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[... photo 1 ...]
Wikipedia Caption: An improvised camp for Soviet prisoners of war.
August 1942 |
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The fabled spectre
of campaigning through a Russian winter thus assumed a certain foreboding
prominence, which loomed in the minds of many Landsers as the weather
began to change. Solomon Perel, who was travelling with a group of soldiers
from the 12th Panzer Division, noted that the men "had not forgotten Napoleon's
defeat in 1812 and ... [t]hey were scared out of their wits". Another soldier
wrote home on 21 September, "God save us from a winter campaign in the east. It
is very cold here already and rains practically every day." Wilhelm Prüller
wrote in his diary on 28 September that it was so cold he and his comrades had
to sleep in their vehicles. He then continued, "Terribly cold. You can't wrap
yourself in too many blankets. When I think back on the July and August days,
when we simply spent the nights lying in a field on the grass, I have to mourn
for the summer... And who knows what's in front of us as far as the weather
goes?" It was a prudent question, which held dire implications not only for the
operational aspects of the campaign, but also for the war of annihilation. With
a chronic shortage of housing in the forward areas of the front, German soldiers
ensured they were not the ones being left out in the cold. As Wilhelm Prüller's
diary records:
You should see the act the civilians put on when we make it
clear to them that we intend to use their sties to sleep in. A weeping and
yelling begins, as if their throats were being cut, until we chuck them out.
Whether young or old, man or wife, they stand in their rags and tatters on the
doorstep and can't be persuaded to go... When we finally threaten them at
pistol point, they disappear for a few minutes, only to return again yelling
even more loudly. While no one was freezing to death in September 1941, the
Russian peasants knew better than anyone what was coming and knew that survival
depended on shelter and stores of food for the coming winter. Without access to
these the weather would soon prove fatal for countless Soviet peasants. In this
indirect way Germany's war of annihilation involved average German soldiers to a
far greater extent than is often acknowledged. Between seventeen and eighteen
million Soviet civilians died in the war with Nazi Germany and most of these
died not as a direct result of a German action (that is, by being shot), but
rather from the conditions created by the German army and occupational forces
(starvation, disease, exposure, overwork, etc.). Accordingly, however some
historians may seek to "interpret" the circumstances or apply restrictive
definitions to what constituted a war crime, the fact remains that the
Ostheer and its soldiers, each to varying extents participated in and
contributed to the conditions which resulted in the deaths of so many. In this
sense one must keep in mind that the well-known suffering of the German army
during the winter fighting had even worse results for the civilian population,
especially in the areas of heavy German troop concentrations. |