War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 Read online

  War Without

  Garlands

  Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942

  Robert Kershaw

  This book is dedicated to my three sons

  Christian, Alexander and Michael

  First published 2000

  Paperback edition first published 2008

  Reprinted 2009

  This impression 2010

  ISBN 978 07110 3590 1

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

  © Robert Kershaw 2000

  The right of Robert J. Kershaw to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Published by Ian Allan Publishing,

  Riverdene Business Park, Molesey Road,

  Hersham, Surrey, KT12 4RG.

  Printed and bound in Great Britain

  by Mackays of Chatham, Kent.

  Contents

  Glossary, Abbreviations and Rank Comparisons

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: ‘The world will hold its breath’

  Saturday, 21 June 1941

  ‘Forget the concept of comradeship’

  ‘The Führer has got it all in hand’

  Tomorrow ‘we are to fight against World Bolshevism’

  Chapter 2: ‘Ordinary men’ – the German soldier on the eve of ‘Barbarossa’

  ‘Endless pressure to participate’

  ‘Order and Duty’ and the Führer

  ‘Prepared… to face what is coming!’

  The German Army, June 1941

  Chapter 3: The Soviet frontier

  ‘There was no information…’

  ‘We’ve never had such a situation… Will there be any instructions?’

  Chapter 4: H-hour 03.15

  The River Bug… Brest-Litovsk

  Air strike… First light

  The shortest night of the year… H-hour

  Daybreak… Berlin

  Chapter 5: The longest day of the year

  The first Soviet pocket is formed – Brest-Litovsk

  ‘Only 1,000km as the crow flies to Moscow’

  Where was the Red Air Force?

  Dusk… 22 June 1941

  Chapter 6: Waiting for news

  The home fronts… Victory will be ours! Germany

  Victory will be ours! Russia

  ‘Don’t die without leaving a dead German behind you’… Brest-Litovsk

  Across the Dvina… Army Group North

  No news

  Brest-Litovsk… ‘I wonder how it is I am still alive!’

  Chapter 7: Blitzkrieg

  The ‘smooth’ period… The Panzers

  Frontier tank battles

  Panzer vanguard

  On to Smolensk

  Finale: Brest-Litovsk

  Chapter 8: Smolensk

  The infantry

  The Smolensk pocket

  ‘Do not cry’… Soviet defeat in the West

  Chapter 9: Refocusing victory conditions

  The longest campaign

  Conditions for victory

  A city ‘pulsing with life’… Leningrad

  Chapter 10: A war without garlands

  ‘Better three French campaigns than one Russian’

  The pressures on the German soldier

  ‘Kein Kindergarten Krieg’. Prisoners and partisans

  Chapter 11: ‘Kesselschlacht’ – victory without results

  Cannae at Kiev

  The reduction of the Kiev pocket

  Chapter 12: ‘Victored’ to death

  Objective Moscow

  A logistic ‘trip-wire’

  ‘Totsiegen’… victored to death

  A dying army

  Chapter 13: The last victory

  Double encirclement… Vyazma and Bryansk

  The great illusion

  Chapter 14: ‘The eleventh hour’

  Moscow… A defence crust forms

  Dilemma at Orscha

  ‘The eleventh hour

  Chapter 15: The spires of Moscow

  ‘Flucht nach Vorn’

  The frozen offensive

  ‘The spires of the city’… Moscow

  Chapter 16: The devil loose before Moscow

  The Soviet counter-offensive

  The German soldier does not go ‘Kaputt!’…

  The crisis of confidence

  The German Army in retreat

  Chapter 17: The order of the frozen flesh

  ‘Not one single step back’ – the Hold Order

  Frozen flesh

  Postscript – ‘Barbarossa’ Notes to the text

  Notes to the text

  Appendices

  1. German casualties Operation ‘Barbarossa’ 1941–42

  2. German casualties reflected in division manning equivalents

  3. The fighting elements within a German division

  4. A snapshot of Soviet battle casualties

  Sources

  Glossary, Abbreviations,

  Rank Comparisons

  Introduction

  Nobody has written a definitive ‘soldier’s’ account of Operation ‘Barbarossa’. Academic historians and survivors writing on the Russo-German war of 1941–45 generally concentrate on military operations and have often ducked uncomfortable moral issues, or concentrated on one area to the exclusion of the other. I read with interest Paul Kohl’s comments retracing the footprints of the invading Army Group Centre during a historical pilgrimage through Russia in the 1980s.(1) Of 35 Wehrmacht veterans he contacted to assist in the project, only three admitted to having participated in excesses during the conflict. At the other end of the extreme is the Vernichtungskrieg (War of Annihilation) public exhibition travelling the length and breadth of present-day Germany seeking to publicise and lay clear blame for war guilt on the Wehrmacht. The significance is that the present-day Bundeswehr (the Federal Republic of Germany’s Army) developed from the Wehrmacht after the war. There is no shortage of epic and heroic tales from German survivors, who rarely saw an atrocity. Conversely the equally stirring Russian rhetoric of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ tells a similar tale of heroism from a political and ideological perspective. An honest account is that of a Wehrmacht veteran who admitted during a TV interview, ‘if some people say that most Germans were innocent, I would say they were accomplices’.(2)

  There are varying degrees of accountability in war and they need to be examined. War guilt has been painstakingly examined by social democratic academics assessing the culpability of American soldiers fighting in Vietnam, Frenchmen during post-colonial conflicts in Algeria and the British in the Falklands. Moral issues are not as black and white as some learned authors would have us believe. Even UN and NATO soldiers have recently discovered in the Balkans that moral responsibility during conflict is a little blurred around the edges. The Russo-German war was fought between two totalitarian and ideologically motivated enemies, which produced a degree of ‘peer pressure’ upon combatants, frequently misunderstood by modern democratic historians who have never experienced it. Helmut Schmidt, a former German war veteran and later German Chancellor, once rounded on academic historians during a newspaper interview, pointing out they should not accept every document suggesting war guilt at face value.(3) Not every German at the front, he insisted, was a witness to atrocities.

  Documents are truths in the purist sense. Perception is also truth because it is an imperative that
causes us to act. This is then why attempts are made in this book, through personal, letter and diary accounts, to narrate, observe and identify the beliefs and concerns that motivated the soldiers. They are about perceptions that became truths in themselves.

  How can one explain or indeed reconcile the Christian statements of soldiers, seemingly decent men, about to go to war, with the systematic maltreatment and murder of Soviet PoWs and non-combatants? That war is a brutal process and corrupts its participants is not the sole explanation. There was an undercurrent of emotion impacting on incidents that caused brave men to act in a criminal way. Only by viewing these ‘snapshots’ of experience can one identify the emotions, perceptions and motivation of soldiers fighting a pitiless war in a strange land. The title ‘War Without Garlands’ is a play on a Landser expression used to describe this war. Soldiers referred to it as ‘Kein Blumenkrieg’, a war without flowers. Quite literally flowers were not thrown in salute by an adoring public, as in the case of triumphant parades in Berlin, acknowledging Blitzkrieg victories after the campaign in the West.

  This book accepts that war is an intensely personal experience. Memories of conflict come in momentary glimpses or ‘snapshots’, and that is the style adopted. Concentrating on the five human senses brings a form of immediacy to the events being narrated. In addition, one must assess the soldier’s psyche through a medium of practical experience, placing ideological influences within a rational perspective. This is attempted by interpreting extensive diary and letter accounts.

  It is important to measure the impact of these events, because, of some 19 to 20 million soldiers who fought for the Wehrmacht, about 17–19 million fought in Russia. These men were to form the basis of the future state established in present-day Germany, numbered among the most enlightened and democratic in the world. The book is an examination of the beginnings of a crucible of experience that was to influence these men throughout their adult lives.

  The spelling of individual personalities and place names has been difficult to unravel from the multiplicity of Russian, German and English sources through which I worked. Many of the latter have changed since the end of the war. In general I have used the English version or German in the absence of an alternative.

  Every effort has been made to trace the source and copyright holders of the maps and illustrations appearing in the text, and these are acknowledged where appropriate. Most are my own. Similarly the author wishes to thank those publishers who have permitted the quotation of extracts from their books. Quotation sources are annotated in the notes that follow the text. My apologies are offered in advance to those with whom, for any reason, I have been unable to establish contact.

  I am particularly indebted for information and documents provided by Bundeswehr colleagues and contacts from within various NATO HQs, who assisted in the book’s long research and gestation period. My thanks also go to: the Panzerschule at Münsterlager and the Pionierschule at Munich; to Herr Michael Wechtler for access to a remarkable collection of documents and an informative 45th Division video chronicling the fall of Brest-Litovsk and to Dr Kehrig from the Bundesarchiv at Freiburg who assisted with important contacts, including Franz Steiner who enabled access to information and former members of the 2nd (Vienna) Panzer Division. Sheila Watson, my agent, has been very patient, gently reminding me during a series of overseas postings and operational tours that this book will never finish of its own accord.

  My wife Lynn enabled the project to come to fruition by supporting me throughout. In typing the manuscript she applied her impressive eye for detail, clarity and grammatical accuracy. Any errors remaining are those I refused to change!

  Without her, this book would quite simply never have been written.

  Robert Kershaw

  Salisbury, 2000

  Chapter 1

  ‘The world will hold its breath’

  ‘I can imagine the surprise and, at the same moment, dread that will overcome you all. But you need have no worries, everything is so well prepared here, hardly anything can go wrong.’

  Gefreiter, artillery regiment

  Saturday, 21 June 1941

  The young NCO glanced up from his letter, the warm breeze of the Lithuanian plains wafting gently across his cheek. The weather was close and sultry. He continued to write:

  ‘I have a feeling that in the morning, or the one after, things are going to happen that will make the world sit up and take notice again. Moreover I suspect these events will not pass me by without some impact. Hopefully the near future will bring Final Victory a further step closer.’

  His unit, the 6th Infantry Division,(1) was one of 120 divisions poised along a demarcation line stretching between the Gulf of Finland and the Black Sea. An air of expectancy hung over this host, numbering some three million soldiers.

  Leutnant Hermann Witzemann, a 26-year-old platoon commander, sat in a tented camp amongst his men, concealed in the forests beside the River Bug near the Soviet fortress of Brest-Litovsk. A beautiful summer day was drawing to a close. Scotch pines began to wave in the freshening evening wind. The sun’s rays penetrated the branches. ‘The blue sky was stretched over them like a tent,’ he observed. ‘We stood on the eve of momentous events,’ he confided in his letter, ‘of which I would also play a part.’ The unknown was unsettling. ‘None of us knew whether he would survive what was coming.’ War appeared inevitable. A new campaign was about to begin, but where? Unease before battle permeated everything: ‘After long conversations, questions and doubts we were serene and relaxed. As always, the last word that might have prompted differences was dropped.’(2)

  Ital Gelzer further north occupied ‘a multi-coloured tent city under tall Scotch Pines’. He felt himself fortunate. As a guest of the Intelligence platoon commander he could actually stand up in his tent. ‘Very comfortable when dressing,’ he remarked. With a bright lamp and a covering over the floor it was cosy at nights, if the temperature did not drop too much. His access to maps was of particular significance. They gave some clue of coming events. Knowledge within a welter of rumour always gave a soldier authority. ‘All over the edge of the map that I am using now are arrows, pointing in the direction of Lemberg [Lvov],’ he wrote in his letter. Little had been finalised. During the evenings he played the harmonica between the camp fires, singing Swiss songs. His thoughts, like many others’, dwelt on loved ones on the eve of battle. ‘I think of you all dispersed around,’ he wrote, ‘and hope that eventually one day, there will be a postwar period during which one can ponder a future different from that our parents experienced.’ Enforced inactivity was frustrating. ‘Have I ever waited so long as these past days?’ he wrote. Rumour fed on rumour. ‘The news of the treaty with Turkey arrived; if it had been Russia, I could similarly have accepted it after the motto “credo quia absurdum” [I believe it because it is absurd].’ Gelzer finished his literary correspondence with a conspiratorial flourish. ‘When you read these lines we’ll all know plenty. We’re on the march this evening.’(3) He was not to know it, but the arrows on the map indicated his future final resting place: Borysychoi, north of Lemberg. He would be dead within four days.

  Leutnant Witzemann steeled himself for the coming conflict. His letters reveal an idealistic yet religious man:

  ‘God the Father grant me strength, faith and courage beneath whining bullets, under the impact of artillery and bombs, vulnerable in the face of enemy tank attack and the horror of creeping gas. Thanks be for love. Thy will be done.’

  He was not to survive the first 24 hours.(4)

  Deception measures for the coming operation, as yet unbriefed, were immense. They needed to be. Seven armies were massing along the 800km-long sector of the Russo-German demarcation line in Poland. Four Panzergruppen and three Luftwaffe Luftflotten were poised ready to go: 600,000 vehicles, 750,000 horses, 3,580 tanks and self-propelled guns, 7,184 artillery pieces and 1,830 aircraft.(5) Two workers observing German activity around Maringlen airstrip in Poland had already guessed the like
ly reason. Jews and Poles had been obliged to build the runways by forced labour in 1940. Jan Szcepanink said, ‘I did everything that was ordered. If I was ordered into the wood to fetch timber – I fetched it. If I had to transport building materials for the barracks, I got on with it.’ The sinister implication of measures taken to disguise progress was not lost on them.