The Eastern Front (1941-5), called the Western Front or Great Patriotic War by the Soviets, was by far the bloodiest of the Second World War (1939-45). In this article, the memories of those who experienced the conflict firsthand are presented, both from the German and Soviet side. Also presented are the memories of civilians who were reluctantly caught in the burning stage lights of this most terrible theatre of war.
Operation Barbarossa
Many German and Axis soldiers started the campaign with optimism, believing Hitler's claim that the USSR's Red Army was rotten and would soon crumble. One German soldier, Bernhard Bechler, reassured his sister as he departed for the Eastern Front:
I said 'Listen, we will part now. In a few weeks I'll ring you from Moscow.'…I was utterly convinced that this would happen, and I was in fact proud of our plans.
(Rees, 40)
Nazi propaganda had also spread the message that the Red Army was a brutal and unprincipled fighting force that should be given no quarter. This view was reinforced by experience for many German soldiers. Walter Schaefer-Kehnert, an artillery officer in a panzer division, recalls one episode:
When they [the Soviets] counter-attacked and we had to leave the wounded behind and then we came back again, we found all the wounded had had their heads split open with short infantry blades. Now you can imagine our soldiers, when you see your wounded friend has been brutally killed, then they were furious.
(Rees, 50-1)
Axis soldiers were also told that they were fighting a war against Bolshevism, the main enemy of Nazism, and so they were ordered to shoot political officers (commissars) serving in the Red Army. Walter Traphöner remembers:
…when we caught any of them, they just had to be killed. We never really asked about the reasons for anything much. I mean they were just blokes who were supporting their system, just like with us. The commissars just had to be killed…we wanted to prevent the Bolsheviks from conquering the world.
(Rees, 51)
The new front went well for the invaders in the summer of 1941. The Red Army in WWII began the conflict in disarray. The Soviets were poorly organised, poorly equipped, and caught by surprise by the sheer scale of the Axis offensive. Viktor Strazdovski, then just 18, recalls:
The 60-millimetre guns that we were given were trophies left from World War I – they didn't have modern sighting devices. And we had only one rifle between five soldiers…When I was sent to the place where the Germans broke our defence line, you can imagine how we felt – we felt we were doomed. There were four of us, with two rifles between us, and we didn't know in which direction we would run into the Germans. The woods around us were ablaze. On the one hand we couldn't disobey our order, but on the other hand we felt doomed.
(Rees, 65)
The Vastness of Russia
The greatest enemy to the invaders as the campaign entered its second year turned out to be the land itself. Axis soldiers suffered melancholy from the sheer scale of the USSR. For those responsible for logistics, the great distances involved and the lack of good roads proved a nightmare. As General Hasso von Manteuffel (1897-1978) noted:
The spaces seemed endless, the horizon nebulous. We were depressed by the monotony of the landscape and the immensity of the stretches of forest, marsh and plain.
(Stone, 146)
The spring and autumn rains made the roads into muddy tracks, as explained by Major Hans Hinrichs, a German Army engineer:
It was completely different from France and, of course, from the desert area. France had a very dense road network, there were only a few woods and the population of France was rather indifferent. There were no ambushes…In Russia we had very few roads and these became rather muddy already in September. You couldn't diverge for a moment in Russia because of the large woods and of course the many rivers and streams you had to cross without bridges or river-crossing installations. I, with my engineer company, built more than a hundred bridges on the way to Moscow.
(Holmes, 186)
Another enemy arrived a few months later: the extremely harsh winters of the region. Walter Schaefer-Kehnert remembered:
When the temperature dropped to below minus 30 degrees Celsius our machine guns were not firing any more. Our machine guns were precision instruments but when the oil got thick they didn't shoot properly any more – this really makes you afraid…We had huge losses from frozen toes and fingers during the night. And when the infantry had to sleep in the open, you tried to make a hole in the snow. Then there was an order that a guard had to go round every two hours and look because you would freeze to death and you would not realize it was happening.
(Rees, 79)
A German private, Albrecht Schimpf, recalls the desolate, frozen landscape:
In Russia there were no signposts to mark the way, no streets like in Western Europe, and to find our way we had to set the frozen bodies of horses along the snow roads to find the way during the snowdrifts. Certainly it was a very macabre sight but it was only to find the roads because there were no points to find, no house, no cottage, no tree, always wasteland, snow and snow.
(Holmes, 281)
The Red Army Fights Back
By 1942, the Red Army had recovered from its series of defeats the year before. Better led and supplied, the soldiers were given another incentive to fight well when Stalin ordered anyone retreating without orders be shot. Fyodor Sverdlov, an infantry commander at the Battle of Moscow, confirms these orders were carried out:
It happened once during a successful attack. There was one soldier, I don't know what his name was, but because of his cowardice and because the combat was very severe he broke down, and he began to run, and I killed him without thinking twice. And that was a good lesson to all the rest.
(Rees, 84).
The Red Army had a great numerical advantage in tanks, and, from 1942, the superior T34 tanks were being used in much more effective, massed attacks that began to push the invaders back westwards. One German infantryman, Hans von Tettau, recalls:
Indescribable chaos. Motorised columns and infantry in hasty retreat. Now we had seen with our own eyes what headlong flight, what turmoil and horror are called forth by that one word: tanks!…Their tracks crush everything, make mincemeat of motorcyclists and their machines, ride over guns, gun-carriages, gun-crews and horses. It's been said that two battalions were ground completely into the dust.
(Trigg, 133)
Fellow German Heinz Fielder recalls how difficult it sometimes was to leave the wounded behind during an attack:
There was a private, a young boy, who sat by a birch tree with his intestines streaming from his stomach, crying 'Shoot me!' And everybody just ran past him. I had to stop but I could not shoot him. And then a young second lieutenant from the sappers came and gave him the coup de grâce with a pistol to his temple. And that's when I had to cry bitterly. I thought if his mother knew how her boy had ended…instead she gets a letter from the squadron saying, 'Your son fell on the field of honour for Great Germany.'
(Rees, 219)
Sometimes, the soldiers on the Eastern Front could not bring themselves to record in their diaries or letters home what they had experienced, as was the case here with Harald Henry:
Yesterday was a day so immersed in blood, so full of dead and wounded, so blasted by crackling salvoes, shrapnel from shells and groans and shrieks of the wounded, that I can not yet write about it…As if by a wonder I was drawn from the heaviest fighting in the afternoon and remain until now unhurt.
(Stahel, 413)
Getting supplies of any kind to the troops was difficult, but there was very little opportunity to live off the land (often a euphemism for looting from civilians) as the locals were themselves impoverished, as here explained by one German soldier, Martin Meier:
The hunger. I only remember fat or butter by name now. We get just three slices of bread a day, mostly mouldy. We sneak around in the fields and dig potatoes that aren't ripe yet…Then we keep eating green, unripe apples to try and satisfy our hunger. The result is very clear: diarrhoea. In addition, the water is undrinkable….I never imagined Russia to be so poor. It's even worse than we've been told over and over.
(Trigg, 142)
Civilian Involvement
Civilians were, of course, caught up in the war, either in the countryside where the front happened to establish itself or in the towns and cities which were bombed or besieged. Albert Burkovski was 14 when his home was bombed during the Battle of Stalingrad:
When the bombing began, it was really horrible. I can still remember the planes, the noise they were making, and it became real hell. I don't know how people managed to bear it. It was all one big fire…Once we came back [to his own home] there was only moaning and more moaning coming from under the ruins. My grandmother had been hiding in the basement of the house, but it was all closed in by the ruins – everyone in there was crushed. I thought for some time that I had better be killed because such was my grief, my misery, because I was all alone.
(Rees, 143)
Civilians suffered as the invaders took over their towns and villages, stole their property and food, and often burnt down their houses in case they sheltered partisans or soldiers. Jewish people, Communists, those suspected of supporting the partisans, and many others were sought out and executed. Others were taken to Axis-controlled territory for use as slave labour or detainment in concentration camps. An SS soldier, Heinrich Wulfes, recalls his involvement in the terrible work of the Einsatzgruppen, secret Nazi mobile killing squads, which executed specific targets in newly occupied territory:
We came to a town of about 3-4,000 people and were told to round up the Jews – local militia pointed them out, there were a few hundred – and then we took them to a quarry, surrounded by big cliffs so they couldn't escape. Then the Einsatzgruppe turned up, there weren't many of them, maybe 40 to 50, so they were too small to do that sort of thing on their own.
(Trigg, 165)
Rape was common, as attested by Albert Schneider, a mechanic in a German assault gun battalion:
There were several cases in this [unnamed Russian] village in particular when women were actually raped…it was well known throughout the ranks that things like this were going on. And nobody said a word about it…I once asked a sergeant why nothing was being done about it. And he said: 'Because half the army would have to face trial!' In my opinion that says it all.
(Rees, 106-7)
Even in the final days of the war, civilians were subjected to the horrors of war. As Berlin fell in May 1945 and the USSR achieved total victory, Red Army soldiers in Demmin went on a celebratory rampage of rape and pillage. Waltraud Reski was 11 years old at the time and recalls:
Demmin was to burn for three days…And the women were fair game for three days – free to be abused. All the women were disguised, but you can always see whether a woman has a good figure, and somehow they found my mother again and again and treated her terribly. And she never really recovered…It's impossible to imagine what it is like to be raped 10 or 20 times a day, so that one's hardly human any more…Both my sister, who is four years younger than me, and I, tried to shield our mother and screamed…This feeling of helplessness and cruelty – even today I am unable to find words for it.
(Rees, 229-30)
The Eastern Front accounted for at least 25 million military and civilian deaths, perhaps half of the overall WWII death toll.
