Stalingrad

generally received no medical assistance, and those who could not march or who collapsed from exhaustion were shot. Soviet soldiers were not allowed to be transported in German military transport in case they infected it with lice and fleas. It should not be forgotten that 600 Soviet prisoners of war were gassed in Auschwitz on 3 September 1941. This was the first experiment there with Zyklon B.
    For those who reached prisoner-of-war camps alive, the chance of survival turned out to be not much better than one in three. Altogether, over three million Red Army soldiers out of 5.7 million died in German camps from disease, exposure, starvation and ill-treatment. The German Army itself, not the SS nor any other Nazi organization, was responsible for prisoners of war. Its attitude was reminiscent of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s remark in 1914 that the 90,000 Russian prisoners captured at Tannenberg ‘should be left to starve’.
    On the southern front, a German camp at Lozovaya, overrun by Timoshenko’s January advance, revealed appalling conditions, with Red Army prisoners dying ‘
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f cold, of starvation, of brutal maltreatment’. Yury Mikhailovich Maximoν of the 127th Rifle Division,captured in the autumn of 1941, was one of those taken to Novo-Aleksandrovsk. The so-called camp there had no huts, just open ground with a barbed-wire fence. The 18,000 men were fed from twelve cauldrons in which odd hunks of horseflesh were boiled. When the guards on duty gave the order to come forward to receive food, sub-machine-gunners shot down anybody who ran. Their corpses were left there for three days as a warning.
    German officers at the front wanted prisoners to be better treated for practical reasons. ‘Their information on enemy numbers, organization and intentions may give us more than our own intelligence services can provide,’ read an instruction from the chief intelligence officer of the 96th Infantry Division. ‘Russian soldiers’, he added, ‘respond to interrogation in a naive way.’ The OKW propaganda department at the same time issued orders that Russian desertion must be encouraged to save German lives. But intelligence staffs at the front knew well that this could ‘work only if promises made to deserters are kept’. The trouble was that they were usually treated just as badly as any other prisoners.
    Stalin’s dislike of international law had suited Hitler’s plan for a war of annihilation, so when the Soviet Union proposed a reciprocal adherence to the Hague convention less than a month after the invasion, its note was left unanswered. Stalin did not usually believe in observing such niceties, but the ferocity of the German onslaught had shaken him.
    Within the Red Army, there was no formal equivalent to the illegal orders issued to the Wehrmacht, but members of the SS, and later other categories such as camp guards and members of the Secret Field Police, were almost certain to be shot after capture. Luftwaffe pilots and panzer crews also risked lynching, but on the whole the shooting of prisoners was random rather than calculated, while acts of wanton cruelty were localized and inconsistent. The Soviet authorities desperately wanted prisoners, especially officers, for interrogation.
    For partisans, including Red Army detachments, hospital trains were regarded as legitimate targets, and few pilots or gunners spared ambulances or field hospitals. A doctor with the 22nd Panzer Division observed: ‘My ambulance had a machine-gun mounted on top and ared cross on the side. The red cross symbol was a farce in Russia, and served only as a sign for our own people.’ The worst incident took place on 29 December 1941, when a German field hospital was overrun at Feodosia on the Crimean coast. Soviet marine infantry, many of them apparently drunk, killed about 160 German wounded. A number of them had been thrown out of the windows, others were taken outside, soaked in water and left to freeze to death.
    The occasional, primitive atrocity committed by Red Army soldiers during the first eighteen months – there would almost certainly have been more if they had not been retreating so rapidly – prompted many Germans to make comparisons with the Thirty Years War. A truer link, however, would have been to the Russian civil war, one of the cruellest of twentieth-century conflicts, which Hitler’s crusade against bolshevism had reignited. But as the war progressed, Russian outrage and a terrible desire for revenge was