All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [95]
Euphoria overtook Berlin. Halder, the Wehrmacht’s chief of staff, declared on 3 July: ‘I think I am not exaggerating when I say that the campaign … has been won in fourteen days’; Hitler spoke of a victory parade in Moscow by the end of August. Former doubters in high places felt themselves confounded by Soviet command incompetence, the ease with which thousands of Russian aircraft had been destroyed, the effortless tactical superiority of the invaders. At the front Karl Fuchs, a tank gunner, exulted: ‘The war against these subhuman beings is almost over … We really let them have it! They are scoundrels, the mere scum of the earth – and they are no match for the German soldier.’ By 9 July Army Group Centre had completed the isolation of huge Soviet forces in Belorussia, which lost 300,000 prisoners and 2,500 tanks. Russian counterattacks delayed the capture of Smolensk until early August – a setback that afterwards proved significant, because it cost the Wehrmacht precious summer days – and the Red Army maintained strong resistance in the south. But when the forces of Bock and Rundstedt met at Lokhvitsa, east of Kiev, on 15 September, two entire Russian armies were trapped and destroyed, with the loss of half a million men. Leningrad was besieged, Moscow threatened.
The ruthlessness of the invaders was swiftly revealed. In France in 1940, more than a million French prisoners were caged and fed; in Russia, by contrast, prisoners were caged only to perish. First in hundreds of thousands, soon in millions, they starved to death in accordance with their captors’ design, and inability to cope with such numbers even had they wished to do so – the Reich’s camps had capacity for only 790,000. Some prisoners resorted to cannibalism. Many German units killed PoWs merely to escape the inconvenience of supervising their more protracted end. Gen. Joachim Lemelsen protested to the high command: ‘I am repeatedly finding out about the shooting of prisoners, defectors or deserters, carried out in an irresponsible, senseless and criminal manner. This is murder. Soon the Russians will get to hear about the countless corpses lying along the routes taken by our soldiers, without weapons and with hands raised, dispatched at close range by shots to the head. The result will be that the enemy will hide in the woods and fields and continue to fight – and we shall lose countless comrades.’
Berlin was indifferent. Hitler sought to conquer as much land, and to inherit as few people, as his armies could contrive. He often cited the precedent of the nineteenth-century American frontier, where the native inhabitants were almost extinguished to make way for settlers. On 25 June Police General Walter Stahlecker led Einsatzgruppe A into the Lithuanian city of Kaunas behind the panzers. A thousand Jews were rounded up and clubbed to death by Lithuanian collaborators at Lietukis garage, less than two hundred yards from Army HQ. Stahlecker reported: ‘These self-cleansing operations went smoothly because the army authorities, who had been informed beforehand, showed understanding for this procedure.’
The Soviets, for their part, shot many PoWs as well as their own political prisoners; when their retreating forces abandoned a hospital where 160 German wounded were held, these were killed either by smashing in their heads or throwing them from windows. A German platoon which surrendered after a Soviet counterattack on the Dubysa river on 23 June was found next day when the Russians were again driven back. They were not only dead, but mutilated. ‘Eyes had been put out, genitals cut off and other cruelties inflicted,’ wrote a shocked German staff officer. ‘This was our first such experience, but not the last. On the evening [after] these first two days I said to my general, “Sir, this will be a very different war from the one in Poland and France.”’ Whether or not the Germans’ atrocity story was true, a culture