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  OSTKRIEG

  OSTKRIEG

  Hitler’s

  War of Extermination

  in the East

  STEPHEN G. FRITZ

  Copyright © 2011 by The University Press of Kentucky

  Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.

  All rights reserved.

  Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky

  663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008

  www.kentuckypress.com

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Fritz, Stephen G., 1949-

  Ostkrieg : Hitler′s war of extermination in the East / Stephen G. Fritz.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-8131-3416-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8131-3417-8 (ebook)

  1. World War, 1939-1945—Campaigns—Eastern Front. 2. World War, 1939-1945—Campaigns—Soviet Union. 3. World War, 1939-1945—Atrocities—Europe, Eastern. 4. Soviet Union—History—German occupation, 1941-1944. 5. Germany—Territorial expansion—History—20th century. 6. Germany—Territorial expansion—Economic aspects. 7. Germany—Territorial expansion—Social aspects. 8. Germany—Military policy. 9. Hitler, Adolf, 1889-1945—Military leadership. I. Title.

  D764.F737 2011

  940.54′21—dc23 2011030914

  This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting

  the requirements of the American National Standard

  for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  Member of the Association of

  American University Presses

  Contents

  Maps

  Abbreviations and Foreign Terms

  Preface

  1. Dilemma

  2. Decision

  3. Onslaught

  4. Whirlwind

  5. Reckoning

  6. All or Nothing

  7. Total War

  8. Scorched Earth

  9. Disintegration

  10. Death Throes

  Conclusion

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix: Supplementary Data

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Photographs follow page 234

  Operation Barbarossa

  Operation Blau

  Stalingrad, September 1942–February 1943

  Kursk and Ukraine, summer/fall 1943

  Destruction of Army Group Center, summer 1944

  Vistula-Oder-Berlin Operations, 1945

  Generalplan Ost

  Abbreviations

  and Foreign Terms

  AFV

  armored fighting vehicle

  AK

  Armeekorps (army corps)

  BA

  Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archives)

  Bagration

  Soviet offensive in Belorussia, June–July 1944

  Barbarossa

  1941 invasion of the Soviet Union

  Berghof

  Hitler’s Bavarian retreat (Obersalzberg)

  Blau

  Blue, 1942 summer offensive in the Soviet Union

  blitzkrieg

  lightning war

  commissar

  political officer attached to Red Army units

  Commissar Order

  “Guidelines for the Treatment of Political

  Commissars”; order of 6 June 1941 to shoot Red Army political officers

  Edelweiss

  advance into the Caucasus, July–November 1942

  Einsatzgruppe

  mobile killing squad

  Einsatzkommando

  subunit of an Einsatzgruppe

  Fredericus

  operation against the Izyum bulge, May 1942

  Freikorps

  German paramilitary groups

  front

  Soviet equivalent of an army group

  Frühlingserwachen

  Spring Awakening, German offensive toward

  Budapest, March 1945

  Gauleiter

  Nazi Party regional leader

  Generalplan Ost

  General Plan East

  Gestapo

  Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police)

  Hiwi

  Hilfswillige(r), Russian volunteers/auxiliaries who performed noncombat duties with the German army

  Kampfgruppe

  battle group (usually formed of units seriously reduced in strength)

  Kessel

  pocket; cauldron

  Kesselschlacht

  a battle of encirclement

  Landser

  German infantryman

  Lebensraum

  living space

  Luftflotte

  German air fleet

  Luftwaffe

  German air force

  Mars

  Soviet offensive against the Rzhev salient (Ninth Army), fall/winter 1942

  NSV

  Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt (National Socialist People’s Welfare Organization)

  OKH

  Oberkommando des Heeres (Army High Command)

  OKW

  Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Armed Forces High Command)

  Ostfront

  Eastern front

  Ostheer

  Eastern Army

  Ostkrieg

  Eastern war

  panje

  Russian horse-drawn wagon

  Panther position

  proposed German defensive position in the east

  Panzerfaust

  German one-shot anti-tank weapon

  Pz III

  German tank, from 1942 with 50 mm antitank gun

  Pz IV

  mainstay German tank with a long-barreled, high velocity 75 mm gun

  Pz V

  Panther tank (from 1943, with a long-barreled, high velocity 75 mm gun

  Pz VI

  Tiger tank (from 1942, with an 88 mm gun)

  rasputitsa

  lit., time without roads; spring and fall rainy season in the Soviet Union

  Reichsführer-SS

  Himmler’s title

  Reichsmarshall

  Goering’s title

  Ring

  final Soviet offensive against Stalingrad, January 1943

  Rollbahn

  main highway in the Soviet Union

  RSHA

  Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office)

  SA

  Sturmabteilung (Storm Troopers)

  Saturn

  proposed Soviet offensive west of Stalingrad aimed at Rostov, November 1942 (“Little Saturn” actually executed)

  Schwerpunkt

  focal point of an attack

  SD

  Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service, part of the RSHA)

  Sonderkommando

  smaller subunit of an Einsatzgruppe

  SS

  Schutzstaffel (elite Nazi troops)

  Stavka

  headquarters, Soviet Supreme Command

  Stuka

  Sturzkampfflugzeug (German dive bomber; JU-87)

  T-34

  Soviet mainstay tank (76 mm, then after 1944 an 85 mm gun)

  Taifun

  Typhoon, drive on Moscow, October–December 1941

  Trappenjagd

  Bustard Hunt, op
eration on the Kerch Peninsula, May 1942

  trek

  German refugee column

  Uranus

  Soviet counteroffensive at Stalingrad, November 1942

  Vernichtungskrieg

  war of annihilation

  Viking

  Fifth SS Division

  Volk

  people, nation

  Volksdeutsche

  ethnic German

  Volksgemeinschaft

  national community, people’s community

  Volkssturm

  “People’s Storm” (German national militia)

  Waffen-SS

  armed or combat SS

  Wehrkraftzersetzung

  undermining of the war effort

  Wehrmacht

  German armed forces, often used to refer specifically to the army

  Wintergewitter

  Winter Storm, operation to relieve Stalingrad, December 1942

  Wolfsschanze

  Wolf’s Lair (Hitler’s headquarters at Rastenburg, East Prussia)

  Preface

  For decades after the end of World War II, much of our understanding of the German-Soviet war came from the German perspective, for the very good reason that only German documents and archives were readily available. Equivalent Soviet sources were either unavailable, marred by ideology, or limited in their circulation because of language problems. Moreover, the various histories of the Ostfront, or eastern front, that emerged were skewed in other ways as well. Many of the earliest accounts were written by German generals who did not have access to original records but wrote from their own diaries or memories, the latter being, of course, both unreliable and easily distorted over time. In addition, German officers writing either on their own or under the auspices of the U.S. Army’s historical project rather consciously sought to create an image of the Wehrmacht as professionally competent, technically proficient, and, above all, “clean.” In this version of history, which largely confined itself to accounts of battles and military events, not only had the army suffered from Hitler’s megalomania, constant interference, and poor strategic and operational judgments, but its leaders had neither known of nor condoned the massive crimes committed against the Soviet civilian population, especially the Jews. In the narrative the generals created after the fact, the military operations and the massive crimes perpetrated by German forces on the eastern front existed in two separate and parallel spheres, with little interaction between the two. This, of course, was later shown to be a self-serving cover-up, but for a variety of reasons—not least the growing impact of the Cold War—this initial version of events stuck in the Western mind. Thus, standard narratives of the Ostkrieg, the war in the east, available in English primarily focused very narrowly on the sweep of military events and ignored the intersection of the war and Hitler’s overtly ideological, racial, and economic plans for the conquered eastern territories.

  Two things have combined to change this view, at least among professional historians. The first was the collapse of the Soviet Union some twenty years ago, which gave historians unprecedented access to formerly unavailable archival material. As a result, over the past fifteen years there have been, and continue to be, a number of excellent new accounts in English of the eastern war from the Soviet perspective, ranging from the detailed studies of David Glantz to the narrative overview of Richard Overy to the integrative analysis of Evan Mawdsley. All these have deepened and enriched our understanding of the conflict by providing the badly needed Russian context. At the same time, the massive ten-volume “semiofficial” history of the war initiated some four decades ago by the Military History Research Office of the German Bundeswehr has not only exploded the myth of the clean Wehrmacht by showing its complicity in Nazi crimes in the east but has also integrated the separate “wars” on the eastern front into the Vernichtungskrieg, or war of annihilation, originally envisioned by Hitler. This history having finally been completed, the interested English-language reader faces a dual problem: not only have the English translations lagged behind the German originals, but the entire ten volumes (some with two parts) run to well over fifteen thousand pages. In addition, other German historians, in investigating specific issues, have produced outstanding works on a variety of topics ranging from the decision for and implementation of the Holocaust to the larger Nazi plans for a racial-demographic restructuring of the east to the question of the continuing support for the Nazi regime.

  It is important, then, to note from the beginning what this book is not. It is not a work based on primary research; rather, it is intended as a synthesis, an integrated narrative based primarily on exhaustive research by German, British, and American historians over the past two or three decades. It is also clearly told from the German perspective, with no pretense of being a balanced account of the war. My aim is to provide a deeper understanding of the complexity and immensity of the Ostkrieg by anchoring the military events of the war within their larger ideological, racial, economic, and social context. There have been many military histories and numerous other works that have highlighted the atrocities committed on the eastern front but none that have attempted to integrate the military, ideological, and economic dimensions. Without a sense of the comprehensively murderous nature of Hitler’s aims, the full scope of the eastern war cannot be grasped. The Holocaust, for example, cannot be adequately comprehended without reference either to German military success or to Nazi plans for a larger racial reordering of Europe. For all Hitler’s anti-Semitism and verbal radicalism, the Final Solution neither was intended from the beginning, nor sprang out of the blue, but evolved as a result of specific time and spatial circumstances and largely as a result of the unprecedented scale and barbarity of the German war in the east. It was the Ostkrieg that radicalized and crystallized Nazi intentions regarding the Jews, while the process of annihilation was largely determined within the context of military events. By the same token, many of Hitler’s seemingly irrational military decisions seem much more explicable when set within their larger economic or strategic context. A purely operational focus, such as has dominated narratives of the eastern front, is not merely incomplete but misleading.

  Why is a book like this necessary? Despite the ongoing fascination with World War II in this country and the English-speaking world in general, there is surprisingly little on the German-Russian war and virtually nothing within the past thirty years that aims to cover the entire period 1941–1945—let alone a narrative that places the military events within a larger interpretive framework. In fact, it is not too much to say that a good bit of the genesis of this work was frustration, both with trying to find acceptable books for my World War II classes to read and with otherwise knowledgeable American readers who failed to understand the importance of the eastern front or acknowledge the inherent connection between military events and Nazi criminality. Contrary to the belief of many in the West, Hitler did not blunder into the war in the east. For him, the “right” war was always that against the Soviet Union, for to him Germany’s destiny depended on attaining Lebensraum and solving the “Jewish question.” Both of these, in turn, hinged on destroying the Soviet Union. Which of these aims was most important? Given Hitler’s views, it would be artificial to attempt to prioritize or separate them. For him, the war against “Jewish-Bolshevism” and for Lebensraum was comprehensive and of whole cloth.

  I have also attempted to infuse this account with irony, paradox, and complexity—all the things necessary for comprehending history but largely absent from the prevailing American view of World War II as the “good war” (which, again, is not so much wrong as incomplete). In addition, I have aimed to reestablish the eastern front as the pivotal theater of the war. The Second World War was not won or lost solely on the Ostfront, but it was the key—while the scale of fighting there dwarfed anything in the west. In retrospect, the disproportional nature of the Ostkrieg is striking: roughly eight of every ten German soldiers who died were killed in the east; from June 1941, in no
single month of the war did more Germans die in the west than in the east, and the only month that came close was December 1944 (when during a “quiet” period over ten thousand more Landsers fell in the east than on all other fronts); the Red Army, at the cost of perhaps 12 million dead (or approximately thirty times the number of the Anglo-Americans), broke the back of the Wehrmacht; total German and Soviet deaths (military and civilian) numbered around 35 million, compared with less than 1 million for Great Britain and the United States. At times, indeed, the Ostkrieg often seemed more murder than war. That it took the most murderous regime in Europe’s history to defeat its most genocidal certainly tarnishes Western notions of the good war. Nonetheless, Stalin’s alleged observation—England provided the time, America the money, and Russia the blood—contained a good deal of truth.

  Why wars start, why they last so long, why they are so difficult to end, are all key questions that serious historians ask. In addition, a number of other themes infuse this work. Perhaps most important is the intersection of impulses—military, ideological, economic, racial, and demographic—that account for the violent, destructive nature of the eastern war. It was a war for hegemony, of conquest of Lebensraum, an ideological war against Jewish-Bolshevism, a war for food and raw materials, a racial-demographic war to reshape the borderlands of East-Central Europe, perhaps even a sort of colonial war in its ultimate goal of creating a vast “Greater Germany.” Each of these points reflects a valid aspect of Hitler’s war in the East and has elicited much recent research. Obtaining raw materials, for example, was regarded as vital by Hitler in his strategic goal of elevating Germany to a position of world power status. Without secure access to large quantities of key resources, a mid-sized power such as the Third Reich could never throw off its constraints and aspire to compete against the likes of Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States. With it, however, a German-dominated Europe could aspire to maintain its world ascendancy. Indeed, in many respects, World War II can be seen above all as a war for oil, with those lacking it (Germany, Italy, Japan) seeking to defeat those who controlled it (Great Britain, America, and Russia). A war to secure Germany’s economic future, however, could also serve to guarantee the Reich’s racial future as well since the area targeted for expansion—European Russia—with its polyglot ethnic makeup seemed ripe for exploitation. Not for nothing did Hitler refer to it as “Germany’s India” or note approvingly the opportunities for settlement similar to America’s west. The “wild east” would be Germany’s frontier, a space within which racial demographers and economic planners could work from a blank slate—once x number of millions of native inhabitants had been resettled or killed. From the outset, the war against the Soviet Union was planned as a war of annihilation, with the full knowledge and complicity of the Wehrmacht leadership.