War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941

208 Pages·2007·7.63 MB·English

by  Geoffrey P. Megargee

GEOFFREY P. MEGARGEE
AR F NNIH
COMBAT AND GENOCIDE ON THE EASTERN FR
"Elegant~y--researched and written ... this rna _ _ ______ _
8 bitter indictment of force without accountability" -CHOICE
WAR OF
ANNIHILATION
COMBAT AND GENOCIDE ON
1941
THE EASTERN FRONT,
Geoffrey P. Megargee
ROWMAN & LITTLEHELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Lanham' Boulder' !'.'ew York· Toronto' Plymouth. CK
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Published in the United States of America
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Megargee, Geoffrey P., 1959-
VITaI' of annihilation: combat and genocide on the Eilstern From, 1941 CrtlffrC\' P.
Megilrgee.
p. cm.-(Total war (Unlllllubered))
Includes bibliographical references and index.
l. World War, 1 939-1945-Cmnpaigns-Eastern Front. 2. World War. : ;'3~-
19 45-Atrocities-Europe, Eastern. 1. Title. II. Series.
D764.1\138.5 200(j
940 . .54'217-dc22 200:'-':':' ;:-...
ISBN .. 13: ~)78 .. 0-7425 .. 44R 1-9 (cloth: alk. pilper)
ISBN-lO: 0 .. 742.5-44S1-8 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN. . 13: 97S .. 0-742.5-44S2-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-742.5 .. 44S2 .. 6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Printed in the United States of America
QI2T9i~ 1 The paper lIsed ill this plIhlicationmeets the millinn::
American National Standard for Inforllliltion Sciences-Pc:
for Printed Library Nhterials, ANSIjNISO Z3!J.4S-1 ~)~):2
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS VJl
LIST OF AHBREVIATIONS IX
PREFACE Xl
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xv
THE ROOTS OF THE WAR
OF ANNIHILATION
2 PLANS AND PREPARATIONS, 1940-1941 19
.'3 INITIAL VICTORIES AND ATROCITIES,
JUNE TO AUGUST 43
4 THE SECOND PHASE: EXPANDING
CONQUESTS AND GENOCIDE,
AUGUST TO OCTOBER 73
5 THE FINAL DRIVE ON MOSCOW
AND SYSTEMATIC KILLING,
OCTOBER TO DECEMBER 99
6 FAILURE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES,
TO EARLY 1942 129
CONCLUSION 149
CONTENTS
APPENDIX I The Levels ofCommallcl 155
APPENDIX 2 Principal German Army COlllmands and Staffs
011 JUlie 22,1941 157
NOTES 159
BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY 165
INDEX 169
ABOUT THE AUTHOR 177
\ I
ILLUSTRATIONS
MAPS
Map 1 Army Groups North and Center,june 22-ca.july 31 45
Map 2 Army Group South,June 22-ca.july 31 49
Map 3 Army Group North, ca. August I-September 1 75
Map 4 Army Group South, ca. August 1-25 77
Map 5 F:ncirclement in the Ukraine, August I2-September 20 84
Map 6 Army Groups North and Center, ca. October I-December 5 101
Map 7 Army Group South, ca. October I-November 25 106
All maps were created by the author using the Xara X I graphics program.
PHOTOGRAPHS
1 Hitler with Alfi'edjodl, chief of the OKW's Armed Forces
Command Stafr and the Fuhrer's principal military adviser. 20
2 A military planning session at the FUhrer's headquarters. 23
3 A horse-drawn artillery unit. 25
II.I.USTRATIONS
4 Hermann Goring, commander in chief of the LuftwafIe and
Plenipotentiary of the Four-Year Plan. 31
5 Reinhard IIeydrich, head ofthe SS Main Office for Reich Security. 35
6 A Gelluan armored unit advancing into Lithuania onJune 22, 1941. 46
7 A German infantry column advances as a colunm of smoke rises
in the background. 48
8 Wilhelm Ritter von Leeh, commander of Army Group N ortll. 53
9 A Illotor convo), navigates a typical road on the eastern fl·ont. 57
10 Wehrmacht soldiers burn a village in the Ukraine. 66
II Hermann Hoth, cOlllmander of Armored Group 3. 74
12 Ewald von Kleist, cOllllllander of Armored Group 1. 83
1.) Near Kiev, August 1941: A heavy halft rack tows two trucks and
a car along a Russian road after a summer rain. 87
14 Heinrich Himmler (second from left), head of the SS. 93
15 Men of an unidentified German unit carry out a mass shooting. 96
16 Heinz Guderian, cOlllmander of Armored Group 2. 104
17 Erich von Manstein, cOlllmander of Eleventh Army. 107
18 Ernst Busch, commander of Sixteenth Arm)'. III
19 Gerd VOll Rundstedt, commander of Arm}' Group South. 112
20 German police take aim at a group ofJ ews from Ivangorod
in the Ukraine. 122
21 Walter von Reichenau, commander of Sixth Army. 125
22 Fedor von Bock, colllmander of Army Group CeHter. 1.31
23 A lone Germall soldier looks out on the snowy lalldscape
southwest of Moscow. 133
24 GUnther VOiI Kluge, commander of Fourth Army (and £i·olll
December 19, Arm)' Group Center). 139
ABBREVIATIONS
AWA Allgemeilll' Wdll"mflch!amt, the General Armed Forces OtIice
BA-MA Bunclesarchiv-Militararchiv, the fecleralmilitary archive in
Freiburg, Germany
IPN Instytut PaIllieci N arodowej
NARA National Archives and Records Administration
NIOD Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie
OKH Oberko1l1111flJ1do des Heeres, the army high cOlllmand
OKW Oberkom1l1aJ1do dl'l" fYehr1l1flch!, the armed forces high command
SD Sidzerheitsdiellsf, the Security Service, the SS intelligence branch
SS SrllllfzslaJJel, a Nazi Party organization that controlled the
police and the concentration camps, as well as its own military
formations. Led by Heinrich Himmler.
USHMM United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
IX
PREFACE
T he war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was arguably the most
important aspect of the Second World vVar in the European theater. By far
the greatest part of the German army-the vVehrmacht-served on its eastern
front, and most of its losses occurred there. Without that commitment and those
losses, Germany's ultimate defeat at the hands of the western Allies would have
been problematic. For the USSR, although it emerged victorious, the war was
absolutely devastating. Hundreds of cities and towns lay in ruins at its end, and
somewhere between twenty-five and thirty million Soviet soldiers and civilians
died. The death ami destruction resulted not just from military operations, but
because of deliberate policies on the part of Nazi Germany. The Nazis aimed to
kill ofl' a large proportion of the Soviet population, including all the Jews and
Communists they could lay their hands on. They condemned millions more to
death through starvation, exposure, disease, and forced labor, as part of an ag
gressive campaign to conquer the east and turn it into a vast colony for Ger
many's future benefit. These were policies in which senior members of the Ger
man military took an active role, from the planning phase right through
implementation, and in the end their military misjudgments and inhumanity
both contributed to Germany's defeat.
:,\1
PREFACE
The historical literature on the Nazi-Soviet war has suffered from two funda
mental weaknesses, both having to do with the connections between the cam
paign's military and criminal aspects. The first concerns the German army's rep
utation. Sometimes, contrary to the popular sayillg, the losers are the ones who
write the history books. This was the case after the Second World War, when
Fonner German generals set out to shape the historical image of that conflict.
They succeeded to a surprising degree, and that success is nowhere more evi
dent than in the popular understanding of the war in the east. According to their
accounts, the \Vehrmacht fought a heroic battle against the forces of a harbaric,
totalitarian state, alld fought honorably, or at least as honorably as it could, given
the nature of its enemy. Furthermore, the generals maintained that the blame for
the war ami for Germany's defeat lay solely with Adolf Hitler, whom they in
sisted they served only because duty delllanded it. Responsibility for an}' crimes
likewise rested with Hitler and his Nazi minions, especially the SS.
The facts are thoroughly at odds with this version of events. Most senior Ger
man officers supported the attack against the Soviet Union and believed they
would add to the string of easy victories they had won since 1939. They also un
derstood, well before the first soldier set foot across the border, that this was to be
a diflerent kind of war than they had fought hefore. This was to be, quite literally,
a T'cmich(lIl1[!,'skril'g, a war of an nih ilati 011, in which the army would take an active
role ill pursuillg Natiollal SocialisJII's racist goals. l\Iorcoycr, ",hen Germall), lost
the campaign and the war, it would do so IIOt (111)' because of I litler's inadequa
cies, but also because its military leadership made fatal mistakes all on its own.
How did the dual myth of German military genius and moral correctness
come into being? Several factors contributed. First there was the fi.mdamental
difficulty of sorting Ollt such an enormous, complex, and distant series of events.
In this case, a unique set of circumstances, having to do with historical sources,
compounded the clifliculty. When Germany fell, the Allies captured literally mil
liolls of pages of reports, speeches, memorandums, private and oflicial diaries,
orders, and other records. Not many scholars had access to this material, espe
cially at first, and those \\'ho did required decades to make sense of the jumbled
mass. In the meantime, the surviving German military leaders brought out their
own version of reality in memoirs, letters, interviews, court testimony, and his
torical studies-soJlle of which the U.S. Army sponsored-in a deliberate efIort
to shape the historical record of the war. Their material added to the sheer
weight of the available material, and it also provided, naturally enough, a clearer,
more comprehensive version of events than the raw records could give liS, at
least at first. Historians were thrilled to have such a resource at their disposal,
and Illany of their works relied heavily on the generals' accoLlnts.
'\11