Helmut von Harnack wrote: ‘The fact that we did not bring this campaign to a finish, and go on to take Moscow, is a massive blow for us. The lack of foresight about the weather…is of course an important reason. But the truth is we totally underestimated our opponent. He showed a strength and resilience we did not believe him capable of – indeed, resilience greater than most of us imagined humanly possible.’
Stalin’s personal direction of Russia’s 1941 campaigns inflicted disasters which at times threatened to become irreversible. His refusal to yield ground was responsible for the loss of many of the 3.35 million Russian soldiers who passed into German captivity that year. But his people revealed a will to fight, and a willingness to die, that owed little to ideology and much to peasant virtues, a visceral devotion to Mother Russia, and the fruits of compulsion. Soldier Boris Baromykin described the execution of a comrade from a Central Asian republic, charged with unauthorised withdrawal from his position: ‘The poor fellow was standing just a couple of metres from me, peacefully chewing a piece of bread; he could only speak a few words of Russian and had no idea what was going on. Abruptly the major heading the military tribunal read out an order: “Desertion from the front line – immediate execution,” and shot him in the head. The guy collapsed in front of me – it was horrible. Something inside of me died when I saw that.’
But Baromykin, acknowledging the chaos of one of their retreats, ‘like a herd of desperate cattle’, added: ‘The only thing holding us together was fear that our commanders would shoot us if we tried to run away.’ A soldier shot by his comrades as he attempted to desert swore at them as he lay dying in the dust: ‘They’ll kill the lot of you.’ He glimpsed Nikolai Moskvin, the unit’s political officer. ‘And you, you bloodstained commissar, they’ll hang you first.’ Moskvin drew his revolver and finished the man off. He wrote in his diary: ‘The boys understood; a dog’s death for a dog.’ To discourage desertion, the Red Army adopted a new tactic: dispatching groups of men towards the German lines with their hands in the air, who then tossed a shower of grenades. This was designed to provoke the Germans to fire on others who attempted to surrender in earnest.
The ruthlessness of the Soviet state was indispensable to confound Hitler. No democracy could have established as icily rational a hierarchy of need as did Stalin, whereby soldiers received most food; civilian workers less; and ‘useless mouths’, including the old, only a starvation quota. More than two million Russians died of hunger during the war in territories controlled by their own government. The Soviet achievement in 1941–42 contrasted dramatically with the feeble performance of the Western Allies in France in 1940. Whatever the limitations of the Red Army’s weapons, training, tactics and commanders, Soviet culture armoured its forces to meet the Wehrmacht with a resolution the softer citizens of the democracies could not match.
‘This is no gentleman’s war,’ admitted Wehrmacht Lt. von Heyl in a letter to his family. ‘One becomes totally numb. Human life is so cheap, cheaper than the shovels we use to clear the roads of snow. The state we have reached will seem quite unbelievable to you back home. We do not kill humans but “the enemy”, who are rendered impersonal – animals at best. They behave the same towards us.’ The spectacle of starving prisoners dehumanised Russians in the eyes of many Germans, in a fashion that destroyed any instinct towards pity. A Wehrmacht soldier wrote: ‘They whined and grovelled before us. They were human beings in whom there was no longer a trace of anything human.’
German savagery reconciled Stalin’s nation to the savagery of its own leaders: Hitler’s invasion united tens of millions of Russians who had hitherto been alienated by ideological and racial differences, purges, famines, institutionalised injustice and incompetence. The ‘Great Patriotic War’ Stalin had declared became a reality that accomplished more for the cohesion and motivation of his peoples than any other event since the 1917 Revolution. Even Hitler’s SS became reluctantly impressed with the Soviets’ indoctrination of their own soldiers. Whatever delusions persisted in Berlin, on the battlefield almost every German soldier now recognised the magnitude, perhaps the impossibility, of the task to which his nation was committed. Panzer officer Wolfgang Paul acknowledged: ‘We have blundered, mistakenly, into an alien landscape with which we can never be properly acquainted. Everything is cold, hostile and working against us.’ Another soldier wrote home: ‘Even if we capture Moscow, I doubt whether this will finish the war in the east. The Russians are capable of fighting to the very last man, the very last square metre of their vast country. Their stubbornness and resolve are quite astonishing. We are entering a war of attrition – and I only hope in the long run Germany can win it.’
The last letter from Russia received by gunner lieutenant Jasper Monckeburg’s family in Hamburg was dated 21 January 1942: ‘Forty per cent of our men have got oozing eczema and boils all over their bodies, particularly on their legs…Our duty periods stretch over forty-eight hours, with two or three hours’ sleep, often interrupted. Our lines are so weak, twenty to thirty-five men per company over two kilometres, that we would be completely overrun if we, the artillery, did not stem the onslaught of the enemy, who are ten or twelve times stronger.’ After repulsing one Russian attack, infantrymen carried the lieutenant into his bunker: ‘Since I had been lying for 4½ hours in the snow – 35 degrees of frost – I could no longer feel hands or legs and was completely unable to stand…If it weren’t for this swinish cold!’ Monckeburg was killed a few days later.
Gen. Gotthard Heinrici, visiting Berlin in February, was struck by Hitler’s indifference to eyewitness accounts of the enormous tragedy unfolding in the east. The Führer chose to discuss only technical issues such as the design of anti-tank defences. When once he spoke of the Russian winter, it was with flippancy: ‘Luckily nothing lasts for ever, and that is a consoling thought. If, at this present moment, men are being turned into blocks of ice, that won’t prevent the April sun from shining and restoring life to these desolate places.’ A German soldier named Wolfgang Huff wrote on 10 February 1942, at Sinyavino in Russia: ‘Dusk is falling. The crack of artillery fire – and white smoke rises above the forest. The harsh reality of war: gruff cries of command, struggling with ammunition through the snow. And then a surprising question – “Did you see the sunset?” Suddenly I thought: how grievously we have broken the peace and tranquillity of this land.’
Throughout February, at Stalin’s orders his armies threw themselves again and again at the German positions – and were repulsed with huge losses. The Soviet supply system was close to collapse, and many soldiers existed at the extremities of privation. 2.66 million Russians had been killed in action. But the campaign had cost the German army almost a million casualties, together with 207,000 horses, 41,000 trucks and 13,600 guns. On 1 April, its high command judged only eight of 162 divisions in Russia to be ‘attack ready’. Just 160 tanks were serviceable among sixteen panzer formations. As Hitler anticipated, when spring came his armies would once more roll forward and win victories. But the critical reality of the first year of war in the east was that Russia remained undefeated.
Near Tula, an old woman gave Vasily Grossman and his little party potatoes, salt and some firewood. Her son Vanya was fighting. She said to Grossman, ‘Oh, I used to be so healthy, like a stallion. The Devil came to me last night and gripped my palm with his fingernails. I began to pray: “May God rise again and may his enemies be scattered”…My Vanya came to me last night. He sat down on a chair and looked at the window. I said to him, “Vanya, Vanya!” but he didn’t reply.’ Grossman wrote: ‘If we do win this terrible, cruel war, it will be because there are such noble hearts in our nation, such righteous people, souls of immense generosity, such old women, mothers of sons who, from their noble simplicity, are now losing their lives for the sake of their nation with the same generosity with which this old woman from Tula has given us all that she had. There is only a handful of them in our land, but they will win.’
The British people, awed by Russian resistance, embraced the Soviet Union as an ally with an enthusiasm that dismayed and even frightened their own ruling caste. At a humble level, such sentiment was manifested by an elderly London cockney who said in an East End pub, ‘I never believed them Roosians was ’arf as black as they was painted.
