War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942

‘Not one single step back’… the hold order

‘This retreat order has reduced me to dumb resignation,’ admitted an officer in the 198th Infantry Division. ‘I don’t want to think about it any more,’ but he appreciated that, in order to survive, ‘thinking and forethought is more necessary than before’. Obergefreiter Huber from Infantry Regiment 282 recalled unforgettable days battling on the Nara, with long nights, the cold, snowstorms – grey sinister days with artillery impacts and a constant racket among the smoke and crackling explosions of the fearsome “Stalin organs”’. The interminable retreat depressed the infantry officer. He was uneasy.

When the ‘hold’ order was received at battalion level in the Fourth Army sector, it was met with incredulity. Infantry Regiment 9, part of 23rd Infantry Division, heard:

Commanders were to be held personally responsible for the order’s execution. Feldwebel Gottfried Becker’s initial reaction when told to dig was, ‘OK, OK we hold the position, but could someone please tell me which one?’ His commander, Leutnant Bremse, pointed to a hole in the ground partially filled with snow. ‘It was not completely prepared,’ he agreed, ‘but they could do it now.’ Each man in Becker’s platoon had the same unsettling thought: ‘He has got to be kidding!’ They had completed a seemingly endless march through snow and ice with no sleep, and fought countless rearguard actions. Now they were instructed to dig a position virtually from new, in rock-hard frozen ground. Mindful of the Soviet approach, they commenced digging. Becker shovelled snow out of the half-constructed trench, complaining that ‘those at the “top” had to be nuts’. Bremse was not sympathetic. ‘That’s it,’ he said, ‘shut your mouths and get on with it – now! Dig!’⁽²⁾

Obergefreiter Huber from the 98th Division reached his objective at 02.00 hours on Christmas Eve.

Adolf Hitler had confounded the plans of his military advisors. Viewing an impending collapse of the front with dismay, he resolved to relieve his generals of command initiative. He took pride in his proven ability to master and profit from a crisis. The ailing Generalfeldmarschall von Brauchitsch, the German Army Commander-in-Chief, followed the hapless von Rundstedt from Army Group South into retirement. Von Brauchitsch became the scapegoat both for the failure of‘Barbarossa’ and the present winter crisis. Next came Generalfeldmarschall von Bock, who, in predicting disaster unless his Army Group was allowed to retreat, received a much earned ‘rest’ on 20 December. Generaloberst Guderian, evading orders to ‘stand fast’, was relieved from active duty on 26 December. General Erich Hoepner, the aggressive commander of Panzergruppe 4, enraged Hitler in early January as he retreated westward to avoid encirclement. Stripped of command, rank and privileges, he was forbidden to wear uniform in retirement. Strauss, the commander of Ninth Army, was cashiered one week later, and von Leeb, the Commander of Army Group North, was relieved on 17 January. During the subsequent winter, over 30 generals, corps and division commanders and senior officers were removed from command. They were the leaders that had brought the Ostheer with dramatic success to the very gates of Moscow. Now they were gone. Hitler, in removing them, completed the physical and moral transformation the Ostheer had been undergoing since June 1941. The last vestiges of Weimar and General Staff influence were gone. The Ostheer and Wehrmacht became the military arm of a National Socialist Reich.

Cashiering so many senior commanders in the midst of the winter crisis had an inevitable impact upon the flow of operations. Hitler’s aim was indeed to minimise fluidity. His instinctive reaction, grounded on his veteran World War 1 experience, was that soldiers in a fast-moving crisis or retreat are more easily controlled when instructed to stand fast. An unequivocal ‘stand and fight’ order, whatever the seriousness of the situation, removed immediate uncertainties. Soldiers crave decision and clarity of intent at times of crisis. The German soldier sought clear direction and order.’ Panzer Leutnant F. Wilhelm Christians later explained:

This resolve was not simply a mindless adherence to duty. ‘A feeling of comradeship sustained us also,’ said Christians, ‘right up until entry to a Soviet concentration camp.’⁽⁴⁾ Soldiers did what was required to live.

The next impact of the turmoil created by the extensive command changes was to stultify initiative at the front. The Ostheer was asked to perform the unthinkable, and elements would need to be sacrificed to achieve it. Hitler did not want his commanders to think; they were required to obey. As a result, strategic and operational control went to the supreme commander, virtually by default. An important source of advice and professional assessment was silenced in the process. The very command philosophy of the German Army, Auftragstaktik, designed to confer maximum initiative in accomplishing assigned tasks, was compromised. In one of those bizarre parodies of warfare, centralisation was imposed on the German military machine at the very time its opponents began to realise the virtues of decentralised control. The Wehrmacht had already demonstrated that the war-winning edge conferred by Blitzkrieg was dependent upon it.

The first phase of the Soviet counter-offensive clearly drove the Germans back from Moscow but did not destroy the bulk of the Panzer forces. Zhukov’s original concept had been to gain space in front of Moscow, but the near-total collapse of the Army Group Centre front exceeded even the most sanguine Soviet expectations. As the three main German infantry armies were locked in combat, the beginnings of a possible double envelopment began to form. This encapsulated the area of Rzhev and Ninth Army in the north and a developing split between Fourth and Second Panzer Army creeping towards Vyazma in the south. Having planned and configured for a shallow set-piece battle, the Russians were unable to sustain wide-ranging penetrations without further supplies, replacements and fresh units. Momentum petered out as the distance between the advancing armies and their supply bases widened. Hitler coincidentally decided at the same moment that Army Group Centre should stand its ground and fight. A crucible of experience resulted from this decision for which a special German Winter Medal entitled In Osten 1941–42’ was struck. German soldiers, with typical black humour, immediately labelled it The Order of the Frozen Flesh’.

Feldwebel Gottfried Becker, holding on the Lama river line with Infantry Regiment 9, was driven from his bunker by artillery fire on Boxing Day. Shelter was crucial for Becker and his men, but they had no idea of the overall situation as they fell back to a village. There was no way of knowing which houses were enemy held, and which by German troops. It was not until his rifle slipped involuntarily from his grasp that Becker realised, in a moment of heart-stopping panic, that he had left his gloves behind in the bunker. All feeling had gone from his hands and he could not even hold his weapon. Frostbite had already reached the tissue-damaging stage. Becker had no option but to follow scores of walking wounded and struggle back through 20km of deep snow to seek treatment in the rear. He trudged through the snow accompanied by another lightly wounded soldier, towing on a sledge a more serious casualty shot through both knees. The man’s knees had swollen to the size of ‘two children’s heads’ but he displayed ‘immense stoicism’, Becker said. ‘He did not complain once despite being tipped several times into deep snow.’ Morale in the rear was low. There was a reluctance to accept the sledge-borne casualty at the division aid post, but Becker did at least manage to purloin some food and drink. He decided to continue on foot alone to seek treatment for his badly frozen hands.

After walking several kilometres Becker felt the need to urinate. This posed a dilemma because he was physically unable to unbutton his trousers because his hands were thickly bandaged. What could he do? Perform the action in his pants? If he did so, he realised with sinking heart that his trousers would freeze rock hard in the extreme temperatures and cold injuries would result. A vehicle appeared ahead which he urgently flagged to a halt. Inside was a lieutenant at the wheel, who looked at him enquiringly. ‘Could you help me undo my trousers?’ Becker asked, gesticulating with bandaged hands. ‘What’s wrong?’ asked the officer. On realising, he responded‘you poor bugger’ and got out of the vehicle and led Becker to the roadside, where he extracted his penis, enabling him to pass water. The officer acted as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and apologised for not offering a lift; he was required at the front. He wished him well and departed. Becker had been unlucky. One moment’s lack of concentration in the fighting around the bunker had within minutes cost considerable damage. He placed his hands wrapped in socks under his armpits and continued on his way.

The intense cold caught many inexperienced soldiers unprepared. An artillery radio operator from the 400th Artillery battalion, working alongside inadequately clothed soldiers from the ‘Grossdeutschland’ Regiment around Gorodok in temperatures of −40°C, related just how inhibiting the cold could be. He described a Soviet attack:

Becker reached a clearing station for the wounded and was placed in a straw-covered railway goods wagon. This took him to Vyazma, a journey lasting two to three days. A remorseless itching had begun to irritate from beneath his bandages after the second day. Somebody helped him to remove his pullover to relieve the itching he felt all over his body. It was infested with lice. With some revulsion he realised what the irritation beneath his bandages portended. They were rationed and looked after at Vyazma, but the dressing was not replaced. A further train journey followed to Smolensk, lasting several more days.

By now, the badly wounded soldiers lying in the straw-covered goods wagons were in a distressed state. Becker had to walk to hospital on arrival at the city, where a doctor examined his hand. The right one had turned almost completely black. ‘We must take it off,’ was the doctor’s diagnosis. Becker declined, pleading, ‘it would heal some time,’ which drew a disinterested, ‘do as you wish’ from the much harassed doctor. Nobody bothered to delouse him and his injured hands were hurriedly rebound. Two days later a hospital train left for the West with Becker on board. It took 10 days to reach Warsaw. The Feldwebel had lost all feeling in his hands. Driven to distraction by the lice he pleaded to his doctor, ‘I can stand it no longer, please, please take away these bloody bandages.’ As the sister cut away the dressings he saw a sight that would remain with him the rest of his life: a triple layer of lice were crawling over ‘the suppurating flesh of his hands’. Becker, in tears, had his hands disinfected and rebound. He was transported back to Germany where he spent four months recovering in a clinic. It took nine weeks before he was able to hold a spoon. Recovery came, but slowly.⁽⁶⁾

Becker’s comrades with the 23rd Division were ejected from the Lama position and had to retreat 50km to west of Rzhev. Panzer Hauptmann Schroeder with the 7th Panzer Division recalled operating alongside them once again with the whole front slipping’. They were described as ‘decimated but unbroken’. Feeling guilty with the realisation that the Panzers increased his chances of survival well beyond that of the hapless infantry, he said:

During the latter part of December both sides sought to reinforce their battered forces. Hitler ordered the despatch of 17 fresh divisions to the Eastern Front from other parts of German-occupied Europe.⁽⁸⁾ They would take considerable time to arrive. Meanwhile Stalin saw the opportunity to apply an even more ambitious counter-stroke, encouraged at the success of the initial phase of the offensive. Phase two opened during the first two weeks of January and included another attempt to raise the siege of Leningrad, combined with an offensive by the south and southwest fronts. Amphibious landings were mounted by the Caucasus Front in the Crimea. In the Central sector the Kalinin, West and Bryansk Fronts attempted a double envelopment from Rzhev in the north and Sukhinichi from the south to close on the main Moscow highway at Vyazma. Hitler was obliged to order a withdrawal to a line approximating to the original ‘Taifun’ start point the previous October. Many German units were surrounded during the withdrawal, but the move shortened the front, which freed units for counter-attacks able to seal the worst gaps torn in the front line. Another Soviet attack swept in from the north in a wide arc that sought to capture German-held Smolensk. Although the German strongpoint belt was penetrated in several areas, it soon became apparent the Soviet second stage objectives had been over-ambitious. The Russians had insufficient strength and resources to achieve a decisive victory as the drive was dispersed over too many objectives. German armies were not only spared decisive encirclement, they began to isolate over-extended Soviet thrusts which were mopped up later when reinforcements arrived. Second Shock Army under General A. A. Vlasov penetrated the rear of the German Eighteenth Army but became isolated in forest and marsh with its supply lines cut. Eventually its nine divisions and several brigades capitulated in June 1942. The Soviet Thirty-third Army with an integrated mobile cavalry group was cut off near Vyazma, as also the Twenty-ninth Army near Rzhev. This strategic spread of forces, weak in artillery and short of ammunition, enabled the ragged but still lethal forces remaining with Army Group Centre to bite back savagely. By the end of February, Stalin’s great offensive had run its course. German armies, partly reinforced by fresh divisions, re-established a continuous front in the centre. The line, tortuous in shape, reflected the limits of Russian offensive and opposing German defensive endurance.

Frozen flesh

The stamina of the Ostheer was tested to breaking point, an experience many would have difficulty coming to terms with mentally in later life. ‘Our division was in reality decimated in Russia,’ declared a distressed Walter Neustifter, perhaps up to 80% of its strength.’

Killing the enemy engendered a spectrum of emotions unique and peculiar to each man. German soldier Benno Zeiser, newly arrived at the shifting front, described his feelings:

The majority of soldiers suppressed their feelings automatically, adjusting to whatever was required of them. Artillery observer Helmut Pabst, fighting near Rzhev at the end of January, saw that counter-attacks have all failed’. Night after night the infantry had gone into the attack despite enduring days in the open. They knew full well,’ he said, ‘the effort was hopeless.’ One night a platoon of Pioniers, an officer and 42 men, mounted an attack. The officer came back ashen-faced with 15 men.’ Eleven had been killed, and nine seriously and seven lightly wounded. Six days later the same officer, shot through the arm, fought his way out of Russian encirclement with only two of his original 15 men. Pabst bleakly observed, no more prisoners are being taken in the front line.’⁽³⁾

The health of the soldiers deteriorated to an alarming degree. An assessment by the senior medical officer with 167th Infantry Division highlighted concerns at the beginning of January 1942.

The front was held by such men. Conditions in the fighting line itself were almost untenable. Gefreiter Rehfeldt recalled:

Two weeks later Rehfeldt complained he had been three days without rations and‘practically everyone has the shits on an empty stomach’. They felt as‘weak and miserable as dogs,’ and above all there was ‘the unbelievable cold!’ His frostbitten feet were becoming more swollen and septic with the passing of each day. ‘Nothing heals in this cold,’ he despairingly wrote.⁽⁵⁾

Leadership combined with draconian measures kept men in the line. Unteroffizier Pabst commented on near-hopeless counterattacks mounted near Rzhev on 28 January. ‘The front line dug-outs,’ which had been lost, will be reoccupied,’ he wrote; and ‘any man leaving his post will be court-martialled and shot.’ The mood in their shelter was extremely sombre’. Pabst, however, admired his company commander, Leutnant von Hindenburg – ’from an old family’ – who kept them together.

Comradeship mattered to the exclusion of all else. It sustained both sides. Leadership qualities were the cement binding it together. Discipline and mutual suffering bonded men together in an inexplicable, intangible way. Oberleutnant Beck-Broichsitter held a 4km-wide sector with 200 men from the ‘Grossdeutschland’ Regiment. (It was normally a task for two battalions numbering 1,400 men.) His men had been required to march the whole night and occupy hastily dug and inadequately prepared positions against Russian attacks. While crossing a stream, moving up, some of his men had broken through the ice and had been soaked in waist-deep water. They had then to stand around outside for ten hours in frozen trousers… Exhaustion,’ the company commander wrote, was hindering his leadership.’ When checking his perimeter a few days later Beck-Broichsitter stumbled across an amazing scene. One of his grenadiers was manning a single foxhole surrounded by 24 dead Russians sprawled all around. He had shot them all with his rifle.

‘I promoted him to Gefreiter,’ said the impressed company commander. Another of his NCOs ‘had three children and also dysentery and frostbite.’ Exercising compassion, the officer suggested he might wish to serve a period with the logistics element to the rear. ‘No, no,’ responded the soldier. ‘Somebody else will only have to do it – I’ll stay here.’ The position was held for 20 days following a punishing routine, according to the company commander, of ‘one hour’s sentry and three hours’ rest in an overcrowded lice-ridden area, during which most had to prepare new positions’. His battalion commander consistently asked him whether he could hang on, posing the eternal leadership dilemma.

It made him feel guilty.

If leadership alone did not suffice then the ultimate price was exacted from flagging men. Oberleutnant Sonntag, a battalion commander with the 296th Infantry Division, felt duty-bound to report on Oberfeldwebel Gierz, a senior NCO, to his regimental commander. Gierz appeared incapable of keeping his men in the line. Accused of cowardice, the hapless sergeant and his men were driven back into their position. The battalion commander despaired what to do next because, as he said, he was convinced, ‘the next time the enemy came, they would run again’. He agonised over the decision. ‘It wounds my heart,’ he later wrote, when one has to consider it is German soldiers we are dealing with.’ The inevitable happened. ‘I am ashamed to report, Herr Oberst-leutnant,’ he wrote, explaining, ‘I was obliged to implement draconian measures, and ordered the company to implement the order.’ Gierz was shot.⁽⁸⁾

Infantry Leutnant Erich Mende appreciated the powerlessness of the individual to make an impact in such circumstances. ‘I had extraordinary casualties,’ he said, defending a railway station south of Kaluga. ‘Of my original 196 men, 160 were dead, wounded or missing by the end of January.’ Reflecting on this experience after the war, he mused, ‘the soldier is a tragic figure’.

Meanwhile, at home in the Reich, the appeal to collect winter clothes received massive support but created uneasiness. Information was filtering back, but there was no substance to it. Wehrmacht broadcasts and announcements appeared to concentrate on apparently insignificant local actions. Many soldiers imposed a form of self-censorship in their letters, indicating they were alive but deliberately avoiding subjects that might arouse concern. Leutnant Heinrich Haape, fighting for his life, applied a certain circumspection to everything he wrote. ‘When I wrote to Martha,’ (his wife) he admitted, ‘I mentioned little of the fighting, for the people at home had not yet been conditioned to realise what a serious change had come over the situation on the Eastern Front.’⁽¹⁰⁾ Sceptics were beginning to guess. SS Secret Service Home Front reports remarked on the contradiction between press and film reports, showing warmly clad troops at the front and the call for winter clothing. It concluded, ‘the appeal is clearly confirmation of the authenticity of the soldiers’ stories on front leave and Feldpost letters pointing to the shortage of equipments suited to the Russian cold.’⁽¹¹⁾ Armaments Minister Albert Speer said after the war:

Hildegard Gratz, working as a relief school-teacher at Angerburg in east Germany, felt uneasy teaching children‘about a hero’s death’when she clearly saw‘sitting in front of me were children whose fathers would never come home’. The children were required to participate in the ‘Winter Relief programme, collecting or knitting warm clothing. These activities aroused ‘anxious, despairing and forbidden thoughts,’ she said.⁽¹³⁾

Then came the startling news that the Führer had assumed overall command of the army. This ‘elicited the utmost surprise’, commented SS Secret Service observers. ‘Amazement bordering on dismay prevails among much of the population that the change in the Army High Command should occur just when the fighting was at its fiercest on all fronts, and, of all times, just before Christmas.’

There was increasing unease that the war was perhaps not going too well. People said they would rather be told about a withdrawal or failure than be denied a clear picture of what was going on. A certain mistrust over official reports’ resulted, fuelled further by letters and reports from soldiers on leave. Rumours suggested German troops had been driven back 150km from the line originally reached due to the introduction of the excellently equipped Soviet Far Eastern Army. Faith in the Führer remained but ‘it was becoming ever more apparent,’ commented the SS reports, ‘that the war had become a matter of life and death for Germany, and everyone would need to be prepared to offer himself up as a victim if necessary’.⁽¹⁴⁾

This development was crystal clear to those engaged in the pitiless struggle at the front. The German soldier had experienced defeat and a retreat and had survived. ‘It was the first time,’ one veteran noted, ‘that our soldiers remarked on the dark shadows of the coming times.’⁽¹⁵⁾ Friedebald Kruse wrote back from the front on 23 December that‘yesterdays’ news that Brauchitsch had to go and today the Führer has taken on the High Command of the Army affected me’. It was to him an inauspicious development: ‘the first time that faith in the army had been questioned.’ Many soldiers dismissed the news as a ‘palace revolution’ resulting from military failure.⁽¹⁶⁾ Staff officer Bernd Freytag von Lorringhoven, working at Guderian’s headquarters, viewed it from a more sombre perspective.

‘Having to retreat from Moscow,’ declared another Eastern Front veteran, ‘meant the Russian people and soldiers must realise it is possible to defeat the German Army’.⁽¹⁸⁾ Panzer Major Johann Graf von Kielmansegg agreed. ‘It was the first time in this war,’ he said, ‘that German soldiers had been defeated somewhere en masse.’⁽¹⁹⁾ It produced a measured celebration on the Russian side. Actress Maria Mironowa, living in Moscow recalled, ‘the mood during the New Year festivities was bad, it was not celebrated.’ They drank a little to coming victory ‘but we certainly had no idea it lay so far in the distant future’. There had been too much suffering. ‘The war,’ she said, was like a natural catastrophe and had an impact on us like an earthquake.’ But despite all this, Soviet platoon commander Anatolij Tschernjajew recognised, ‘it was an enormous turn around of events, this feeling that an offensive, a victory and finally even a turning point in this war were again possible.’⁽²⁰⁾

The German soldier enjoyed a certain black humour, even in defeat. During the retreat a cynical motto was introduced. It was often preceded by a comic reversing of the helmet or field cap, and the exclamation – frequently when threatened by Soviet encirclement – ‘ Vorwärts Kameraden, wir müssen züruck!’ In short: ‘Advance men, we’ve got to get back!’ One soldier in the 2nd Panzer Division, on hearing the exhortation admitted, ‘in spite of the serious situation, one had to laugh.’⁽²¹⁾ This ability to recuperate suddenly and lash out again against the foe was time and time again to stun Allied armies thinking they held the initiative during the final stages of World War 2. ‘That explains the huge trauma and shock,’ Russian platoon commander Anatolij Tschernjajew explained, when six months later the German Army was advancing even further, against Stalingrad!’⁽²²⁾

The war was far from over yet.