; the village is already burning from end to end.’⁽¹²⁾

Wilhelm Göbel with the 78th Infantry Division witnessed the same gloomy spectacle. ‘The nights presented an awful sight,’ he said, with the entire horizon glowing red from the fires of burning villages.’ He recalled an Unteroffizier Müller from Infantry Regiment 215, who had been given a stinging rebuke for not entirely burning the village of Dolginino, north of Mozhaisk, ‘because the weeping and crying had become too much for him’. Göbel was emphatic: every rearguard had the order to burn the village to the ground as it left.’ The consequence for the inhabitants left behind with no shelter in near-Arctic conditions was clear. They were thereby totally delivered to the mercies of the cold,’ Göbel admitted.⁽¹³⁾ Leutnant Haape described what these −45°C temperatures were like. ‘Every time we inhaled the frozen air our bodies lost heat,’ he said, ‘and the cold seemed to penetrate the marrow of our bones until walking became a stiff and awkward business.’ Nevertheless, Infantry Regiment 18 continued to burn villages as it fell back from Kalinin.

Christmas was a sentimental time for the German soldier. Twenty-two-year-old infantryman Harald Henry with Ninth Army sought anxiously to deliver a letter to his parents in time for Christmas. He was concerned that the ‘dry reports’ they were getting in Germany were not the true picture, and admitted that his ‘Christmas letter’ written on 3 December ‘says too little also’. On 7 December he told them he was in poor health, with dysentery and septic lice bites, but ‘I am alive,’ he continued, ‘and uninjured, which gives me some hope to keep going’. Despite the pressures of everyday front life, Harald Henry felt an imperative to write home and stay in touch. ‘Greetings from 11.12,’ he wrote, ‘impossible to write – Harald.’ Another short note followed on 13 December and he managed a further letter on the 21st which included these last few lines:

The fighting strength of a company was normally about 176 men. On the day before Christmas Eve, Harald Henry was shot in the stomach during a tank infantry battle north-west of Moscow. The young man who had held a brief doctorate at Berlin University did not survive his wounds.⁽¹⁵⁾

Panzer officer Helmut von Harnack, already twice wounded, managed to extricate an infantry battalion under intense Russian pressure with his company of mixed Panzers and self-propelled guns. ‘It was unforgettable,’ he wrote, ‘the battalion commander, out of breath, kept calling out “My best Christmas present ever!”‘ On Christmas Eve von Harnack received the gift of life himself. As he climbed down from his Panzer to check over one of his broken drive wheels ‘my Panzer was rammed by a heavy Russian tank.’ His elation was, however, short-lived. Within a month he was dead.⁽¹⁶⁾

The German sentimental view of Christmas lay in cruel juxtaposition to, and starkly emphasised, the reversal of fortunes compared to the more successful previous year. Panzer Leutnant F. W. Christians admitted, ‘Christmas was a particularly emotional experience for us German soldiers in such conditions.’ The Russians, according to artillery soldier Pawel Ossipow, made the most of it also.

Will Thomas, a German infantry NCO platoon commander, wrote to his wife on the second day of Christmas, cynically describing ‘the best Christmas Day of my life’, during which:

The unit was surrounded. Thomas ended his letter with a prescient confirmation of his love, writing even in death we will never be apart’. He was killed the following month.⁽¹⁸⁾

Atrocities continued unabated. Ludwig Frhr von Heyl, a reconnaissance patrol commander, assessed that the campaign was certainly no gentleman’s war’; it was in fact more like a punitive’ expedition. ‘What was the point of it all?’ he asked.

Both sides were guilty of this. Gefreiter Vetter’s unit was surrounded by Russians on the second day of Christmas, in temperatures of −35°C. Nevertheless, 3,000 Russian PoWs were taken out of their prison camp at nearby Kaluga and driven toward Roslavl. Vetter observed:

Soviet prisoners were transported to the rear by rail, in open goods wagons, even after the retreat had started. Exposed to cold, rain and snow, up to 20% perished before they reached their destination. One-fifth of 5,000 Russian PoWs transported over 200km from Bobruisk to Minsk between 20 and 21 November froze to death. Obergefreiter Franz Wesskallnies, with 161st Infantry Division, saw Soviet prisoners arriving at Ebenrode in East Prussia in mixed open and enclosed goods wagons in temperatures of −18°C. The cars were so overfilled the prisoners could not lie down, and had to sit there [in the open] for six days with no food.’ They were so hungry and thirsty that they subsisted on snow and grease scraped from the wagon wheels. ‘Several lorries,’ Wesskallnies said, were required to take away the bodies’ of Red Army men found in every compartment. When they arrived at the camp there was no accommodation ready. Prisoners were obliged to dig holes inside the perimeter to gain protection against the elements.⁽²¹⁾

German soldiers caught up in the retreat reaped the whirlwind of these excesses. Quarter on the Eastern Front was rarely given or, for that matter, anticipated. At the end of December the port town of Feodosia on the Crimean Peninsula was overrun by a surprise Russian amphibious assault. The resident German 46th Division hurriedly evacuated, abandoning 160 severely wounded cases in the Feodosia hospitals. When the town was recaptured in February 1942, the ice-blackened corpses of these wounded littered the beach alongside the hospital by the Black Sea. They had been thrown out of second floor windows onto the sand and hosed down with water so they froze to death in the sub-arctic temperatures.⁽²²⁾

During the early morning hours of 27 December Amadeo Casanova, a member of the Spanish ‘Blue Division’, was defending a position with German troops north of Novgorod. One of the Spanish companies was attacked and encircled by the Russians. A rapid counter-attack was mounted to extract them, and during this fighting a Spanish lieutenant and four soldiers were wounded and had to be left behind. ‘Shortly after,’ Casanova testified, we found them dead. In all cases the Russians had nailed their heads to the ground with pickaxes.’⁽²³⁾

There was dread throughout the retreat at the prospect of capture by the Russians. Eye gougings, genital mutilations and arbitrary shootings continued. ‘Fear of what would happen if captured by the Soviets,’ remarked one regimental history, was what kept the German soldier on his legs’; adding, ‘no small number shot themselves when in doubt.’⁽²⁴⁾ It was another nagging fear eroding morale and gnawing at nerves, magnifying further the desperate situation the troops felt themselves to be in. On 20 December Oberarzt Hans-Georg Suck’s battalion, retreating with Guderian’s Second Panzer Army, had fallen back to Plawsk, south of Tula. Lights had not been allowed within the column, which was being pursued by Soviet ski troops. As they moved through an unknown village the Panje wagons being used for the wounded and ammunition began to skid and slide over an uneven part of the road. Such an expanse of sheet ice was unusual in a village main street and merited investigation. Suck shone his pocket lamp on the surface of the road and recoiled in horror. A naked corpse stared back at him through the shimmering ice. ‘We found several naked bodies lined up next to each other’ under the ice, he said. There was no time to investigate the scene minutely because the enemy was in hot pursuit and closing. They realised they were German ‘because there were pieces of German uniform scattered by the roadside’. The soldiers were much depressed and alarmed by this gruesome discovery in temperatures of −42°C to −48°C. ‘Our comrades,’ he surmised, must have had to undress in the road, were made to lie down in the street, and then covered with water so as to construct a stretch of road!’⁽²⁵⁾

Fear and comradeship kept German units intact. Leutnant Haape, retreating with Infantry Regiment, 18 said:

Leutnant Erich Mende concurred, stating, ‘only one thing steadied the nerves, and that to a lesser or greater degree sustained you, and that was a sense of comradeship.’ Everything else was otherwise subsumed in the ‘awful automation of war’. He said:

More than simply a will to survive was required to weld the German front together. As the army group fell back, a vitriolic debate raged between the operational army groups staffs and the strategic (OKH and OKW) level staffs to identify a way out of the crisis. By the third week in December, deep Soviet penetrations on both flanks of Army Group Centre were threatening to develop into a double envelopment of the entire German Central Front. There was a stark choice: retreat or fight. The former was the course currently being conducted and favoured by German field commanders, a prompt and extensive withdrawal to a suitable defence line. This had been identified as roughly the line between Kursk, Orel and Gzhatsk. The risk, and this was occurring in some sectors, was that enemy units thrusting between retreating German columns might inflict a sudden moral collapse. At the very best, considerable matériel would be lost and lines of abandoned guns and vehicles testified to this fact.

To stand and fight was, in the eyes of field commanders, a suicidal option. Success in this scenario was achievable only if German defensive endurance was superior to Soviet offensive capability. The present weakness of German fighting units seemed to preclude that. Moreover, such a course of action would result in the overrunning of units, and their loss would forfeit any opportunity of husbanding resources for a spring offensive in the central sector. Field commanders and the staff preferred the risk of a winter retreat to the certainty of annihilation if they stood their ground in the face of the Russian assault. Adolf Hitler provided a characteristic solution to this dilemma in a Teletype to Army Group Centre on 18 December.

The instruction was an uncompromising stand and die’ order. This is the only way,’ the Führer added, ‘to gain the time necessary to bring up the reinforcements from Germany and the West that I have ordered.’ Two days before, Hitler had telephoned von Bock to order Army Group Centre to cease all withdrawals and defend in its present position. German soldiers would take ‘not one single step back’.⁽²⁸⁾

General Günther Blumentritt, the Chief of Staff to Fourth Army, was in conference with his Commander-in-Chief and other corps commanders in mid-December. They were totally engrossed in co-ordinating the move westward of their increasingly vulnerable army. A steadily widening gap had opened between von Kluge’s Fourth and Guderian’s Second Panzer Army. There were no reserves to restore the increasingly dangerous situation on the southern flank, which threatened to cut Fourth Army’s single supply line to the rear. One motorised division was already marching westwards to Yukhnov. The withdrawal of Fourth Army units south of the Moscow-Smolensk highway was being discussed when Blumentritt was summoned to the telephone to speak to his personal friend and counterpart at Army Group Centre, Chief of Staff General von Greiffenberg. ‘You’d better make yourself comfortable where you are,’ he said. A new order has just arrived from Hitler. Fourth Army is not to retreat a single yard.’ Blumentritt was aghast:

Adolf Hitler had personally assumed the mantle of Commander-in-Chief of the Army. The Ostheer would fight where it was and, if necessary, perish.