Before the officially sanctioned date of July 3, Hoth and
Guderian sent their tanks toward the next geographic objective: the
Dvina-Dnieper line—more than 300 miles distant. By this time it was clear to
everyone involved that the gaps between panzer groups and infantry armies could
only grow wider. The Soviet forces still active behind the panzers’ axes of
advance could only grow larger. In a sense Panzer Groups 2 and 3 were
replicating Rommel’s behavior in the desert. Just as logistics was a
rear-echelon problem, so was cleaning up whatever the armor left behind.
From the beginning of this phase the panzers encountered
resistance stronger than expected. Stalin had assigned Marshal Semyon
Timoshenko to organize the defense, concentrate reserves, and, above all,
counterattack at every opportunity. Timoshenko was no master of mobility but he
was a hard man even by Soviet standards. His tanks and riflemen made the
Germans pay for their tactical victories. A battalion of the 35th Panzer
Regiment occupied the town of Staryi Bychoff on the Dnieper, only to be pinned
down by a defense that cost 33 men and nine tanks—the regiment’s heaviest
losses in a single day since the start of the war. Its report describes the
Russians as “hard-fighting, very brave soldiers.” The Red Air Force reappeared
in strength, and with new material. Nine Il-2 Sturmoviks, a formidably armored
ground attack plane, gave Rommel’s old division a taste of its French medicine
on July 5, delaying the advance most of a day. One Il-2 took more than 200
ground-fire hits and made it home. Rain and terrain slowed the Germans as well.
On one 50-mile stretch of road in Hoth’s sector, 100 bridges in succession
failed to take the strain of tanks and trucks. The often-overlooked pioneers
were correspondingly vital for both panzer groups: bridging flooded rivers,
repeating the job when the bridges collapsed, and all the time keeping watch
for die-hard Soviet stragglers.
The Germans were winning on an increasingly frayed
shoestring. Third Panzer Division was down to a third of its authorized tank
strength. Fourth Panzer Division sent a staff officer all the way back to
Germany in search of spare parts. A single tank battalion of 7th Panzer
Division reported no fewer than five lieutenants killed in a few days—shot
through the head by snipers who had a free hand because the riflemen’s trucks
could not keep up with the tanks. The motorized artillery as well was having
increasing difficulty keeping pace, especially the heavy corps and army
battalions so valuable for taking out Soviet prepared defenses. The result was
increasing reliance on the Luftwaffe, and the air crews gave their best.
Richthofen’s VIII Air Corps, its Stukas using an early version of the cluster
bomb, climaxed three weeks of constant effort by taking two of Hoth’s divisions
across the Dvina on July 8. The medium bombers of Air Fleet 2 hammered roads
and rail junctions and interdicted troop movements—but against increasing
fighter opposition that drew more and more German fighters into the air battle.
The tank and the airplane might be the Wehrmacht’s concept
of an ideal couple. But like most couples, stress brought out the worst sides
of both partners. The ground units’ war diaries contain an increasing litany of
complaints about Russian aircraft being “masters of the skies,” about the
damage to tankers’ morale from repeated attacks by low-flying Soviet aircraft,
about Stuka strikes promised but never delivered. The Luftwaffe responded by
describing the soldiers as “outrageously spoiled” by direct air support, and
too quick to halt or even retreat in the face of opposition if German planes
were not overhead. Richthofen himself upbraided his ground-pounding opposite
numbers for refusing to recognize that in order to be effective, air power must
be concentrated and could not be distributed piecemeal.
These arguments have been common in the air-ground relations
of all armed forces, from North Africa through Korea and Vietnam, down to
Desert Storm. Nevertheless they highlight the growing erosion of the German
mobile forces, to the point where maneuver would become their only viable
option.
And yet the panzers kept advancing—as far as 100 miles a day
for some units. When movement stalled, group, corps, and division commanders
probed for weak spots. When none existed, the colonels, captains, and sergeants
created them. As Hoth smashed the Russian right, Guderian crossed the Dnieper
south of Mogilev, and the panzers sought once more to create a giant pocket by
meeting at Smolensk. With Soviet defenses in shreds and Soviet mobile
formations scattered, the first German troops entered Smolensk late on July 15.
Eleven days later the German High Command declared the
Smolensk pocket closed. The call was premature, but German skills showed to
particular advantage against the major counterattacks mounted beginning in late
July. German tank companies took advantage of Soviet inexperience to knock out
two or three dozen T-34s at a time. On August 5, Bock announced the end of the
fighting, the capture of another 300,000 prisoners, and the destruction of more
than 3,000 tanks and almost as many guns.
It was the climax of a series of virtuoso performances that
combine to make a case that the relative tactical and operational superiority
of the panzers over their opponents was never greater than in the first half of
July 1941, on the high road to Moscow. Guderian spoke of attacks going in like
training exercises. Guderian’s senior subordinates in turn praised his common
sense and goodwill, the Fingerspitzengefühl, and not least the unflagging
energy that marked him a master of mechanized war at the operational level. If
Hoth lacked his stablemate’s flair (and his gift for securing headlines), his
handling of Panzer Group 3 produced results at the same level.
These successes were, however, the point of the spear—or
better said, the tip of an iceberg. Army Group Center’s mobile forces had by
now outrun their logistics to a degree impossible for even the most
operationally minded generals to overlook. Losses in tanks continued to mount.
Rifle companies were shrinking to the strength of platoons. As a result, for the
first time in the campaign, the panzers lacked the strength to force the pace
of engagements. Instead they were increasingly constrained to wear down Soviet
attacks and throw them off balance before counterattacking themselves. That
pattern would become characteristic of German tactics and operations in the
second half of the Russo-German War. Its systematic appearance at this early
stage was another of Barbarossa’s many warning signs.
Like the
giant Antaeus of classical mythology or the Green Knight of medieval
English lore, the Red Army seemed to derive strength from being knocked down.
Initial estimates had allowed for around 200 Soviet divisions. By the end of
the Smolensk operation, more than 300 had appeared on German charts. The USSR
outproduced Germany in tanks during 1941. But in six weeks, the best Soviet
commanders had been discredited, the best Soviet formations had been
eviscerated, thousands of tanks, guns, and aircraft had been destroyed, and
tens of thousands of square miles overrun. Was it entirely wishful thinking
that sustained the German belief that one more strike would finish the job? And
was that viewpoint underpinned by an unacknowledged but growing sense of the
panzers as an ultimately wasting asset, best employed to their limits while
they could still shape the campaign?
As early as July 8, Hitler had informed the Chief of Staff
of his intention to divert mobile forces north and south with open options: to
reinforce the attack on Leningrad, to cooperate with Army Group South in capturing
Kiev, and to regroup for a drive on Moscow. Depending on the operational
situation, this represented a flat denial of the concept of the decisive point.
It also represented the downplaying of the moral importance of Moscow. The
city’s loss would be a prestige victory and an ideological triumph for National
Socialism—a double body blow to the Soviet Union.
A fable with many versions in many languages describes a
donkey starving to death because he is unable to choose among a half dozen full
mangers. Franz Halder was no folklorist, but on July 23 he informed Hitler that
the Russians had been decisively weakened—not decisively defeated. Every new
operation had to begin by breaking enemy resistance, but overall infantry
strength was down by 20 percent, and the panzer divisions averaged 50 percent
short of establishment.
On the other hand, Kiev was the transportation and
communications hub for the great industrial centers of southwest Russia.
Leningrad, Lenin’s city, was arguably more the USSR’s moral center than was the
official capital. Its capture would give Germany control of the Baltic Sea,
create a united political and military front with Finland, and free Panzer
Group 4 for employment against Moscow.
And if the enemy’s army was considered the primary
objective, as opposed to resources and territory, the pickings were likely to
be easier on the wings than by continuing headlong into a sector the Soviets
must defend at all costs, and where their counterattacks indicated they were
doing just that. The pace of Army Group Center’s advance was slowing
perceptively enough to cause concern. At the same time, that advance was
creating an increasingly exposed salient. Securing its flanks, especially the
southern one, was a defensible response, especially in the context of those
suddenly emerging reserves Wehrmacht intelligence had asserted the Red Army did
not possess.
Rundstedt, whose army group could expect to benefit
massively from a southern option, argued in public for the importance of
continuing the drive on Moscow. He and Leeb, however, also had a particular
sense of what they were on the verge of accomplishing with just a few of the
right kinds of resources. Reduced to its essentials, the revised plan projected
sending elements of Panzer Group 2 south with the mission of enveloping and
destroying the Soviet forces engaging Rundstedt’s left. Hoth’s Group would turn
north to assist in capturing Leningrad, then swing toward the Volga in
cooperation with Panzer Group 4. Army Group Center would continue advancing on
Moscow with infantry and sort out its rear areas and logistics until the mobile
divisions returned.
When the Army High Command asked whether the campaign now
sought economic objectives or destruction of Soviet military forces, the answer
was “both.” It would be oversimplified hindsight to describe Hitler as playing
his senior generals against each other. It would be an equal oversimplification
to describe the generals as blindly obsessed with their respective places in
the history of war. Both factors were undeniably present—and it must be
particularly emphasized that generals without high levels of alpha ambition are
likely to be liabilities in senior command. What is significant about the
decisions made as the Smolensk pocket closed is the underlying consensus that
affirmed them: a conviction that the panzers could still move fast enough and
strike hard enough to make ultimate choices unnecessary. Barbarossa’s second
stage would be predicated on what might be called a postmod ern construction: a
“flexible Schwerpunkt.”
Depending on perspective, that placed the panzers in the
role of either a chameleon placed on a plaid shirt, or a cartoon character
running through a china shop shattering one glass after another by flicking his
finger. In a month, XLI Panzer Corps had fought its way across 650 miles of
forest and swamp to within 100 miles of Leningrad. Air supply sustained the
final stage of an advance that by July 14 had thrown two bridges across the
Luga River, the last major natural barrier before a city that was only two
days’ march away—on the maps. But Leeb was a cautious general; the Soviet
defense was desperate; and Reinhardt’s depleted divisions lacked the fighting
power to overrun a city with two and a half million inhabitants. For armored forces,
getting into a city was far less a problem than getting out of it—especially
given the constrained time frame in which the attack on Leningrad was
conceptualized.
Had Manstein’s corps been directly involved, the story might
have played out differently. Instead Leeb and Hoepner had turned Manstein
southeast toward Novgorod and the Moscow-Leningrad railroad. It was the kind of
maneuver operation basic to panzer doctrine, in which Manstein possessed
unusual skill—and which the Soviets were determined to frustrate. A
well-executed counterattack cut off 8th Panzer Division and took out half of
its 150 tanks in the four days Manstein required to break the 8th free. Pushing
slowly forward, the corps eventually also bogged down along the Luga River.
As for the projected reinforcement by Panzer Group 3, not
until August 16 was Army Group Center formally ordered to transfer four of its
mobile divisions to Army Group North—a consequence of increasingly forceful
debates between and among Hitler and the relevant generals. The new arrivals
proved just enough to encourage Leeb and Hoepner and not enough to turn the
tide in their sector. With both of Hoepner’s corps immobilized on the Luga,
when Hoth’s divisions finally arrived, Leeb committed them to strengthen his thinly
manned front as opposed to reinforcing one of Hoepner’s corps as a striking
force. On September 8, Hoepner nevertheless renewed his group’s attack.
Schlisselburg, widely regarded as a keystone of the defense,
fell after heavy and expensive fighting. The Russians threw in everything they
had. First Panzer Division engaged tanks literally fresh from factory assembly
lines. But the city held—and the Army High Command grew increasingly insistent
on transferring Panzer Group 4 south for the drive against Moscow. Sixth Panzer
Division was ordered south on August 18. By the twenty-fifth the front had
“stabilized” in a blockade that plunged Leningrad into three years of horror as
Hitler ordered the starving of the city his tanks failed to conquer.
Army Group North’s series of tactical victories between June
and September neither camouflage nor compensate for unhandiness at the
operational level. Leeb has come under especially heavy criticism for
repeatedly halting or slowing the armored spearheads to allow the infantry to
close up: a fits-and-starts process that gave the Soviets time to improvise
Leningrad’s defense. The dispersion of Hoepner’s panzers in the first half of
July further diminished blitzkrieg’s prospects in the northern sector. Wilhelm
Ritter von Leeb, in short, will never go down as a master, or even an
apprentice, of mobile war.
In Leeb’s defense, arguably even more than in Barbarossa’s
other sectors, logistics and rear security controlled the pace and nature of
operations in the north. The first phase of the German advance had been through
the relatively developed territory of the Baltic states: Latvia, Estonia, and
Lithuania, which had been occupied by the Red Army in 1940 and were as yet
relatively spared the blessings of Marxism-Leninism. The Germans benefited from
overrunning large amounts of stockpiled Red Army supplies, and from capturing a
number of major bridges and rail connections undamaged. Crossing into the USSR
proper meant entering a literal wilderness, historically left undeveloped to
provide a glacis for Russia’s northern capital. The near-literal absence of
infrastructure made exploiting local resources nearly impossible: there were no
surpluses, however meager, to requisition, confiscate, or steal.
That put a rapid, unexpected burden on a supply system
stretched to move its own bases forward into the northern wasteland. It was not
mere reflex caution that led Leeb to insist repeatedly on the necessity for
bringing the infantry forward as the price of the next advance. Guerilla
activity in Army Group North’s rear grew so serious that beginning on August 5,
the entire 8th Panzer Division was withdrawn from the front and assigned to
anti-partisan duties on the line of communications.
Developments in Army Group South followed a different
pattern. Kleist shook off the initial Russian counterattacks, broke through an
improvised “Stalin Line” on July 5, and started his tanks toward Kiev. In their
wake marched the infantry of 6th Army, who were intended to do the heavy work
of actually capturing the city. Fighting through strong resistance, especially
by units officially overrun and reported as scattered, Panzer Group 1 had its
first sight of Kiev’s skyline on July 10.
With the infantry and heavy artillery a hundred miles to the
rear, III Panzer Corps commander Eberhard von Mackensen nevertheless considered
storming the city with the two panzer divisions and one motorized division
coming on line. Sixth Army CO Walther von Reichenau, anything but battle-shy,
compared the prospect of fighting house-to-house in Kiev to Verdun—not least
because of the constant losses his infantry were already taking from persistent
air and ground attack. It was Hitler, however, who pulled the plug, forbidding
a direct attack on Kiev for the present and freeing Mackensen’s corps for what
seemed a far more promising mission.
The other two mobile corps of Panzer Group 1 had turned
south of Kiev toward Uman. Red Army counterattacks, heavy air strikes, and poor
weather slowed and disrupted the operation. Mutual envelopment operations at
times left troops uncertain who was encircling whom. Nevertheless between July
16 and August 3, Kleist’s group created and sustained a pocket that, when
cleared, yielded more than 100,000 prisoners—no mean bag even by the standards
of Minsk and Smolensk. Large numbers of Russians managed to escape a trap that,
like the others in Barbarossa, never fully closed. They did so at the expense
of their organization and much of their equipment as the Red Army began a
full-scale retreat from Bessarabia and the western Ukraine, abandoning the
Dnieper River line. An enraged Stalin ordered the dismissal of some generals,
and the execution of others.
Uman was no more than second prize in the blitzkrieg
lottery. Halder and Rundstedt originally projected an even bigger encirclement
in the area of Kirovograd, one cutting off the entire Soviet force west of the
Dnieper. That had exceeded the panzers’ capacity. But with most of the Soviet
front in apparent disintegration, with the Romanians advancing on Odessa and
the Black Sea coast, the military prospects of a “southern strategy” began to match
Hitler’s original economic visions—particularly when the major alternative
involved a direct assault on Moscow in the best traditions of the Great War.
Blitzkrieg was about creating opportunities and seizing them. Panzer Group 1
had begun Barbarossa with the lowest force-to-space ratio of the four. The
increasing development of the southern front had increased the distances among
possible objectives. But Rundstedt, Kleist, and the mobile corps commanders had
done well—better than well—playing cape-and-sword with the Red Army. Suitably
reinforced, they could finish the job.
Orders might be given, but mobile war German style depended
on informed consent. The pivotal figure in the developing shift of operational
focus was Heinz Guderian. He was considered firmly in the Moscow camp—so firmly
that on August 23 he flew to Hitler’s Rastenburg headquarters with the
intention of protesting in person against the projected reassignment of his
group. By his own account at least he made a compelling presentation. Hitler
then responded with his reasons for the Kiev option. Guderian’s self-described
reluctance to make a scene in the face of a firm decision need not be taken at
face value. But nor should his critics’ descriptions of careerism overriding
principle be accepted without modification.
Guderian was at best a medium-sized fish in what had
suddenly become a very big pond. His focus since June 21 had been to his front:
operational and tactical. During the discussion Hitler had asked him a
question: Did Guderian’s men have one more great effort in them? Guderian
answered yes—if given an objective whose importance was self-evident. Kiev was
not Moscow. But keep Panzer Group 2 together, give its commander a free hand,
and there was a solid chance of completing the operation before the autumn
rains shut down southern Russia entirely. Hitler conceded the point, and Halder
flew into an enduring rage at what he called Guderian’s capitulation.
In Guderian’s terms, that was just another sign that the
Chief of Staff might talk the talk of mobile war, but could never walk the
walk. When matters grew dark, it was time to step on the gas. It is always
ill-advised to throw spitballs at an adversary armed with rocks. Guderian began
his move south minus one of his corps, transferred at Halder’s orders. But with
massive Luftwaffe support, Panzer Group 2 broke the Soviet front within days.
Third Panzer Division’s commander Walther Model was one of a rising new breed
of hard-charging risk-takers willing to make bricks without straw and mobile
war with only a few tanks. In a tactical tour de force, a battle group of the
3rd Panzer Divsion captured a key bridge over the Desna River on August 26,
motorcyclists and half-tracks shooting their way across as German and Soviet
pioneers dueled under the roadbed for control of the demolition apparatus.
The panzers drove south, shrugging off poorly coordinated
flank attacks. As he had done in France, Guderian chivied subordinates
mercilessly. Soviet commanders at all levels were bewildered by the speed of
the German advance and the ability of the Germans to be where they were not
expected. By September 7, Panzer Group 2 had opened a twenty-mile operational
gap between the Southwestern Front and its right-flank neighbor the Bryansk
Front.
Meanwhile, Panzer Group 1 struck for the Dnieper. The first
permanent bridgehead came at Kremenchug. Then, on August 25, the 13th Panzer
Division captured an intact bridge at Dnepropetrovsk, opening a way into the
Soviet rear. Semyon Budenny, commanding the Southwestern Front, was an old-line
horse cavalryman, an anachronism in the internal- combustion era. But he knew
well enough what mobile troops could achieve in empty space. He requested
permission to retreat—and was promptly replaced. Stalin’s determination to hold
the line in part reflected the ongoing battle for Kiev, which fully justified
Reichenau’s grim prediction. It was street by street and house by house, with
the Germans making little progress. Stalin ordered Kiev held and threw in
reinforcements, as the Germans began turning two breakthroughs into one
envelopment.
Facing massive counterattacks around Dnepropetrovsk, Kleist
feinted north and drove through Kremenchug. The starring role went to one of
the new formations: 16th Panzer Division, under another newcomer, Hans Hube.
Crossing the Dnieper on September 11, by the thirteenth the division was 20
miles into the Soviet rear with two more divisions in close support. Again
Stalin ordered Kiev held: no retreat without his authorization. Panzer Group 1 was
down to half strength and less in tanks, but on the cusp of the kind of
objective Guderian had described to Hitler. Hube led from the front as his
tanks overran an army headquarters whose commander was constrained to escape
through a window. The Luftwaffe, with V Air Corps supporting Kleist and II Air
Corps supporting Guderian, pounced on every Soviet effort to establish blocking
points and scoured the sky clean of Soviet aircraft. On the evening of
September 16—at 1820, to be exact—3rd and 16th Panzer Divisions met to close
the Kiev pocket at Lokhvitsa, more than 120 miles behind the city itself.
Kiev was the third of Barbarossa’s major pocket battles, and
the greatest. Serious resistance ended around September 24; mopping up took ten
days longer. German official figures give more than 800 tanks and almost 3,500
guns captured, along with more than 650,000 prisoners. Salvaging the equipment
and transferring the men took weeks. Kiev was also the smoothest of the
envelopments. Leakage was minimal—only around 15,000 Soviet soldiers managed to
escape across the steppe. Panzer Group 1 was worn thin, like a long-used knife
blade. Winter was close enough for Rundstedt to recommend suspending
operations. On October 1, Kleist’s men, renamed the 1st Panzer Army, instead
turned south first to the Sea of Azov, then toward Rostov and the oil fields of
the Caucasus, 180 degrees away from the revitalized attack on Moscow the High
Command was calling Operation Typhoon.
The upgrading of Panzer Group 1, and eventually all the
rest, to army status was more than cosmetic retitling. On one hand it was
positive: a recognition that the mobile forces’ effectiveness depended heavily
on the kind of autonomy denied when they were subordinated to army commanders
rather than reporting directly to the army groups. In particular the tension
between Guderian and Hoth and their nominal superior von Kluge had contributed
significantly to a level of friction and delay clearly unaffordable in the
circumstances of the Russo-German War. On the other side of the coin,
establishing the higher panzer headquarters as armies downgraded their
specialist function. Increasingly they would be used in the same way as other
armies, commanding mixed bags of mobile and marching divisions, occupying
sectors as often as conducting mobile operations—in short, following the
patterns developing in Army Group North but on a larger scale.
Kiev remains a subject of controversy among scholars and
soldiers. One school argues that the operation was a digression. It did not end
the war; the USSR did not collapse. Instead, Kiev (and Leningrad) further
strained an already overextended panzer force. Kiev arguably delayed the attack
on Moscow by a month, giving the Red Army and General Winter time that could
not have been bought in battle. But Kiev also destroyed or neutralized massive
Soviet forces that would have been available against the right flank of the
Moscow offensive. Nor could Stalin and his generals overlook the near-free
strategic hand Kiev gave Rundstedt in southern Ukraine: diversion of strength
and attention is usually a two-way process. And as Robert M. Citino dryly puts
it, “Can any battle that nets 665,000 prisoners be considered a mistake?” Even
the USSR’s deployable resources, human and material, were not infinitely
renewable.
Kiev was a crucial benchmark in another, no less decisive
way. On September 24, a series of explosions shook the city. Preset,
remote-controlled demolitions started fires that destroyed much of what
remained intact after the fighting. Hitler ordered retribution. The army
enthusiastically cooperated not for the first time in such exercises, but in a
visible, spectacular way that made its position on the Jewish question
unmistakable. Its culmination was the shooting of more than 30,000 Jews at Babi
Yar—an operation that would have been impossible without army-supplied
transport, administration, and area security.
Events in Kiev reinforced the growing awareness among
Russians who had worked and sacrificed to build a Soviet future that the
Germans were no less committed to destroying that future. The Soviet people did
not become overnight the united and determined force of Communist myth. Panic,
looting, wildcat strikes—a general breakdown of law and order prevailed in
Moscow during the fighting. Well before then, however, it was increasingly
obvious that whatever might be wrong with the USSR, it was nothing the Germans
could fix—or wanted to.
Stalin’s obscene treatment of his own people had created a
significant opportunity the Germans failed to utilize. Stalin himself
acknowledged the possibility in a speech of May 1945. Prospects for extending
individual and local cooperation with occupation into a call for a joint war
against Soviet tyranny nevertheless foundered from the beginning on
Nazi-structured racism. Hitler forbade any consideration of Slavs as allies.
Independently of Hitler, atrocities became a rear-area norm. Soldiers took
snapshots of mass hangings and mass shootings, often sending them home to their
families. Such messages as “1,153 Jewish looters shot,” or “2,200 Jews shot,”
grew into boasts of 20,000, 30,000 shootings and more.
These body counts had little to do with actually fighting
partisans. The vast, consistent discrepancy between the numbers of weapons
seized and people executed make that point eloquently. The perpetrators
submitted detailed reports to Berlin in codes so simple that British
intelligence had been reading them since 1939. The information went
unpublicized because the British government believed its release would
jeopardize other code-breaking operations deemed vital to the war
effort—especially the decryption of German raidio messages by the ULTRA
operation.
Nor was the work confined to Nazi organizations.
Einsatzgruppen, Waffen SS, and army “ field-grays” came together in a common
cause across occupied Russia. While generals like Leeb and Bock offered token
protests, Reichenau called for “severe and just retribution against subhuman
Jewry” and for a campaign of terror against all Russians. Hoth issued a more
extreme version. Guderian declared he “made the order his own.” Manstein,
promoted to army command in the Crimea, took up his new post by demanding the
eradication of partisans and “Jewish Bolsheviks.”
Arguably more crucial to the war’s metastasizing
brutalization were the junior officers. In 1939 about half still came from more
or less traditional sources: the educated middle classes broadly defined. With
the outbreak of war, combat experience became the dominant criterion. There was
less and less time to provide more than basic instruction to officer candidates
who saw their survival to date as prima facie proof of skill and luck, and who
tended to regard training courses in the Fatherland as an opportunity for
unauthorized rest and recreation. After the fall of 1942, any German over
sixteen could become an army officer if he served acceptably at the front,
demonstrated the proper character, believed in the Nazi cause, and was racially
pure. The Waffen SS was more overtly egalitarian, but its basic criteria were
essentially the same.
This relative democratization in good part reflected the
growing synergy between National Socialist ideology and the demands of the
front. Hitler wanted young men “as tough as leather, as fleet as grey-hounds,
and as hard as Krupp steel,” correspondingly unburdened by reflection or
imagination. The Red Army at its best did not offer sophisticated tactical
opposition. What division and regimental commanders wanted in subordinates was
tough men physically and morally, those willing to lead from the front and
publicly confident in even the most desperate situations. One might speculate,
indeed, that a steady supply of twentysomething lieutenants with wound badges
and attitudes helped older, wiser, and more tired majors and colonels to
suppress their own doubts about Hitler and his war. And men with such
conditioning were more likely to encourage than restrain aggressive behavior
against “others” and “outsiders.”
