The Second World War Page 40

  The German army was indeed battered and suffering badly. Wearing clothes looted from peasants, its frostbitten soldiers, with unkempt beards, noses peeling and cheeks burned by the cold, were unrecognizable from those who had advanced eastwards the previous summer, singing marching songs. German troops followed the local practice of sawing off the legs of the dead to thaw them over a fire in order to pull off the boots. Even wrapping their footwear in cloth could be insufficient to ward off frostbite on sentry duty. Frostbitten limbs, unless treated quickly, soon became gangrenous and had to be amputated. Army surgeons in field hospitals, overwhelmed by the casualty rate, simply threw the sawn-off hands and legs outside into piles in the snow.

  Yet opponents always underestimated the German army’s ability to recover from disaster. Discipline, which had been on the verge of breakdown, had been rapidly re-established. During the chaotic retreat officers had improvised Kampfgruppen of infantry mixed with assault guns, pioneers and a few panzers. And by the first week in January, at Hitler’s insistence, villages had been turned into strongpoints. When the ground was frozen too hard to dig trenches, they used explosives or shells to blast craters, or they created mortar pits and firing points behind packed snow and ice reinforced with logs. Sometimes they were reduced to shovelling snow with their rifle butts. German soldiers had still not received any winter clothing. They hoped to strip Soviet casualties of their padded jackets before they froze solid, but in the hard frosts that seldom proved possible. Dysentery, from which almost all soldiers suffered, was a double curse when one was forced to drop one’s trousers in such temperatures. And eating snow to rehydrate usually made things worse.

  Rokossovsky’s 16th Army and General Andrei Vlasov’s 20th Army attacked north of Moscow and, when a gap opened, the 2nd Guards Cavalry Corps, supported by tank and ski battalions, forced into it. But, as Zhukov had warned, the Germans were no longer disorganized. Soviet forces soon found that instead of surrounding the Germans, they themselves were cut off. Some German formations were bypassed, but they stood and fought, supplied by air. The largest Kessel consisted of six German divisions encircled around Demyansk on the Leningrad highway towards Novgorod.

  Even further to the north-west, General Kirill Meretskov’s Volkhov Front tried again to break the siege of Leningrad, using the 54th Army and the 2nd Shock Army. Stalin bullied him into a premature attack, with untrained formations and artillery which lacked gunsights, until General Voronov flew up with a consignment. The 2nd Shock Army advanced across the River Volkhov and rapidly penetrated into the German rear, threatening to cut off the German Eighteenth Army. But the advance was slowed by German counter-attacks and the winter conditions. ‘In order to beat a path through the deep snow, they had to form columns in ranks of fifteen. The first rank went forward, trampling the snow, which in places came up to their waists. After ten minutes the front rank was withdrawn and took up position at the rear of the column. The difficulty of movement was increased because from time to time they would come across half-frozen patches of bogs and streams covered with a thin layer of ice.’ With soaked and frozen feet, they suffered heavy frostbite casualties. Their illfed horses were exhausted, so they had to carry the ammunition and supplies themselves.

  General Vlasov, who had so recently been lauded for his part in the defence of Moscow, was sent by Stalin to take command. Vlasov was promised reinforcements and supplies but none came until it was too late. Ammunition was dropped by parachute but most fell behind German lines. Vlasov’s army was soon cut off entirely in the frozen marshes and birchwoods. Meretskov warned Stalin of the impending disaster. Not long after the spring thaw, the 2nd Shock Army had virtually ceased to exist. Some 60,000 men were lost. Only 13,000 escaped. An embittered Vlasov was eventually captured in July. The Germans soon persuaded him to form a Russian Liberation Army, or ROA. Most of those who volunteered joined purely to avoid starvation in the prisoner-of-war camps. Stalin’s reaction to Vlasov’s betrayal revealed his misleading obsessions from the Great Terror and purge of the Red Army: ‘How did we miss him before the war?’ he asked Beria and Molotov.

  Stalin’s emissaries, including the sinister and incompetent commissar Lev Mekhlis, simply harried front commanders, blaming them for every shortcoming, even though the lack of supplies and vehicles was not their fault. Nobody dared tell Stalin of the chaos caused by his ludicrously ambitious plan, which extended even to recapturing Smolensk. German reinforcements brought in from France were thrown straight into the fighting, still with no winter equipment, while many of the Soviet divisions were reduced to little more than 2,000 men each.

  The attempt to create a major encirclement around Vyazma failed. Zhukov even had part of the 4th Airborne Corps dropped behind German lines, but the Luftwaffe struck back at their airfields round Kaluga, which the Germans knew well, having only just abandoned them. Down the whole of the eastern front, from Leningrad to the Black Sea, the German strongpoints succeeded in preventing any major breakthroughs. In the Crimea, Manstein managed to bottle up a Soviet amphibious invasion of the Kerch Peninsula attempting to break his siege of Sebastopol.

  The greatest crisis came at Rzhev where the German Ninth Army was in danger of encirclement. General Walther Model, who became one of Hitler’s favourites with his pitiless energy, was sent in to take command. Model demonstrated not only great physical courage, but also on other occasions moral courage in the way he stood up to Hitler. He immediately launched a counter-attack that caught the Soviet forces on the wrong foot. This succeeded in restoring the front line and in trapping the 29th Army. But the encircled Red Army soldiers, told of the fate awaiting them if taken prisoner by Model’s troops, fought to the end.

  Another favourite of Hitler, Generalfeldmarschall von Reichenau, who had been appointed commander-in-chief of Army Group South after Rundstedt’s dismissal, had already become a different sort of casualty. On 12 January, he had gone for his morning run near his headquarters at Poltava. At lunch he felt unwell and collapsed from a heart attack. Hitler immediately ordered that Reichenau should be flown back to Germany for treatment, but the field marshal died on the way. Shortly before his death, Reichenau, whose Sixth Army had assisted the SS Sonderkommando in the massacre of Babi Yar, had persuaded Hitler to appoint his chief of staff Generalleutnant Friedrich Paulus to take over command of the Sixth Army.

  The Germans also managed to resupply their encircled troops at Demyansk, Kholm and Belyi. The large Demyansk pocket was kept going by a daily run of over a hundred Junkers 52 transports. This success was to have serious consequences a year later, when Göring assured Hitler that he could maintain Paulus’s Sixth Army trapped round Stalingrad. But although the German troops around Demyansk received enough food to fight on, the Russian civilians inside the Kessel were left to starve.

  Around Kursk, Timoshenko’s forces managed to drive the Germans back in desperate struggles. The battlefields were left in a frozen tableau mort. A Red Army officer called Leonid Rabichev came across ‘a beautiful girl, a telephone operator who had been hiding in the forest since the Germans came. She wanted to join the army. I told her to get into the cart.’ A little further on, ‘I saw a horrifying sight. An enormous space stretching to the horizon was filled with our tanks and German tanks. In between them there were thousands of sitting, standing or crawling Russians and Germans frozen solid. Some of them were leaning against each other, others hugging each other. Some propping themselves with a rifle, others holding a sub-machine gun. Many of them had their legs chopped off. This had been done by our infantry who had been unable to pull off the boots from the Fritzs’ frozen legs so they chopped them off in order to be able to warm them up in the bunkers. Grishechkin [his orderly] checked the pockets of the frozen soldiers and found two cigarette lighters and several packs of cigarettes. The girl was looking at all this indifferently. She had seen it many times before, but I was horrified. There were tanks which had tried to ram or run over each other and were standing on their hind legs after colliding with
each other. It was terrible to think of the wounded, both ours and Germans, freezing to death. The front had advanced and they had forgotten to bury these men.’

  The suffering of civilians was even greater. They were crushed between the cruelty of the Germans and that of their own Red Army and partisans, ordered by Stalin to destroy any buildings which the Germans might use for shelter. In any newly liberated areas, NKVD troops seized peasants who might have collaborated with the Germans. Nearly 1,400 people were arrested during January, even though the dividing line between survival and collaboration was hard to define. Advancing Soviet troops came across gallows and heard from villagers of other examples of German atrocities, but in some cases, German soldiers had been merciful. It was better for villagers to remain silent in this case to avoid accusations of treason to the Motherland.

  Stalin’s utterly misplaced hopes that the Wehrmacht was about to suffer the fate of Napoleon’s Grande Armée were not abandoned until April, by which time Soviet casualties had risen to just over the million mark, of which half were dead or missing.

  Because the highest priority for transport went to the movement of troops and military supplies, the population of Moscow was close to starvation. A black market developed with clothes and footwear exchanged for potatoes. Older people were reminded of the hunger years during the civil war. Children suffered from rickets. There was no fuel or wood for stoves, so water and sewage pipes froze. A hundred thousand women and children were sent out into the surrounding woods to cut firewood. Electricity was in short supply, with many blackouts. Twice as many people died from tuberculosis as the year before, and overall the mortality rate trebled. A typhus epidemic was feared, but the strenuous efforts of the Moscow medical authorities kept it at bay.

  Conditions in besieged Leningrad were immeasurably worse. German artillery shelled the city regularly four times a day. But the defences held, mostly thanks to the naval guns, both dismounted and those still on ships of the Baltic Fleet at the Kronstadt naval base and moored in the Neva. The key to the survival of the city now lay more in its tenuous lifeline.

  The Soviet authorities made strenuous but often incompetent efforts to keep the city’s fragile link to the east open. With the Germans on the southern shore of Lake Ladoga, the only route was by the ‘ice road’. The ice had become thick enough to carry motor and horse-drawn transport only after the third week of November when the city had supplies for just two days left. The great danger was a sudden thaw.

  On the eastern side, the Germans had seized Tikhvin on 8 November 1941. This forced the Soviets to build a ‘corduroy’ road of felled birch trees through the forests to the north. Several thousand of the forced labourers–peasants, Gulag prisoners and rear troops–died in the process, and their bodies were thrown into the mud under the wooden track. Such sacrificial efforts were almost entirely wasted because Meretskov’s troops, aided by partisan detachments in the German rear, retook Tikhvin on 9 December, three days after the corduroy road was finished. This reopened the railhead and greatly reduced the journey to the south-eastern point of Lake Ladoga.

  The two-way traffic across the frozen lake, with factory machinery from the city going east and supplies going west, constituted an extraordinary achievement. The road over the ice was defended against attack from German ski troops with machine-gun posts and anti-aircraft guns in strongpoints on the ice. These had igloos attached for the Red Army soldiers to shelter in. The Soviets also built armed aerosleighs powered by aircraft engines, with propellers at the back like a winter version of a swamp glider. Medical centres and manned control points to direct the traffic were set up across the ice. But the handling of civilian evacuees from Leningrad was often brutally incompetent and unimaginative. Even the NKVD complained of their ‘irresponsible and heartless treatment’ and the ‘inhuman’ conditions on the trains. Nothing was done to help those who reached the ‘mainland’ alive. Their survival depended on having family or friends to help them with food and shelter.

  Even after the recapture of Tikhvin, Leningraders were so weak from starvation that many collapsed on the frozen streets as they searched aimlessly for fuel or food. Their ration books were promptly stolen. Bread was seized from the hands of people returning from a bakery. Nothing destroys basic morality more rapidly than starvation. When a member of a family died, the corpse would often be hidden in the freezing apartment so that their rations could still be claimed.

  Yet, despite the fears of the authorities, there were few attempts to storm and loot bread shops. Only the Party bosses and those close to the food chain, the distributors and the counter assistants, were likely to have the strength. Those at the bottom of the heap who did not work in a factory, with its privileged access to a subsidized canteen, were unlikely to survive. They began to look old so swiftly that a close relative might fail to recognize them. Crows, pigeons and seagulls were eaten first, then cats and dogs (even Pavlov’s famous experimental dogs were consumed at the Physiological Institute) and finally rats.

  Almost everyone trying to walk to work or to queue for food had to stop to rest every few metres, because they were so weak. Children’s sleds were used to carry firewood. Soon they were used for carrying corpses, called ‘mummies’ because they were wrapped in paper or cloth shrouds, to the mass graves. Wood could not be spared for coffins. It was needed for heating to stay alive.

  Out of a population of 2,280,000 in December 1941, a total of 514,000 were evacuated to the ‘mainland’ by the spring, and 620,000 died. For older citizens, the siege was the second major famine they had endured, the first having started in 1918 with the civil war. Many observed that a foreknowledge of death came some forty-eight hours before a person expired. With their last strength, many people reported to their workplace to warn that they would not be coming back and begged their boss to take care of their family.

  Leningrad, which prided itself on its intellectual heritage, turned the Astoria Hotel into a hospital for writers and artists. There, they were fed vitamins in the form of fresh pine needles crushed into a bitter drink. Attempts too were made to care for orphans. ‘They hardly looked like children any more,’ a head-teacher said. ‘They were strangely silent, with a kind of concentrated look in their eyes.’ But in some institutions the kitchen staff pilfered the food from the kitchens for their own families, and left the children to starve.

  The city authorities had failed to stock firewood before the siege began, so most were left trying to keep warm by burning books, as well as smashed-up furniture and doors, in their pot-bellied stoves. Old wooden buildings were dismantled to provide fuel for public buildings. In January 1942, the temperature in Leningrad at times fell below minus 40 degrees. Many people simply retired to bed to keep warm, but then wasted away. Death by starvation came silently and anonymously. A half-life drifted into non-life. ‘You don’t know what it was like,’ a woman told a British journalist soon afterwards. ‘You just stepped over corpses in the street, and on stairs! You simply stopped taking any notice.’

  Most died from the combination of starvation and cold. Hypothermia and stress, combined with starvation, so upset the metabolism that people could not properly absorb even the few calories they did consume. In theory, soldiers were guaranteed a much better ration than civilians, but in many cases their rations never arrived. Officers stole them for themselves and their families.

  ‘People turn into animals before our eyes,’ wrote a diarist. Some were driven insane by starvation. Soviet history has tried to pretend that there was no cannibalism, but both anecdotal and archive sources indicate otherwise. Some 2,000 people were arrested for ‘the use of human meat as food’ during the siege, 886 of them during the first winter of 1941–2. ‘Corpse-eating’ was the consumption of meat from somebody already dead. Some people even snatched bodies from the morgue or mass graves. Outside Leningrad, a number of soldiers and officers resorted to eating corpses and even the amputated limbs of field hospitals.

  ‘Person-eating’, which was rarer, ca
me from the deliberate murder of an individual for the purpose of cannibalism. Parents, not surprisingly, kept their children in their apartments for fear of what might befall them. It was said that the flesh of children, followed by that of young women, was the tenderest. Although stories abounded of gangs selling human meat ground into kotleta, or rissoles, almost all cannibalism took place within the apartment block, with crazed parents eating their own children, or neighbours preying on those of neighbours. Some starving soldiers in the 56th Rifle Division of the 55th Army ambushed ration carriers, killed them, took their supply of food, buried the body in the snow and returned later to eat it bit by bit.

  Yet while starvation brought out the worst in people, there were examples of self-sacrificial altruism, to neighbours and even complete strangers. Children appear to have had a better rate of survival than their parents, presumably because the adults gave their offspring part of their own rations. Women usually survived longer than men, but often collapsed later. They also faced the terrible dilemma of whether to give in to the pleading of their children or to eat enough themselves to keep up their strength to look after their family. The birthrate plunged, partly from extreme malnutrition since women stopped menstruating and men became infertile, but also because most males were away at the front.

  Red Army soldiers and the marine infantry in Leningrad became confident that the Germans would never break through. They were convinced that the main reason why the Germans persisted in the siege was to keep the Finns in the war. Leningraders were angry that the western Allies were reluctant to regard Finland as an enemy country. They could not accept that Stalin’s assault on Finland in 1939 had been entirely unprovoked. Hatred of the enemy was continually fomented by the propaganda services of the Red Army. Posters showed a wild-eyed little boy, with a burning village in the background, crying out: ‘Papa, ubei nemtsa!’ (‘Daddy, kill a German!’).