Armageddon - Max Hastings [84]
The war in the east was characterized by colossal cruelties. By 1944, these had become institutionalized on both sides of the front. Hitler and Stalin nurtured in their respective peoples a systemic inhumanity which found full play upon the battlefield. German soldiers had been conditioned for a decade to regard Slavic people as sub-humans. It was not only the SS who killed Russians of all ages and both sexes with casual indifference.
“Here in the east,” wrote Colonel-General Hermann Hoth of the German Seventeenth Army in an order to his men, “spiritually unbridgeable conceptions are fighting each other: German sense of honour and race; and a soldierly tradition of many centuries, against an Asiatic mode of thinking and primitive instincts, whipped up by a small number of mostly Jewish intellectuals.” The American historian Omer Bartov writes: “Increasingly during the last two years of the war, [German] troops at the front came to see themselves as the missionaries of the entire German nation, indeed of Western civilization as a whole. Rational evaluation and clear perception of events were replaced by intense terror from and rage against a faceless, monstrous enemy.” Neither Germans nor Russians readily offered quarter, save when prisoners were required for intelligence purposes, or more slaves were needed for their respective mines and factories. At Dr. Nikolai Senkevich’s field hospital, a group of captured Germans refused to answer questions from their interrogators: “We simply took them 100 metres off, and they were shot.” Sergeant Nikolai Timoshenko said: “The rule of war is that you go into battle, you see the enemy, and that enemy is not a human being. Putting your hands up isn’t going to save you.” Only a minority of Germans who attempted to surrender reached PoW camps. “We killed prisoners just like that,” said Captain Vasily Krylov, snapping his fingers. “If soldiers were told to escort them to the rear, more often than not they were ‘shot while trying to escape’.” Lieutenant Pavel Nikiforov: “There was no serious control over the treatment of prisoners. If they were sent back to regimental headquarters, they were usually shot on the way.” Vitold Kubashevsky hated shooting prisoners, and found himself striving to avoid any eye contact with the doomed men, but like everyone else he fired when he was told to do so—which was invariably the case with Waffen SS captives.
It is interesting that such an attitude reflected the vision of Russia’s greatest novelist a century earlier. Leo Tolstoy argued that the taking of prisoners maintained a sham of humanity amid the reality that war “is not a polite recreation, but the vilest thing in life. Our attitude towards the fearful necessity of war ought to be stern and serious. It boils down to this: we should have done with humbug, and let war be war, and not a game . . . If there were none of this magnanimity business in warfare, we should never go to war, except for something worth facing certain death for.”
The history of German barbarity within the Soviet Union since 1941 was familiar to every Russian soldier. Many had experienced its manifestations at first hand. Russians were repelled by Germans’ pretensions to represent a superior civilization. “They are completely shameless,” a Russian war correspondent, Alexei Surkov, observed with disgust. “They strip naked in front of women to wash. They mount women like stallions.