Stalingrad - Antony Beevor [11]
Hassell’s pessimism was justified. Although a few army commanders were reluctant to distribute the instructions, several others issued orders to their troops which might have come straight from Goebbels’s office. The most notorious order of all came from the commander of the Sixth Army, Field Marshal von Reichenau. General Hermann Hoth, who was to command the Fourth Panzer Army in the Stalingrad campaign, declared: ‘The annihilation of those same Jews who support Bolshevism and its organization for murder, the partisans, is a measure of self-preservation.’ General Erich von Man-stein, a Prussian guards officer admired as the most brilliant strategist of the whole of the Second World War, and who privately admitted to being partly Jewish, issued an order shortly after taking over command of the Eleventh Army in which he declared: ‘The Jewishbolshevik system must be rooted out once and for all.’ He even went on to justify ‘the necessity of harsh measures against Jewry.’ There was little mention of this in his post-war memoirs, Lost Victories.
The acceptance of Nazi symbols on uniform and the personal oath of allegiance to Hitler had ended any pretence that the army remained independent from politics. ‘The generals followed Hitler in these circumstances’, Field Marshal Paulus acknowledged many years later in Soviet captivity, ‘and as a result they became completely involved in the consequences of his policies and conduct of the war.’
In spite of all the Nazis’ attempts to reshape the German Army, it was not as monolithic at regimental level in June 1941 as some writers have made out. The difference in character between a Bavarian, an East Prussian, a Saxon, and above all an Austrian division, would be remarked upon immediately. Even within a division from a particular region, there could be strong contrasts. For example, in the 60th Motorized Infantry Division, which was later trapped at Stalingrad, many young officers in its volunteer battalions came from the Technische Hochschule in Danzig, and were caught up in the heady atmosphere of the city’s return to the Fatherland: ‘For us,’ wrote one of them, ‘National Socialism was not a Party programme but the very essence of being German.’ On the other hand, the officers in the division’s reconnaissance battalion, 160 Aufklärungs-Abteilung, a sort of mechanized yeomanry cavalry, came mainly from East Prussian landowning families. They included Prince zu Dohna-Schlobitten, who had served in the Kaiser’s Garde du Corps in the Ukraine in 1918.
The 16th Panzer Division was firmly in the tradition of the old Prussian Army. Its 2nd Panzer Regiment, which spearheaded the dash to Stalingrad the following summer, was descended from the oldest Prussian cavalry regiment, the Great Elector’s Life Guard Cuirassiers. The regiment had so many members of the nobility that few were addressed by their military rank. ‘Instead of Herr Hauptmann or Herr Leutnant’, one of their tank crewmen remembered, ‘it was Herr Fürst or Herr Graf. The regiment had suffered such low losses in the Polish and French campaigns that its peacetime identity remained virtually untouched.
Traditions from an earlier age offered an advantage. ‘Within the regiment’, observed an officer from another panzer division, ‘it was safe to talk. Nobody in Berlin could joke like us about Hitler.’ Officer conspirators on the general staff were able to talk about deposing Hitler, even to uncommitted generals, without risking denunciation to the Gestapo. Dr Alois Beck, the Catholic chaplain