Gotthard Heinrici was at a loss. Tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers had already killed, wounded or captured his troops. But the Soviet soldiers just did not surrender:
"Astonishing for all of us is again and again the tenacity with which the Russian fights, his bandages are all half smashed, he stuffs new people in and they attack again." How the Russians manage that is incomprehensible to me. "This is what the German general wrote to his wife on August 3, 1941. Six weeks earlier, on June 22, 1941, the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union without a declaration of war - code name "Enterprise Barbarossa". German fighters attacked Soviet airports, thousands of guns fired unceasingly into the border area: "The Russian army has literally been shot out of their beds," Heinrici triumphed.
As commander of an army corps, the officer crossed the Soviet border with over three million German and allied soldiers. The front line, about 2000 kilometers long, stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.
Within a few weeks, Adolf Hitler and his generals wanted to subjugate the Soviet giant empire - a blitzkrieg as in the previous year against France. And yet a very different war than in Western Europe. As a "crusade of Europe against Bolshevism" called the German propaganda the attack. "Masters" against "subhumans", National Socialism against communism. To the bitter end.
Campaign without mercy
This "crusade" was designed from the beginning as a war of extermination and exploitation against the Soviet population. To the chronicler should the professional soldier Gotthard Heinrici, born in 1886, with his numerous letters to his wife, diary entries and reports to the family from the years 1941/42.
In the recently published edition "Notes from the War of Annihilation" the historian Johannes Hürter of the Munich Institute of Contemporary History has published the records in excerpts. Like no other historical source, they describe the war on the eastern front from the point of view of a senior German officer.
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Heinrici's initial euphoria was soon to prove premature. Although the German armored units advanced at full speed into the interior of the country, the infantry hurried behind in forced marches. To be sure, the Wehrmacht made hundreds of thousands of prisoners in boiler battles, such as Bialystok and Minsk. But the Red Army fought more violently than the German planners had anticipated at their card tables.
"The enemy to us is an amazingly active and tough guy," Heinrici reluctantly paid tribute to the Soviet defenders at the end of July 1941. Shortly before, however, he also noted: "Cunning and deceitful" the Red Army would fight against the German invaders. "Some losses arise because our people are shot down in the back."
Hanged Partisans: "Not a beautiful sight in the morning"
THE MIRROR
In complete reversal of the fact who attacked and who was attacked, Heinrici justified the tremendous brutality of the German Landser. "Cleared up, without mercy," the believing Christian described the behavior of his soldiers. Mercy, or the chivalry often proclaimed by them, were no yardsticks for the German generals. What drove them in the war against the Soviet Union: hatred of communism, hatred of Slavs, hatred of Jews.
Mercilessly, the Wehrmacht devoured entire tracts of land, took away farmers cattle and horses. No lander had to fear punishment, the starvation of millions of Soviet citizens was planned. Prisoner Political Commissars of the Red Army were "done" in rows in violation of international law. "Not nice for our people," commented Heinrici succinctly such a murder in November 1941.
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Thousands upon thousands of Germans pointed out partisans - or people they thought were such. Heinrici's interpreter, whom the researcher Johannes Hürter later became. Hans Beutelspacher identified led a kind of personal extermination campaign. Heinricis only criticism:
"I tell Beutelsbacher not to hang partisans 100m from my window - not a pretty sight in the morning."In this way, Heinrici's Army Corps fought eastwards towards Moscow. Burning villages, bombed cities and rotting corpses marked the advance in scorching heat over endless steppes and woodlands.
For the victims of the German attack, the general who had fought in the Battle of Verdun during the First World War brought only indifference and cynicism. He was all the more worried about his own men as they marched on heavy equipment day after day. As scattered Soviet units and partisans attacked them in forests and swamps. As the losses soared. "The troop is broken in the incessant forest battles," complained the General at the end of July 1941 in his diary (spelling mistakes as in the original).
The advance sank into mud and ice
The illusion of a fast German victory soon burst for Heinrici, given the fierce resistance and the vastness of the country. "So we will probably have to spend the winter in position war on a huge front," he wrote to his wife in early August. "Nice views." And about communism: "He is horrible, but he is a disgusting animal that resists angrily."
The officer detested the barren living conditions of the Soviet citizens, their alleged laziness, the bugs in the requisitioned shelters. Meanwhile, he suffered from the grueling war that killed more people than the previous campaigns of the Second World War. The man of man Heinrici felt no sense of remorse: "These people can no longer be measured by our standards," he wrote in late October 1941.
At that time, the German advance on Moscow had long sunk in mud and ice. From Siberia, the Red Army led fresh divisions. They were equipped for the winter war - the Germans only had their summer gear. "We are currently in dire straits and the enemy is furiously attacking our new positions," said Heinrici on December 1, 1941. "Our people are exhausted."
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Johannes Hurter
Notes from the War of Annihilation: The Eastern Front 1941/42 in the records of General Heinrici
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It was the beginning of the end. Half-frozen, sick, with insufficient supplies of food and ammunition, the Landser tried to fend off the Soviet soldiers, who in turn threatened to surround the Germans.
"From day to day, we experience more and more of ourselves, that the noose around our necks is pulled in. The leader does not want to believe it, but for us, who recognize the situation, it is almost grueling, since 14 days piecemeal to be slaughtered. "It was only in mid-January 1942 that Hitler allowed the troops to withdraw from Moscow. The carnage continued. For years. Heinrici had already guessed at the turn of the year 1941/42 - the war was as good as lost for Germany.
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The raid - Hitler's war against the Soviet Union: A SPIEGEL e-book
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Historians estimate that around 27 million Soviet citizens died in the German campaign. Only on 28 May 1945, 20 days after the end of the war, Heinrici finally went into British captivity. "Whom the gods want to destroy, they strike with blindness," he wrote in one of his last letters in 1941 to his wife.
His own blindness and war guilt the officer never recognized and knit after 1945 on the legend of a "clean" Wehrmacht. In 1948 he was released from captivity and lived from then on as a pensioner. Twice he had been interrogated in Nuremberg during the Allied trials against German war criminals - but Gotthard Heinrici himself was never charged until his death in 1971.