Inferno - Max Hastings [97]
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 the Lietukis garage, less than 200 yards from army headquarters. 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 Dubyssa 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 of massacre would characterise the eastern struggle.
Stalin delegated to Molotov, who strove to overcome his stutter, the task of informing the Russian people that they were at war, in a national broadcast at 12:15 p.m. on 22 June. In the days that followed, the Soviet warlord met repeatedly with his key commanders—there were twenty-nine sessions on the day of the invasion—and made some critical decisions, notably for an evacuation eastwards of industrial plant. The NKVD embarked on wholesale executions and deportations of “unreliable elements,” which included many people who merely bore German names. All privately owned radios were confiscated, so that Russians became dependent on broadcast news relayed into factories and offices “at strictly determined times.” For some days, Stalin clung to an absurd, self-justificatory flicker of hope that the invasion represented a misunderstanding; there is fragmentary evidence that NKVD agents in neutral countries sought to explore with German interlocutors the possibility of further negotiations, which were spurned.
By 28 June, when Minsk fell, such fantasies were dispelled. Stalin suffered a collapse of nerve which caused