Stalingrad - Antony Beevor [46]
Rifle divisions had an NKVD Special Department staff of up to twenty officers, with one ‘Operational representative’ per battalion, and a headquarters guard unit of twenty to thirty men, who held prisoners and executed ‘cowards and traitors’. The Special Department officer recruited his own agents and informers. According to a former SMERSH informer, he tended to be ‘pale because they usually worked during the night’, and, on parade, he ‘looked closely in our faces as if he knew something bad about each one of us’.
NKVD Special Departments took their work of rooting out spies and traitors with great seriousness. An officer, using the name Brunny, wrote to the author and journalist llya Ehrenburg complaining that the newspapers did not publish enough in praise of the Special Departments. ‘It is very difficult to discover an experienced fascist spy. This requires great intelligence and a good eye. An NKVD soldier should be very keen and know the special rules of this game. The press publishes much about the terrible deeds of the Germans, which is necessary. But it is also important to make our soldiers hate traitors.’
The Wehrmacht tried to exploit the Stalinist approach to loyalty. One German instruction strongly recommended that Soviet prisoners should be warned ‘of the treatment which awaits them at the hands of the NKVD’ should they manage to escape ‘from German captivity and return to the Red Army’.
Another department of the NKVD, set up by Beria in the autumn of 1939, dealt with enemy prisoners of war. Its first major task had been the liquidation of over 4,000 Polish officers in the forest at Katyn. In the summer of 1942, however, its officers were underemployed because so few Germans were captured during the Axis advance.
Every member of a small detachment from the 29th Motorized Division of Fourth Panzer Army was interrogated by Lieutenant Lepinskaya from the political department of South-Western Front headquarters. Her questions to gauge their morale provided little encouraging material. ‘Most of the soldiers want to fight to the end,’ she had to report. ‘No cases of desertion or self-inflicted wounds. Officers strict but fair.’
Lepinskaya had more luck with Romanian prisoners. An officer admitted that his men hated Marshal Antonescu for having ‘sold their motherland to Germany’. Romanian soldiers were even more forthcoming. They told her of ‘fist-fights with Germans’, even that a German officer had been killed after he shot two of their comrades. Their own officers were ‘very rude’ to them and often struck them. There had been numerous cases of self-inflicted wounds, despite lectures from officers that they were ‘a sin against the Motherland and God’. Lepinskaya concluded that the Romanians were clearly in a ‘low political moral state’. Her report was passed rapidly back to Moscow.
The advance across the Don steppe provided many mixed experiences for the Sixth Army after the winter snows. General Strecker, the commander of XI Corps, found it ‘as hot as Africa, with huge dust clouds’. On 22 July, his chief of staff, Helmuth Groscurth, recorded a temperature of ‘53 degrees in the sun’.
Sudden rains, while temporarily turning tracks to mire, did little to solve the water shortage, which was the main preoccupation of the German Landser during that time. The Red Army polluted wells during the retreat, while collective farm buildings were destroyed, and tractors and cattle driven to the rear. Supplies which could not be moved in time were rendered unusable. ‘The Russians have poured petrol over the grain supplies,’ a corporal wrote home on 10 August. ‘Soviet bombers