According to Nazi ideology, the war on the Eastern Front was directed at barbarians of the non-Selfish race. For Hitler, the attack on the Soviet Union was the peak of his life's work, and if Germany wanted to establish hegemony, it must gain "living space" in the East, and use the agro-industrial resources of this land to push Germany into the position of world power. As early as the Middle Ages, the Germanic peoples colonized the Baltic Sea region and expanded eastward towards Russia, so their 20th-century descendants should continue their ancestral causes on a larger scale. Germany's eastern border should extend from the Agan Line on the White Sea coast to the Astra Khan line in southern Russia.
In the process, of course, the "Jewish-Bolshevik" government of the Soviet Union must be eliminated, and the population of the land, whether Slavic or Asian, should be enslaved or exiled to the wild frontier. It's a colonial war, like last century, only this time to do everything in its power to wipe out a great power in Europe.
From Hitler's description of the Russian people as "inferior", it is clear how much contempt and contempt he had wagned in the war he had waged. This sentiment goes back to the common memories of the Germanic peoples, the fear that another Mongol invasion would envelop Europe under the "Asian wave." The only way to defeat such an enemy is to "exterminate." On March 30, 1941, Hitler delivered a two-and-a-half-hour speech at the Chancellery, explaining to some 250 officers the nature of the coming war. Halder, the army chief of staff, wrote down its contents in his diary.
Our task in Russia is to eliminate their armed forces, to destroy their form of government... It is a struggle between two ideologies. To destroy Bolshevism is to kill for self-defense. We must abandon the idea of "comrades", and the Communists were not our comrades in the past and in the future. This was accompanied by a devastating fight... It is a struggle against the toxic ideas that incite riots. There is no need to consider the trial of the Tribunal, the Force Commander must know what is personal and should be resolved on the spot, he must guide the troops into the struggle ... The commissar of the Russian army should be summarily executed ... This war will be very different from the war in the West. In the East, harshness is benevolence for the future. Commanders must demand that subordinates should not be too scrupulous.
Hitler's ruthless orders were passed directly to the forefront. At the beginning of the Operation Barbarossa, Marshal Rehraau, commander of the Sixth Army, issued an order, and later a copy of it was transmitted to all the troops on the Eastern Front.
The goal of the war against Judeo-Bolshevism was to completely destroy the source of the enemy's power and to drive the Asian remnants out of European culture. Every soldier on the Eastern Front, in addition to being a warrior, must also be a ruthless racist, and an avenger who takes revenge on the bestial acts of the Germans in the past... Therefore every warrior must understand the importance of harsh measures and treat them as inferior human beings... Only in this way can we recover justice from history and free the Germanic peoples from the threat of Jews and Asians.
Because the enemy's racial and cultural inferiority, like the devil in human skin, threatened the racial purity of the Germans, the Germans could disregard the precepts of ordinary warfare. Another evidence of the "barbarization" of the German army is the "Commissar Order" of June 6, 1941, which specifically states that the Commissar of the Red Army was "the initiator of the idea of Asian warfare ... Whether captured in battle or resisting at the time of capture, they should be shot immediately. This news was reiterated in the bi-weekly magazine "Military News Newsletter" published by the Supreme High Command and distributed to the troops:
"Anyone who has seen the Commissar of the Soviet Army will be able to understand the faces of the Bolsheviks. There is no need for any theoretical explanation here. If we say that these people, most of whom are Jews, are beasts, it constitutes an insult to all animals. They are the embodiment of the devil, full of crazy resentment towards noble human beings. From the behavior of these commissars, it can be reflected that the "sub-people" have rebelled against noble human beings. ”
Inevitably, this recognition of the atrocities committed by the commissar leads to another barbaric act— the arbitrary massacre of Russian prisoners of war. The complex reaction of senior German officers to this behavior can be seen in the order of General Li Meerson, commander of the 47th Panzer Army, on June 25, 1941, when the war had only begun for three days.
I have seen the merciless killing of prisoners of war and civilians. For a Russian soldier, when he was captured in uniform and brave battles, he had the right to be treated justly. We want to free the people from the yoke of Bolshevism, and we need their labor... Such acts did not contradict the Fuehrer's order to severely punish the guerrillas and the Communist Party Committee.
But it is practically impossible to limit the object of hatred to the "Jewish-Asian" commissars and not to the average "inferior" Soviet soldier. The massacre continued, and five days later, Lee Merson issued a grave warning:
This is murder. The Wehrmacht was fighting Bolshevism, not the Soviet people. We want to return peace, warmth and order to a land that has been poisoned by the Jews and their evil cliques. The Fuehrer's directive called for severe punishment of Bolshevism and any form of guerrilla warfare. We must carefully single out these people from the Russian people, and any shooting must be carried out on the orders of an officer ... Descriptions of scenes like this must soon circulate among the enemy: countless corpses of soldiers lie on the side of the road, each shot through the head at close range, unarmed and with their hands held high.
This attempt to go against inhumane instructions has had little effect. Tens of thousands of Russian prisoners of war died on the road to the rear because of the lack of an organized transport plan. During the harsh winters in Russia, they were forced to walk extremely long distances on foot or crammed like cattle in uncamped wagons. On 30 July 1941, the 16th Army issued an order prohibiting units from using return troop trains to transport prisoners of war because they were at risk of "contaminating" the carriages. From the beginning of operation Barbarossa, the large number of prisoners of war had created serious logistical problems, but the attitude of the top leadership could be represented by Goering: he said in a mocking tone that it would be of great benefit if "millions, record-high" Russians died.
A lack of prior planning, coupled with many deliberate neglects, resulted in the death of a large number of Russian prisoners of war from disease or starvation. Many people's clothes were snatched away by the German soldiers who lacked cold equipment, and they were frozen to death in large numbers in the cold winter. When orders to improve the situation of prisoners of war are issued, the required supplies are usually already used on the civilian side.
"Peace, warmth and order" are unimaginable images for any people at war, especially those refugees in exile who are in danger of being shot as "guerrillas" or "saboteurs". Although the Germans established a population registration system, as in vietnam later, the Us army could not provide troops with support against the guerrillas.
The peasants who remained where they were were, even more helpless, had to face the German "scorched earth" tactics and the anti-guerrilla clearance. During the Russian winter counteroffensive in late 1941 and early 1942, the German 18th Panzer Division created a series of "deserts" as it retreated: adult men were driven to the rear, women and children were driven into positions, "wandering" in the direction of the Russian attack, with nothing to protect themselves except clothes; all houses were burned; cattle and sheep carcasses were thrown into wells to pollute water sources; all machinery and economic assets were destroyed. If you go to the countryside to clear the guerrillas, the damage will be about the same.
In mid-May 1943, the 18th Panzer Division was drawn from the front line and renamed the 318th Infantry Division, which, together with some "volunteer" units, was sent to the forest area south of Briansk to clear out about 3,500 local guerrillas. In this battle, code-named "Gypsy Baron", men from 15 to 65 years old were arrested as prisoners of war, and other residents who were not suitable for military service were expelled from the area after being given rations for two weeks, and all villages were burned. Red Army officers and commissars were interrogated by intelligence units, and soldiers, Communists, and Jews in general were ordered to serve as guides for the German army or sent to clear mines. In the two-week operation, nearly 16,000 civilians were driven out of the area, many of whom died of frostbite or were killed by SS "task forces." This force was designed to hunt down Jews and other non-Arians in the occupied areas behind the front.
The result of the "Gypsy Baron" operation was that 700 people were executed or imprisoned, and 207 "camps" and 2390 "combat strongholds" were destroyed — the vast majority of which were homes. And that's just a routine action. What is more, the division actually said in the report: "Obviously, this operation will greatly contribute to the propaganda of our army to the people in the occupied areas..." This is really a crazy logic, and it is difficult to imagine what the "positive effect" is.
German atrocities—not just party troops, but also regular army—provoked retaliation from the Russians. As the Germans marched from Stalingrad to the concentration camps, they were brutally treated along the way by the Russians who had suffered the Germans in 1941. A German soldier surrendered at Stalingrad and survived the war. The anonymous soldier recalls the horrific encounters he had on his way to the camp after his capture.
"Our last bits were looted, even backpacks and blankets were stolen, and medals and classes were torn apart and snatched away in the midst of curses. Thousands of people began marching under the compulsion of an unmerciful enemy... At dusk, we reached the ruins of a place called Jesfko and spent the night in the snow and wind. The next day, we set off for Dupovka, leaving behind the bodies of thousands of brothers in Jesfko. German soldiers died in groups on the Russian steppes because there was no food or shelter. ”
On their way to the camp, dysentery, cholera, typhus and famine were rife, killing thousands of people. On the way to the Bektovka concentration camp, 17,000 dead bodies were left at a single meeting point alone. Prisoners of war, too weak to keep up with the ranks, were immediately killed by the guards, all under the supervision of Soviet officers. Arriving at Bektovka, the German captives discovered:
"Our camp was a large area fenced with barbed wire, where the civilians were removed. The newcomers were stunned by what they saw: inside the two-story building and on the open ground, there were piles of corpses—in short, the whole camp was everywhere. They were captured earlier in the pocket south of Stalingrad, where they died of disease, and the number of dead bodies is estimated to be forty-two thousand..."
The Soviet Union's methods of warfare also brought suffering to its own people. A German soldier wrote a letter to his home about driving the people to clear the mines for the armored forces to advance.
"I saw the enemy's offensive advancing in dense crowds, shoulder to shoulder through the mines laid down by our army. These are civilians or prisoners of military law who move forward like robots, and the ranks are chaotic only when a mine explodes, killing or injuring people around them. They didn't seem to know what cowering and fear were, and we noticed that some were killed by bullets, fired by a small group of officers or commissars, following closely behind the line. ”
For the Soviet Union, this was not a cruel picture. Soldiers and people are like robots, just part of a relentless "wave" that destroys everything that resists it as it advances. An infantryman of the German 6th Army recalled the Soviet 37th Army trying to break out of the encirclement during the Battle of Kiev in the autumn of 1941.
"The Soviet assault ... It is through a large number of people, who have no real goal, but just rely on numbers to overwhelm us. The human wall stretches from the left side of our regiment to the right, overlapping and overlapping, and then advancing mercilessly in a dense formation... At a distance of six hundred meters, we began to shoot, killing all the enemies in the first wave, leaving only one survivor, and walked forward in a daze. It's unbelievable, horrible, cruel. ”
Hitler's comments on this inhumane behavior of the Russian army, according to his Spanish ambassador Espinoza, were a "complete massacre" and wave after wave of Russian infantry became "grinding meat". As for the point of view of a soldier, for example, the aforementioned soldier of the German Sixth Army concluded:
"The attack was carried out under such clumsy command that I could not believe that it would have come from a professional modern army, and it also convinced many officers that the Red Army was no different from the army of the Tsarist era, that it was the same old-fashioned."
At the beginning of the war, the Russian army lacked good leadership, but they were quite brave. General Simon, the former commander of the SS Skeleton Division, recalled: "The Russian infantry always fought to the last breath ... Even the chariot was hit and caught fire, and the occupants continued to fire inside. Injured or unconscious people pounce on weapons as if they were okay. ”
In terms of defensive positions, the Russian army is a difficult opponent. Their instinct for the land sought cover, making it almost difficult for the attackers to find them. General Simon described the Russian army as a simple but effective defense system.
"They often did not use formal trenches, but dug deep, narrow caves that could accommodate only two or three infantrymen. The machine gun setup was skillful, with forty or fifty snipers in a company often assigned to the best position. There were various types of mortars in the trenches, often with flamethrowers, often operated by remote control, plunging our attacking forces into a sea of fire. Chariots ready to counterattack were well hidden, often lurking in dug craters and everywhere. The defense line is extended by barbed wire and minefields, and this design is suitable for a variety of surface environments. ”
Another thing that impressed Simon was that the Russians were well trained on the battlefield. The Germans often marched safely into a village that appeared to have been abandoned, only to be surprised to break into the center of the enemy's strong defenses. The Russians guarded a village in an entire regiment, all concealed in the most skillful way. However, Simon also noted that if the German offensive direction was not what the Russians had envisioned, the ambush would immediately collapse. General Myron also mentioned that instability and volatility are the characteristics of the Russian army's performance.
"It's not certain what the Russians will do next, they always oscillate between the two extremes ... The quality of the troops is as unstable as their vast territory. Their perseverance and endurance are beyond imagination, incredibly brave, and sometimes they become spineless cowards. On many occasions, the Russians repelled the German attack with great heroism, but then they were suddenly panicked by a small German assault. They may have been in disarray at the first gunshot, but in the next day's battle, the same unit showed astonishing strength. ”
The Russian soldiers braved the seasons and the environment, were good at infiltrating enemy lines, and could survive below the minimum supply that western armies thought. As the war continued, the Red Army's equipment continued to improve, becoming a formidable adversary to the Germans, who had previously underestimated them. The Germans gave the Russian soldiers the nickname "Ivan". Ivan was a skilled and endurance soldier, armed with a standard Mosin Nagant 7.62 mm rifle, two or three grenades, and a PPSH submachine gun. He was a basic part of the Soviet war machine, a chip in the hands of the "base camp". Before the summer of 1943, infantry units were sent to the front line after only 10 days of ammunition, and almost no one considered the issue of resupply. The Red Army used to let the units fight until they "bottomed out" and then rebuild them, and according to the intensity of the battle, these units did not last for 10 days when the ammunition was exhausted.