Stalingrad

May, which called for the German armies in the east to expropriate whatever they needed, and also to send at least seven million tons of grain a year back to Germany; yet it should not have been hard to guess its basic outline, with the orders to live off the land. Nazi leaders had no illusions about the consequences for civilians deprived of the Ukraine’s resources. ‘Many tens of millions will starve,’ predicted Martin Bormann. Goering bragged that the population would have to eat Cossack saddles.
    When the illegal Barbarossa orders were prepared, in March 1941, it was General Franz Haider, the chief of staff, who bore the main responsibility for the army’s acceptance of collective reprisals against civilians. As early as the first week in April 1941, two opponents of the regime, the former ambassador Ulrich von Hassell and General Ludwig Beck, were shown copies of these secret orders by Lieutenant-Colonel Helmuth Groscurth, who was to perish soon after the surrender at Stalingrad. ‘It makes one’s hair stand on end’, wrote Hassell in his diary, ‘to learn about measures to be taken in Russia, and about the systematic transformation of military law concerning the conquered population into uncontrolled despotism – indeed a caricature of all law. This kind of thing turns the German into a type of being which had existed only in enemy propaganda.’ ‘The army’, he subsequently noted, ‘must assume the onus of the murders and burnings which up to now have been confined to the SS.’
    Hassell’s pessimism was justified. Although a few army commanders were reluctant to distribute the instructions, several others issued orders to their troops which might have come straight from Goebbels’s office. The most notorious order of all came from the commander of the Sixth Army, Field Marshal von Reichenau. General Hermann Hoth, who was to command the Fourth Panzer Army in the Stalingrad campaign, declared: ‘The annihilation of those same Jews who support Bolshevism and its organization for murder, the partisans, is a measure of self-preservation.’ General Erich von Man-stein, a Prussian guards officer admired as the most brilliant strategist of the whole of the Second World War, and who privately admitted to being partly Jewish, issued an order shortly after taking over command of the Eleventh Army in which he declared: ‘The Jewishbolsheviksystem must be rooted out once and for all.’ He even went on to justify ‘the necessity of harsh measures against Jewry.’ There was little mention of this in his post-war memoirs,
Lost Victories.
    The acceptance of Nazi symbols on uniform and the personal oath of allegiance to Hitler had ended any pretence that the army remained independent from politics. ‘The generals followed Hitler in these circumstances’, Field Marshal Paulus acknowledged many years later in Soviet captivity, ‘and as a result they became completely involved in the consequences of his policies and conduct of the war.’
    In spite of all the Nazis’ attempts to reshape the German Army, it was not as monolithic at regimental level in June 1941 as some writers have made out. The difference in character between a Bavarian, an East Prussian, a Saxon, and above all an Austrian division, would be remarked upon immediately. Even within a division from a particular region, there could be strong contrasts. For example, in the 60th Motorized Infantry Division, which was later trapped at Stalingrad, many young officers in its volunteer battalions came from the Technische Hochschule in Danzig, and were caught up in the heady atmosphere of the city’s return to the Fatherland: ‘For us,’ wrote one of them, ‘National Socialism was not a Party programme but the very essence of being German.’ On the other hand, the officers in the division’s reconnaissance battalion, 160 Aufklärungs-Abteilung, a sort of mechanized yeomanry cavalry, came mainly from East Prussian landowning families. They included Prince zu Dohna-Schlobitten, who had served in the Kaiser’s Garde du Corps in the Ukraine in 1918.
    The 16th Panzer Division was firmly in the tradition of the old Prussian Army. Its 2nd Panzer Regiment, which spearheaded the dash to Stalingrad the following summer, was descended from the oldest Prussian cavalry regiment, the Great Elector’s Life Guard Cuirassiers. The regiment had so many members of the nobility that few were addressed by their military rank. ‘Instead of Herr Hauptmann or