All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [112]
The British and Americans continued to fear Soviet defeat until the end of 1942: they were slow to comprehend the losses and miseries of the invaders. As 1941 drew to a close, two million German soldiers, their tunics lined with newspaper and straw to compensate for the clothing they lacked, were in straits almost as dire as those of Russia’s people. Hans-Jürgen Hartmann wrote from Kharkov: ‘I have often wondered what this Christmas might be like. I always cast out the war from my imaginary picture, or at least push it to the very edges. I conjured up special words for the occasion. Christmas, homeland, longing, joy and hope. Yet these words, always sincere and heartfelt, became increasingly strange and precious to me. They evoked something timeless, precious – and yet, in the conditions of the Eastern Front, seemed scarcely believable any more … How brutal this war is becoming. It is now a total war, a war against women, children and old people – and that is the greatest horror.’
Franz Peters and some comrades wandered into a church in a little town; the communists had ripped out its altar, but the Germans clustered around the hole where it had stood, and began carolling. ‘I have never heard “Silent Night” sung with such fervour … Many of us were moved to tears.’ Karl-Gottfried Vierkom read aloud to his comrades a card sent by his mother from Germany: ‘When I finished, there was complete silence. Far away from this terrible disaster – which no one imagined possible when we first entered Russia – something else still existed. Was there still a Christmas somewhere, where people peacefully exchanged gifts, gathered around the tree and went to Midnight Mass?’
In Berlin there was no place for such sentimentality, which was anyway grotesque at a time when systematic barbarism was being perpetrated by the same German soldiers in Russia who sang carols and nursed self-pity. Hitler, enraged by the repulse before Moscow, appointed himself to replace Walther von Brauchitsch as army C-in-C. He repeated to Model his draconian injunctions against yielding ground. Gen. Hoepner, one of many advocates of a strategic disengagement, wrote: ‘There is a serious cost to one’s nerves fighting against the enemy and one’s own supreme commander at the same time.’ A few days later Hoepner joined a long list of commanders in the east, including von Rundstedt and Guderian, sacked for alleged lack of steel.
Model, a blunt soldier’s general and dedicated Nazi, addressed the threat of disaster with energy and success. By mid-January, the Soviets had ceased to win ground; on the 21st, to the amazement of his demoralised officers Model launched a counterblow at the Russian flank west of Moscow. His staff asked what reinforcements he could deploy. ‘Myself!’ he declared irrepressibly – and this sufficed. Everywhere he improvised, dashing from unit to unit, often under fire, urging local commanders first to stand, then to strike back. Desperate expedients were employed to enable men to keep fighting in temperatures of –40 degrees Celsius: heated shelters were established, for recuperation between the few hours of exposed activity that were all a soldier could endure; ‘snow shacks’ were built around aircraft engines, to warm them through the night so the Luftwaffe could fly once more. In the last days of January and the first of February, Model’s troops inflicted repeated repulses and heavy casualties on the Russians, still seeking to push forward in the Rzhev salient.
Horrors afflicted both sides. War correspondent Vasily Grossman met a peasant carrying a sack of frozen human legs, which he proposed to thaw on a stove in order to remove their boots. Fritz Langkanke of the SS Das Reich Division described how a dead Russian, frozen stiff, became wedged under the wheels of his