Germany's War of Annihilation against the Soviet Union

During the past two decades, focus on the German-Soviet war has shifted from a nearly exclusive fascination with field marshals and their battles—“chaps and maps”—to one more concerned with the social aspects of the war. Issues of resistance and collaboration, German occupation policies and everyday life under Nazi rule, and the Soviet Union's recovery from the catastrophe of 1941 and its subsequent unprecedented mobilization during the latter stages of the war now constitute the main emphases of research. Many of these new lines of investigation revolve around the implementation and results of the German Vernichtungskrieg, the war of annihilation carried out by the Wehrmacht, SS, and myriad other German agencies against the Soviet state and population. As the army was the largest and most powerful German institution operating in the Soviet Union, it has recently attracted the most attention and generated the most controversy.Footnote ¹ Historians have reached a rough consensus concerning the German High Command's complicity in implementing the Vernichtungskrieg; here, the set of orders commonly referred to in the literature as the “criminal orders” illustrate the army's means of achieving Hitler's goals.Footnote ² More recently, scholars have begun to investigate the army's responsibility for starving millions of Soviet civilians.Footnote ³ While some dissenting voices have been heard, it is clear that the German High Command willingly and even enthusiastically participated in the war of annihilation.Footnote ⁴

This consensus, however, begins to fray when the focus is shifted to the lower levels of the German army and to the men themselves. Here, the primary concerns focus on how involved the “average” German soldier was in committing atrocities in the Soviet Union and what motivated him to do so. At its most basic, the debate boils down to one of ideological intentionality versus situation and circumstance. The most prominent exponent of the intentionality thesis is Omer Bartov. In a series of provocatively and brilliantly constructed books and articles, he claimed that the fighting in the Soviet Union led to the German army's transformation into Hitler's army. Bartov developed a complex and outwardly persuasive explanatory model for the transformation of the Wehrmacht into an army dedicated to realizing Hitler's objective of conquering a German racial empire in the Soviet Union. This perspective has become the predominant view of the Wehrmacht and especially of its front-line combat troops in the English-speaking world.Footnote ⁵

During Operation Barbarossa, the German army underwent what Bartov describes as a process of demodernization. The modern, tank-oriented blitzkrieg army that had achieved such stunning operational victories in France and during the early months of Operation Barbarossa had, by the winter of 1941/42, been ground down into an undersupplied and ill-equipped infantry force, inferior to the Red Army in nearly every respect except leadership.Footnote ⁶

Simultaneous to this demodernization of the front, the German Army suffered the destruction of its “primary group” bonds. These social networks of soldiers at the lowest organizational levels were utterly destroyed during the costly fighting of the campaign and this forced the German army to create a new means of cohesiveness within its ranks. This was accomplished by a dual process. First, the German army instituted a murderous system of military justice, motivated by the Nazi Weltanschauung, in which a wide range of offenses, including minor infractions such as falling asleep on sentry duty and self-inflicted wounds, were transformed into the much more serious transgressions of Wehrkraftzersetzung—the undermining of military effectiveness—and were therefore punishable by death. As Bartov notes, “it thus became standard policy to terrorize the troops from evading a likely death at the front by promising them certain execution if they were caught in the act.” Some 15,000 German soldiers lost their lives to the dictates of this system during the war.

Second, in addition to terrorizing its soldiers, the German army also utilized Nazi propaganda as a means of creating cohesion in the ranks. Themes such as saving Western Civilization from the Bolshevik hordes; destroying the Judeo-Bolshevik colossus that threatened Germany's way of life; and elevating Hitler to a God-like status, making his orders and dictates sacrosanct, among others, were continually disseminated to troops at the front, through pamphlets, newspapers, books, and films. Over time, soldiers, many of whom had been exposed to such concepts during their formative years in the Hitler Youth and the Reich's Labor Service, absorbed such ideas until they became part and parcel of their own personal Weltanschauung. The combination of a murderous military justice system and the increasing identification of the soldiers with Nazi propaganda led to what Bartov terms “the distortion of reality.”

Bombarded with messages propagating this distorted reality, German soldiers “ascribed the unprecedented brutality of the Wehrmacht and the SS to their victims”; this allowed the troops to “com[e] to terms” with their own behavior in the Soviet Union. Such a “confusion between cause and effect was indeed inherent to the war in the East, and constituted a vital component of its destructive energy.”Footnote ⁷ By turning cause and effect on its head, troops operating in the Soviet Union viewed the civilian population as perpetrators of violence against the Germans; the growing partisan movement and the brutal dirty war that took place behind the lines only acted as confirmation of such thinking. Surrounded by allegedly hostile civilians, facing an enemy growing steadily stronger, and terrorized by their own officers, German soldiers responded with brutality and arbitrary violence against civilians and prisoners of war. The combination of these factors transformed the German army into Hitler's army by late 1943, one dedicated to fighting his war of annihilation.

Bartov's analysis was based on the documentation of three German divisions: the 12th Infantry Division, the 18th Panzer Division, and the Grossdeutschland Division. These three divisions were all early mobilization-wave or elite divisions and therefore differed from the overwhelming majority of the some 285 divisions mobilized by the Wehrmacht during the Second World War.Footnote ⁸ The only real way of ascertaining if Bartov's conclusions are applicable to the entire German army is by undertaking numerous case studies of other German formations, especially non-elite units.Footnote ⁹ German historians, such as Johannes Hürter and Manfred Oldenburg, have begun to examine the actions and motivations of different levels of the Wehrmacht's hierarchy. Hürter's examination of the Eighteenth Army during the initial stages of the siege of Leningrad and Oldenburg's analysis of the Eleventh and Seventeenth Armies' occupation of the Crimea, the Donets Basin, and the Caucasus in 1942 suggest different explanations for the German army's behavior in the Soviet Union.Footnote ¹⁰ Both authors conclude that while racism underpinned the armies' treatment of civilians and especially Jews, the need to safeguard their men and ensure they could complete their military mission formed the basis of their occupation policies. This focus on the military necessity formed the bedrock of the army's behavior in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union.Footnote ¹¹

Though Hürter and Oldenburg modified Bartov's conclusions regarding the importance of ideology, they did so primarily at the army level. As Bartov's analysis focused on combat troops, it seems reasonable that more front-line divisions need to be examined.Footnote ¹² One such combat division was the 123rd Infantry Division (ID). An analysis of this unit and its relations with civilians is made even more attractive by its participation in the battle for the Demiansk Pocket; this forced it into close contact with the same population for nearly thirteen months. In this respect, the division typified the experience of most German units between 1942 and 1944, when combat on the northern and central sections of the front was far closer to the experiences of the trench warfare that characterized the Western Front in the First World War than the mobile, tank warfare practiced by the Germans and later the Soviets and Americans during the Second World War. The 123rd ID's prolonged period of occupation in the Demiansk Pocket can be broken down into three distinct periods, each characterized by a different thrust of policy. These various policies led the division to engage in an assortment of divergent behaviors that fail to fit neatly into Bartov's paradigm but which correspond more closely with the models developed by Hürter and Oldenburg. This article will argue that while ideology played an important role in the German conduct of war in the east, the idea of military necessity—i.e., an absolute focus on achieving military victory at the expense of all other considerations, including the welfare of civilians in the occupied area—functioned as the primary determinant of the German army's behavior in the Soviet Union. This concept gave the 123rd ID a certain flexibility as the division commander's appreciation of the situation was the guiding factor in establishing occupation practices. The most important determinant was not a rigid ideological framework; rather, it was the changing fortunes of the division's military situation.

The 123rd Infantry Division in Operation Barbarossa

The 123rd Infantry Division was formed as part of the eleventh mobilization wave on October 5, 1940. Consisting of the 415th, 416th, and 418th Infantry Regiments as well as other divisional units, the division was established for the express purpose of invading the Soviet Union. It was an amalgamation of prior-serving soldiers from the 13th Infantry Division, the 257th Infantry Division, the 3rd (Motorized) Infantry Division, and the 18th Infantry Division as well as fresh recruits.Footnote ¹³ Two points arise from this. First, though it is difficult to ascertain from the existing documentation how many of the men within the division had already experienced combat by June 22, 1941, a reasonable estimate seems to be approximately one-third to one-half.Footnote ¹⁴ At least one-half, if not the majority, of soldiers in the division's ranks would therefore see their first combat during the invasion of the Soviet Union; this was not a hardened combat unit prior to June 1941. Second, a high percentage of the men who entered the division's ranks came from Wehrkreis III, the military district that encompassed Brandenburg and Berlin. Each of the aforementioned units that provided men for the 123rd ID was itself based in Military District III, and the recruits who entered the division also primarily originated from this region.Footnote ¹⁵ An examination of two companies of the 123rd ID shows that nearly half of all men within the two units were native to Wehrkreis III at the outbreak of war with the Soviet Union.Footnote ¹⁶ In sum, the 123rd Infantry Division entered the war with a mix of combat veterans and green recruits, centered on a strong core of soldiers from the Brandenburg-Berlin region.

The 123rd ID was subordinated to the Sixteenth Army which, in turn, was part of Army Group North. Originally, the Sixteenth Army was charged with pushing due east toward Novgorod and Staraia Russa while both preserving a common front with Army Group Center and providing flank support to Armored Group Four's drive on Leningrad.Footnote ¹⁷ As the campaign developed, however, the demands of Army Group Center took precedence over those of Army Group North, with the result that the latter was constantly hemorrhaging units to the former.Footnote ¹⁸ The transfers resulted in II Corps, the 123rd ID's superior unit from late July 1941 to August 1943, having to fill the gap between the two Army Groups. As II Corps advanced along an eastern axis in an attempt to maintain contact with its southern neighbor, the remainder of the Sixteenth Army was forced to maneuver in a more northeasterly direction. With German planners focused on Leningrad to the north and increasingly on Moscow to the south, II Corps made an unsupported advance into the resulting vacuum. The most isolated of II Corps' units was the 123rd ID, which operated on the extreme right flank of the Corps.

During the first month and a half of the invasion, the 123rd ID operated in classic blitzkrieg mode, covering more than 800 kilometers by August 2. It participated in serious combat on only two occasions, with the remainder of the period devoted to advances and other operations, such as clearing forests and swamps of scattered Soviet troops.Footnote ¹⁹ The forced marches to the east, however, took a toll on the men, with one soldier complaining that “the strains of the march caused by hunger and thirst, heat and dust, and impassable roads were enormous.”Footnote ²⁰ Division command even protested to XXVIII Corps that the pace had to slow as the men were completely exhausted; such considerations, however, paled beside the time requirements built into the planning of Operation Barbarossa, and the division was ordered to make do.Footnote ²¹ A tired 123rd ID ran into noticeably stiffening Soviet resistance on the outskirts of the city of Cholm, however, and the unit suffered such heavy casualties during the fighting and subsequent defense of the city, that by early September, it displayed the characteristics of a formation that had been through a period “of very strenuous advance and … difficult combat.”Footnote ²²

The recognition of the division's dilapidated condition caused II Corps to cancel an attack in early September because “the condition of the 123rd [ID] is such that one cannot trust them with protecting the southern flank.”Footnote ²³ Such a break in the action was short-lived; II Corps and the 123rd ID again restarted the advance in early October in support of Operation Typhoon, the assault on Moscow. When the attack finally petered out, II Corps found itself in a position with “three divisions (which can only be valued as reinforced regiments) for 122 kilometers of front.” Though well aware of the problem, the Sixteenth Army could do nothing to rectify it: according to the army, “there is not one single man available.”Footnote ²⁴ An examination of the First Companies of the 415th and the 416th Infantry Regiments highlights the deterioration of the 123rd ID during Operation Barbarossa. The 1/415th began the war with 180 men; the 1/416th counted 192 men within its ranks. By December 1941, the numbers had dropped to 119 and 114, respectively, an average loss of nearly forty percent of the companies' original strength.Footnote ²⁵ Due to this manpower shortage, the 123rd ID proved unable to construct a solid defensive line, relying instead on a series of loosely connected strongpoints. Such a defensive posture left “broad areas in which not a single German soldier stands” and Red Army patrols as well as partisans penetrated these gaps, wreaking havoc with supplies and communications in the rear areas.Footnote ²⁶ With only fifty infantrymen for every kilometer of front, both the division and II Corps recognized that a determined Soviet attack would easily crack the Germans' positions with the outcome of the battle being “one of simple arithmetic.”Footnote ²⁷ Fortunately for the men of the 123rd ID, the remainder of the month passed without any major offensives, though the troops busied themselves with fighting off nightly Red Army raids.Footnote ²⁸ An obviously bitter officer summed up the division's situation in early January:

The 123rd ID found itself fighting a two-front war for much of the fall and winter of 1941 as the units of II Corps faced the most vibrant partisan movement in all of Army Group North during the opening year of hostilities. Several factors caused this state of affairs. First, the area under Army Group Center's responsibility was home to the largest partisan movement in the occupied Soviet Union and this spilled over into II Corps area of operations due to the rather fluid junction between the Corps and the Ninth Army, its southern neighbor.Footnote ³⁰ Second, II Corps' area of operations consisted of numerous forests and swamps. Such terrain afforded bands of partisans numerous opportunities to conceal their base of operations. Finally, Army Group North was stretched thinnest along the axis of advance for II Corps and combat troops simply could not be detailed to the rear in sufficient numbers to neutralize the partisan movement effectively. In attempts to stifle the guerillas, the 123rd ID forcibly evacuated several villages and launched two operations against partisan bands. These missions, however, paled in comparison to the brutal collective measures initiated by II Corps. The 123rd ID's superior formation launched a “punishment expedition” in its rear that concluded on December 16 with eleven villages burned down and “eighty-five Russians shot of which twelve were proven to be partisans.”Footnote ³¹ II Corps also evacuated and burned down several other villages located near the primary supply road in the winter of 1942/1943 in an attempt to squash the partisan movement.Footnote ³² The strains of fighting an enemy in its rear as well as the Red Army on its front took a serious toll on the division. Exhausted, exposed, and isolated, the men of the 123rd ID settled into a defensive posture. The heady summer days of blitzkrieg had long passed.

The Soviet Counteroffensive and the Formation of the Demiansk Pocket

Though a Soviet attack on the Berliners' position was viewed as inevitable by German commands from the Army Group to the divisional level, no reserves existed to strengthen the line: the 123rd ID faced the onslaught of five enemy divisions by itself, with the predictable result that its front broke in several places on January 10, 1942.Footnote ³³ By that evening, Soviet troops had penetrated the German defensive line to such an extent that Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, commander-in-chief of Army Group North, feared the “useless sacrifice” of the division's infantry regiments if they were not allowed to withdraw.Footnote ³⁴ Soviet pressure forced the Germans into hasty and disorganized tactical retreats despite Hitler's express orders prohibiting withdrawal. The commander of the 416th Infantry Regiment described the retreat:

For the first time during Army Group North's campaign, a Soviet offensive threatened the destruction of a German division as well as the encirclement of its parent corps.

The superior mobility of the Red Army allowed it frequently to capture sections of planned lines in the German rear before Wehrmacht units could completely occupy them, while the chaos accompanying the German retreat led to a complete breakdown of the supply situation. The majority of the 123rd ID's men had neither food nor blankets during a period when temperatures reached -40° Celsius, and cases of frostbite assumed epidemic proportions.Footnote ³⁶ Hitler, however, remained unwilling to countenance retreat and ordered on January 13 that “the position is to be defended to the last man.” The division commander issued his own order the following day threatening “a drumhead court martial for any soldier who leaves his position without permission” and, “in urgent cases,” immediate execution without court martial.Footnote ³⁷ While Hitler's order prevented any type of a planned large-scale retreat, Soviet pressure forced the Germans into haphazard and hasty tactical withdrawals that eventually opened up the right flank of II Corps. The outlines of the Demiansk pocket, in which the 123rd ID occupied the southeastern-most position, were already visible a mere week after the attack commenced.Footnote ³⁸

On January 19, division command reported that the motley collection of units that had successfully retreated along with divisional headquarters was “physically and spiritually no longer capable of action” following a “ten-day march through cold and snow and in constant fear of being cornered by the enemy.” Of the 8–9,000 men available, more than three-quarters suffered from severe frostbite, including more than ninety percent of the II/416th Infantry Regiment.Footnote ³⁹ In a report to II Corps, the division commander pointed out the seriousness of the situation, especially the high number of cases of “frostbite, that have consequently led to a rapid sinking of combat strength, as well as the enormous strain on the nerves of the men in the forward lines, that has led to many crying fits in the line. The Ia [operations officer] emphatically stresses that the men are at the end of their strength.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The divisional doctor reinforced this point by noting that “through the many week-long strains, the troops are partially undernourished and the majority of them are overtired and exhausted.”Footnote ⁴¹ Another officer pointed out that “the severe cold and demands placed on every man through fortification construction and sentry duty are decisively weakening the combat ability of the companies.” He added that shoddy equipment, especially boots, led to frostbite which only further taxed the men.Footnote ⁴² The loss of combat strength was made glaringly apparent by the 1/415th Infantry Regiment, which reported a mere sixty-seven effectives on February 1, 1942.Footnote ⁴³ A battalion in the same regiment reported that “under present conditions, [it was] no longer fully operational.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The power of the Soviet assault combined with the bitter cold to leave the 123rd ID in a severely weakened state.

Following a precarious stabilization of the line in early February, the 123rd ID began to comb through its rear-area in hopes of strengthening its combat units.Footnote ⁴⁵ While the use of such troops for combat had severely disrupted the division's supply during the advance of 1941, this became a moot point by February 8 as Soviet troops closed the encirclement.Footnote ⁴⁶ The men had been receiving a considerable amount of their supplies from air-drops for approximately one week by this point; now, this was the only manner in which food, ammunition, and other necessities could get through.Footnote ⁴⁷ The first two days of exclusive air-drops did not bode well for the future: while the Corps estimated that 300 tons would fulfill the daily minimum requirements for the approximately 100,000 men in the pocket, a mere 16 tons were dropped on February 9 and only 27 tons on the following day.Footnote ⁴⁸ The paucity of air-drops certainly contributed to the appallingly high number of cases of frostbite in the division: between December 1941 and March 1942, 2,488 men of the 123rd ID suffered from exposure to the severe weather.Footnote ⁴⁹

Once the pocket was closed, Red Army forces hammered at the encircled German troops. Members of the 123rd ID counted more than 3,500 enemy dead in front of its positions between January 16 and March 15.Footnote ⁵⁰ In addition to fending off numerous infantry assaults, the Berliners were pounded by massive artillery bombardments, which, according to the Germans, specifically targeted dwellings. The continual loss of shelter during the winter contributed to what one officer viewed as an “alarming … sinking of the men's physical and moral powers of resistance.”Footnote ⁵¹ Within two weeks, the number of non-combat troops in the front lines doubled to 1,268, including 45 from the medic company and 168 from the veterinary company.Footnote ⁵² These troops were even less prepared for winter fighting than regular combat units. The Veterinary Company noted that the 109 men under its command lacked 65 pairs of boots, 100 pairs of socks, 80 pairs of gloves, 100 pairs of underwear, and 130 wool blankets as well as 32 steel helmets. Such equipment issues had a predictable effect: the company commander reported, not surprisingly, that “the morale of the troops is depressed.”Footnote ⁵³ The lowering of rations by a third at the end of January also had a negative impact on the men's spirits.Footnote ⁵⁴ Short of supplies and men, the 123rd ID dug in and hoped that their encirclement would be short-lived.

During the remainder of February and into early March, the division alternated between brief periods of brutal fighting and scorched earth retreats.Footnote ⁵⁵ This process ended on March 6 when the division reached the Pola River line. The division commander addressed his troops, stating that “the Pola position is the last position for Group Rauch in the defensive battle for Fortress Demiansk. It needs to be held until an attack from the outside brings relief. There is no other way.”Footnote ⁵⁶ In addition to holding the front, the 123rd ID also faced two Soviet parachute brigades dropped into the pocket in hopes of weakening German resistance from the inside.Footnote ⁵⁷ Operations against these airborne troops placed yet another burden onto the shoulders of the 123rd ID. The onset of wet weather complicated these combat missions. One soldier wrote home, “the cold has now broken and we have wet weather. You can imagine how one lives in bunkers in this weather.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The problem reached such an extent that the division's men were ordered to purchase both galoshes and rubber boots from the civilian population.Footnote ⁵⁹ In addition to failing to supply the troops with adequate clothing, the Sixteenth Army also proved unable to keep the men properly fed. Rations were reduced by another third in March, with only combat troops receiving full bread rations.Footnote ⁶⁰ Constant enemy pressure, muddy spring weather, inadequate equipment, and hunger were the burdens faced by the division during the spring fighting.

By mid-March 1942, the 123rd ID closely resembled the burnt-out and exhausted divisions that constitute the foundation of Bartov's analysis. Poorly supplied and fighting against a quantitatively and qualitatively superior enemy (at least in terms of equipment), the 123rd ID certainly experienced a “demodernization of the front.” The division's growing battlefield inferiority was complemented by a complete crumbling of the division's organization. This was a two-part process. First, the division's infantry and artillery battalions were scattered throughout the Demiansk pocket fighting under different commands. One unit even deployed completely outside the pocket at Cholm. Both the 415th and 416th Infantry Regiments were split up between different commands in the Kessel while only one of the 418th Infantry Regiment's infantry battalions remained under the command of the 123rd ID during the entirety of the battle.Footnote ⁶¹ The commander of the 123rd ID believed that such a situation seriously impaired the combat efficiency of his unit and in September 1942, he sent a brusquely worded letter to II Corps in which he stated,

The commander believed those men who were forced into “small splinter groups have lower morale and more sickness than others” and that “troops who have been split apart from their division, their regiment, their battalion, and their company” failed to maintain the combat effectiveness of a cohesive unit.Footnote ⁶³ Even as late as July 1943, four months after the 123rd ID had evacuated the Demiansk pocket, the division was still short one of its infantry battalions.Footnote ⁶⁴

Second, even these smaller splinter units were becoming increasingly heterogeneous as the Wehrmacht's replacement system, already staggered by the heavy casualties of the invasion, failed to master the situation caused by the encirclement. Not only were few soldiers brought into the pocket to reinforce the 123rd ID, but the majority of these also did not originate within the boundaries of Wehrkreis III. While the personnel files of the division's companies are rather spotty due to the chaos of the retreat, it seems that less than a third of the some 200 men who entered the companies' rolls between January and April 1942 originated in Brandenburg-Berlin.Footnote ⁶⁵ Though the number of replacements entering the division steadily increased beginning in June 1942, the number of men native to Military District III still remained less than fifty percent of the total.Footnote ⁶⁶

This constituted a serious issue in the German army, especially since divisions were intentionally constructed on a regional basis to ensure cohesion at the lower levels.Footnote ⁶⁷ So instead of commanding its organic regiments and battalions primarily recruited from the Brandenburg-Berlin area, the division led a motley group of units that one way or another ended up in its area of operations during the initial Soviet offensive and the subsequent chaotic German retreat.Footnote ⁶⁸ The regional composition of an infantry division provided the men with a strong sense of cohesion, something that the troops could fall back upon in times of distress and anxiety. The flip side of this strong identification with the Heimat was the stigmatizing of those who originated from other recruiting areas and were viewed initially as “outsiders.”Footnote ⁶⁹ As already noted, Bartov has suggested that the breakdown of the Wehrmacht's organizational structure forced it to turn to other means of ensuring cohesion and hence battlefield effectiveness.Footnote ⁷⁰ The combination of propaganda, a brutal military justice system, and commanders encouraging or at least tolerating troops' excesses against the civilian population as a means of releasing pressure led to the Army becoming inextricably entwined with war crimes. Such a thesis would seem to fit well with the 123rd ID during its time in the Demiansk pocket. An analysis of its relations with Soviet civilians, however, leads to different conclusions.

Life and Death in the Demiansk Pocket

Once Hitler proclaimed the encircled area “Fortress Demiansk” and forbade any retreat, the units within the pocket were forced to modify their relations with the civilian population.Footnote ⁷¹ The very fact that the men operating under the 123rd ID's command were able to reverse track in their dealings with civilians suggests that perhaps other explanatory models outside Bartov's are necessary to explain the more complicated and nuanced relationship between soldiers and civilians on the Eastern Front than he identifies.

During the chaotic and crisis-ridden weeks after the initial Soviet attack, the 123rd ID implemented any and all measures deemed necessary to stop the Red Army advance and maintain its own combat efficiency. Two days after the offensive began, II Corps instructed its subordinate formations that “all villages and buildings lying before the front are to be burned and destroyed.”Footnote ⁷² When questions arose as to whether some villages should remain standing, the 123rd ID commander emphatically responded, “Führerbefehl! [Führer Order] All houses without German soldiers are to be burned.”Footnote ⁷³ These orders were carried out by various subordinate formations during the retreat: numerous “quarters, cellars, and dugouts [were] burned,” while one unit reported that it left a town “in bright flames” for the advancing Soviets.Footnote ⁷⁴ That this would expose numerous civilians to the harsh winter was not lost on German authorities; a directive issued by the division one week later again ordered the destruction of all dwellings “without consideration for the civilian population.”Footnote ⁷⁵ In fact, civilians became targets of German troops as members of the 123rd ID began to “mobilize ruthlessly [all] inhabitants of villages, including women and children,” for the construction of fortifications; those who failed to comply with these orders were to be shot.Footnote ⁷⁶ The men were also instructed that “all felt boots are to be taken immediately from the population without consideration of age or sex,” an order that condemned numerous women and children now forced to work for the army to severe frostbite and probable death.Footnote ⁷⁷

The issue of food supply also became an extremely important question during the tumultuous days of January and February. The 123rd ID was poorly supplied in its forward position in the Demiansk sector even before Soviet forces encircled II Corps and the situation obviously worsened as the battle dragged on. Immediately after the Red Army offensive began, the division confiscated whatever foodstuffs it could extract from the surrounding countryside:

While airdrops sufficed to maintain a minimum level of activity, they were in no way adequate for all of the division's needs. II Corps accordingly ordered the “ruthless exploitation of the countryside.” This order, however, failed to correspond with reality. As the divisional quartermaster noted, there simply were “no supply goods left in the area.” All that remained were several cows and even after the return of several Requisition Commandos, the Quartermaster counted a mere twenty head of cattle.Footnote ⁷⁹ While the division attempted to square its own circle of supply problems, the surrounding civilian population was left with little or no possibility of sustenance. Relentless foraging by the men meant that “despite the most difficult of conditions, the division was able to extract the necessary fresh meat from the countryside.”Footnote ⁸⁰ But what were civilians to do in “the most difficult of conditions” in an area completely stripped of any type of food? The division's records remain silent on this issue.

One possible solution to the civilian food issue employed by the German army in increasing frequency as the war progressed was the forced evacuation of a region's inhabitants. Such orders to evacuate the population were ignored by the division in late January as it did not possess the necessary manpower for such an undertaking during a period of desperate fighting and retreat.Footnote ⁸¹ By mid-February, however, fears of a revolt in the town of Molvotitsy led to the forced evacuation of the town's 1,130 inhabitants, the majority of whom were women and children. A mere one day after the idea was first broached, the civilians were forced out of their homes and then jettisoned into the neighboring 12th ID's area of responsibility.Footnote ⁸² In all probability, a significant number of these up-rooted individuals perished.Footnote ⁸³ Molvotitsy was merely the tip of the iceberg; evacuations of countless smaller villages such as Sodki, in which all thirty inhabitants were forcibly driven to the rear, took place on a large scale during February and March 1942.Footnote ⁸⁴ Focused on halting the Soviet offensive, the division took no chances with possibly rebellious civilians in the rear area: it forced them from their homes in the midst of winter into the chaotic rear areas of other German units. In the calculations of division command, the welfare of women and children received no attention.

As this series of orders illustrates, German policy toward Russian civilians underwent a radicalization during the shock of the Soviet advance in January and February 1942. The 123rd ID took the fate of civilians into consideration only when their activities threatened military operations; the combat requirements of the troops came first. While members of the 123rd ID certainly confiscated food-stuffs and cattle from peasants during their advance in 1941, they generally refrained from overtly intervening in their lives. During the encirclement crisis of January-February 1942, however, the division became much more proactive toward the native population.Footnote ⁸⁵ This appears as more of a desperate attempt to mobilize every available body in an effort to hold the line than part of an ideological war against the civilian population. The division's view of the food question and forced evacuations highlight the emphasis on military necessity. Civilians were not targeted because they were “inferior Slavs” or “Bolsheviks” but because they either possessed items or skills needed by the Germans or posed a potential threat to the division's military tasks. While the end result of these German policies probably resulted in the deaths of numerous civilians—malnourished women and children performing hard physical labor in the freezing cold without proper clothing had little or no chance of surviving the winter—these were not ideologically motivated deaths; rather, they were a result of the German army's utilization of every and all means, no matter the collateral cost, to secure victory.

As the various units of the 123rd ID battled against Red Army attempts to collapse the pocket, Army Group North prepared an offensive to break the encirclement. On February 13, 1942, Hitler demanded an attack from Staraia Russa to link up with the encircled forces pushing west in the westernmost section of the pocket. The creation of this “land-bridge” would ensure that supplies and men could be transported into the “fortress.”Footnote ⁸⁶ After several postponements, the attack was finally launched on March 21.Footnote ⁸⁷ Strong Soviet defenses on the banks of the Lovat River, however, soon frustrated the assault and II Corps' attack was repeatedly postponed until April 14.Footnote ⁸⁸ The two combat groups finally met on April 22, effectively ending the encirclement of II Corps.Footnote ⁸⁹ Despite the opening of the pocket to German lines, II Corps' mission remained unchanged: “the basic principle is as it was previously: no territory is to be surrendered to the enemy. Everyone holds his position until the last man and the last bullet!”Footnote ⁹⁰ While II Corps no longer faced a desperate struggle for survival, it still occupied a tenuous bulge in the enemy's line and this circumstance led to a large-scale program of fortification construction.Footnote ⁹¹

During the thirteen-month existence of the Demiansk Pocket, the war in this sector degenerated into trench warfare.Footnote ⁹² In 1942 alone, engineers attached to the 123rd ID planted more than 22,000 mines of various types while more than 400 rolls of barbed wire were strung out in front of the division's lines.Footnote ⁹³ Though no single engagement caused an exorbitant amount of casualties, continual minor firefights imposed the bloody logic of attrition on German formations, including the 123rd ID.Footnote ⁹⁴ To secure its position, the division began a mobilization of all possible resources, including civilians, within the pocket. While their fate scarcely registered with German authorities during the months of desperate fighting, men of the 123rd ID now began to recognize the suffering of civilians within the pocket.

The division's early practices of using forced civilian labor for its construction program intensified as the battle settled into a type of siege-operation. Already perilously short of combat troops, the front line was in no position to spare the men needed for this work. This led II Corps to order “the ruthless use of all male and female members of the population” to improve defensive positions.Footnote ⁹⁵ The Engineer Battalion immediately began utilizing numerous civilians as well as prisoners of war for these purposes, and this practice continued throughout the summer of 1942.Footnote ⁹⁶ Shelter construction was especially important due to Soviet shelling of villages and towns in an attempt to deny German soldiers refuge from the weather.Footnote ⁹⁷ The marshy area in which the 123rd ID operated complicated this process as many dwellings became unusable when heavy rains and thaws caused sudden floods.Footnote ⁹⁸ The division also used civilians to maintain the roads, especially during fall when yet another muddy period set in. In one eleven-day period, for example, 60 men, 145 women, and 73 children worked under German supervision repairing roads.Footnote ⁹⁹

Once a land connection was reestablished to the Sixteenth Army and the 123rd ID's situation became correspondingly more secure, it began to focus more attention on the civilian population and the problems of food supply within the pocket. Despite a continual increase in the division's rations until they reached their normal levels for the first time in three months in early May, the troops continued to scour the landscape in search of food.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ By mid-summer, numerous vegetables, including cabbage, turnips, and potatoes were being cultivated in the pocket.Footnote ¹⁰¹ This summer harvest came several months too late for many Soviet civilians. In late April, divisional troops alerted its command that a group of 192 refugees was threatened with starvation in a small village in its sector: “the food situation is so bad for the rest of the population, that there is nothing to give the refugees from their small holdings.”Footnote ¹⁰² A contemporaneous report from the Veterinary Company detailed that “civilians in Tobolka are on the point of starvation” and that “disease had broken out” as a result of malnourishment.Footnote ¹⁰³ Unrest bubbled up in Pogorelizy where “the population already has been rebellious and shouted out to the interpreter that one would rather be shot instead of being left to starve.” As the quartermaster noted, “the supply situation for the civilian population is such that a decision needs to be made.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Fearful of epidemics and possible revolts, the division contacted II Corps about the “emergency.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Though the two commands considered pushing the population across the front lines and making the civilians the responsibility of the Red Army, this idea was quickly dismissed as impracticable.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ It was finally decided to establish communal kitchens, under the supervision of the German-appointed civilian leader, in both Tobolka and Pogorelizy, where the inhabitants would receive a daily serving of thick soup.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The root of the problem in both villages appeared to be a number of refugees from the previously evacuated Molvotitsy. The survivors of that hastily carried-out evacuation, starving and wandering throughout the area, were refused any assistance by the poverty-stricken natives of the two towns and it was this clash that created the volatile situation. The poorly planned and ill-timed evacuation of Molvotitsy now haunted the 123rd ID.

In an attempt to “improve” the “hopeless food situation for evacuated Russian civilians,” the division issued a directive concerning the feeding of native inhabitants in its area of responsibility.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ First, the division commander made the front-line commanders, as well as the German medics in each sector, responsible for implementing “emergency measures” in those villages that required immediate help. In these especially affected communities, the troops were ordered to establish communal kitchens which, following the examples set in Tobolka and Pogorelizy, would be run by village leaders under the supervision of German units. The entire community would not receive sustenance from these kitchens; the distribution of warm soup was to be limited to refugees only.

The section commanders were also to set aside a portion of the food intended for civilians already working for the army in order to supplement the soup. In order to qualify for this assistance, however, the refugees needed to provide labor for the Germans, be it construction or agricultural work. Though such a policy ensured that those civilians physically unable to work for the Wehrmacht still faced a struggle for survival, the commander pointed out that the division was unable to provide for everyone. He then stated that these communal kitchens and the supply of the “additional food strained the … entire transport system, etc., etc.” and that the commanders needed to ensure that food was not wasted. Obviously, pragmatism and not humanitarianism constituted the bedrock of this initiative.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Finally, the commander called for an “as intensive as possible cultivation of the land” as well as a close watch on all available seed in order to provide food and hay for both the troops and civilians during the upcoming months. The division emphasized the gathering of the harvest repeatedly during the summer of 1942. In comparison with the previous summer, the collection of food and hay was carried out by the division in a much more organized manner. The division commander charged the Ortskommandanten and local Economic Officers with establishing hay commandos consisting of thirty civilians and soldiers and to “ruthlessly bring in” all hay found in the area.Footnote ¹¹⁰ While “everything [needed] to be done to ensure a one-hundred-percent collection and securing of all animal food found in the divisional area,” the responsible officers also needed to make certain that villages received both payment for their hay as well as one ton of hay for each cow and horse within the village.Footnote ¹¹¹ The division emphasized even more strongly that the fate of civilians was closely tied to that of the rye harvest. The Quartermaster instructed the troops that the rye harvest was intended solely for the civilian population, stating “therefore it is important that we bring in one hundred percent of the harvest so the troops are not responsible for feeding the civilian pop[ulation] this winter.”Footnote ¹¹²

Such policies enacted by the 123rd ID led to an evolution of the relationship between soldiers and civilians in the operational area. A report issued by the Intelligence Section of the Sixteenth Army on June 20 characterized the attitude of the civilian population toward the Germans as “good.”Footnote ¹¹³ While the overly optimistic tone of the report stretches credulity, the establishment of communal kitchens combined with German propaganda that promised to eradicate the hated collective-farm system to make the population more amenable to the invaders. The report also called for the “proper treatment” of civilians and prisoners of war to maintain this reservoir of good will. Other manifestations of this new-found attitude toward Russians included the offering of medical services to civilians. In an order issued in November 1942, the division instructed its subordinate units that only those civilians whose injury or sickness “would be a burden on the troops” were to be sent to the primary civilian hospital located in Demiansk. The remainder of civilians in need of medical care was to be treated by the “closest troop doctor” and even appointments for “eyes [and] nose, ears, and throat … specialists” were made available to Russians.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Other orders issued by division command also indicated that the relationship between German soldiers and Russian civilians, particularly women, had evolved to one far removed from a pitiless racial war. Fraternization between Russian women and German soldiers became so common that the division banned all long-term employment of Russian females—as this led to cohabitation—and approved short-term work only during the day.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Such relationships were certainly motivated in part by the troops' sexual desires and frustrations though this fails to tell the whole story. Members of the Eleventh and Seventeenth Armies also engaged in what Oldenburg has termed “very close relationships” between soldiers and Russian women that were based on more than carnal appetites.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The continual attempts by the Army to impress upon the soldiers that fraternization with Russian civilians “threaten[ed] the respect for the power and strength of the German army” illustrated the powerful attachments formed between German soldiers and Russian women.Footnote ¹¹⁷ While such developments certainly did not indicate that German soldiers had shed their racially tinged feelings of superiority toward Russians in general, it does point to a more nuanced relationship between occupiers and occupied than generally emerges in the literature.

By attempting to halt the practice of arbitrary requisitioning and by proactively assisting starving civilians, the 123rd ID's actions significantly departed from the planned war of annihilation. It is especially noteworthy that this modification of the division's earlier behavior took place while the division itself was undergoing supply problems as a result of the encirclement. Instead of radicalizing its behavior and ruthlessly exploiting the civilian population as the siege progressed, the 123rd ID implemented more conciliatory occupation policies designed to placate its rear area. Within the division's area of operations, pragmatism overrode ideological imperatives.Footnote ¹¹⁸

These local initiatives, however, were sharply criticized by the Army High Command. On August 23, 1942, the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH) issued a directive to its forces in the Soviet Union entitled “Feeding of the Civilian Population in the Occupied Eastern Territories.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ While the OKH recognized the difficulties facing civilians and their procurement of foodstuffs, it deemed “untenable” the “increasing number of petitions of commanders to make food drawn from Army stocks available to civilians in both army and rear areas.” The “serious food situation in the Heimat” meant that the civilians in the occupied areas should receive only a “minimum of food” and that these meager rations were in no way to be supplied by the German army itself. The familiar refrain of how such assistance constituted a crippling burden on an already overstrained supply system was employed to justify a policy that “fundamentally prohibited” feeding civilians from the Wehrmacht's stores. Finally, the OKH asserted that “the supply of the civilian population is the exclusive task of the economic offices.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Here, the center snuffed out the periphery's policies that despite their obvious limitations, certainly presented civilians with increased chances of survival.

While the available documentation gives no indication of the effects of this order on the 123rd ID's policies, it seems safe to assume that large-scale projects requiring noticeable amounts of food were shut down, while smaller, less conspicuous programs continued. This, however, forced the 123rd ID to find another solution to the problem of starving civilians in its midst. The evacuation of civilians from the front now dovetailed with the Reich's new program of recruiting and kidnapping labor, and this became a major component within the division's relationship with civilians.

The labor shortage that had plagued the Third Reich as far back as the late 1930s was intensified by the onset of global war in late 1941.Footnote ¹²¹ Ideological beliefs that mitigated against bringing “Bolshevik” laborers into Germany slowly faded in the face of the need for increased armament production and the realization that Operation Barbarossa had failed to destroy the Soviet state in 1941.Footnote ¹²² On March 21, 1942, Hitler appointed Fritz Sauckel, Gauleiter of Thuringia, Plenipotentiary for the Mobilization of Labor.Footnote ¹²³ Sauckel was charged with gathering the necessary bodies to work in the factories, mines, and farms of the Reich. In order to fulfill his duties, Sauckel and his 800 men employed in the occupied eastern territories were dependent on the Wehrmacht for support and assistance.Footnote ¹²⁴ The German army recognized this as a “task of decisive importance for the war” and its support of the program led to almost three million Soviet citizens being shipped to the Reich.Footnote ¹²⁵

On May 26, II Corps issued an order entitled “The Recruitment and Deportation of Russian Workers for the Reich.”Footnote ¹²⁶ II Corps presented this new policy as having “special meaning … due to the poor food situation of the civilian population inside the pocket.” The local Ortskommandanten were given the responsibility of working alongside village leaders in selecting workers. At this point, the search for labor focused only on volunteers though some additional criteria existed: all workers sixteen to fifty years old were eligible as were parents capable of work who had children under fourteen years old. The troops were instructed that “politically and criminally unreliable” elements would not be brought to Germany, with “Asians and Jews” explicitly excluded. The Germans promised the workers various benefits, including “preference in the parceling out of land [in Russia] after returning from the Reich, the rations of a German worker, appropriate shelter, and cash.” After one week of recruitment in the 123rd ID's area of operations, 774 people reported for work in Germany; by June 23, seven separate transports had evacuated 911 civilians out of the division's area.Footnote ¹²⁷

Since the number of volunteers was too low to solve the food issue in the pocket, the division turned to forced evacuations.Footnote ¹²⁸ On June 9, II Corps instructed its units to categorize the remaining civilians in their areas. The first category consisted of people whose work was indispensable to either the army or the local economy and whose nourishment was secured, while the second category was comprised of productive workers whose food supply was precarious. The final group was comprised by those inhabitants who were “worthless for the Corps or the economy.”Footnote ¹²⁹ The division had thus begun to distinguish between “productive” and “non-productive” civilians and evacuated the latter to the rear. During the remainder of 1942, the division evacuated somewhere between 2,300 and 2,800 civilians from its area of operations.Footnote ¹³⁰ Many of these evacuations were framed in terms of the combat situation, but the inability to feed these civilians adequately also figured prominently in the decision-making process.Footnote ¹³¹ Though this process was much more organized than the earlier evacuation of Molvotitsy, similar problems afflicted the Germans. The 123rd ID complained that the entire evacuation process was held up by the “overflowing of villages with refugees and troops” in the rear area of the division.Footnote ¹³² While the division made an attempt to provide the evacuees with some sort of nourishment for the several days' march to Staraia Russa, the one piece of bread allotted for every three people and hot soup at resting points during the trek failed to provide sufficient sustenance for the refugees.Footnote ¹³³

In addition to improving the food supply and creating a pool of available labor for the Reich, the evacuations in the summer of 1942 also were designed to reduce the partisan threat. As previously noted, such measures had already been introduced by the 123rd ID during the previous fall when they removed civilians in hopes of destroying the social networks that nourished partisan units. In contrast to the preceding fall and winter, however, partisan activity in 1942 was nearly nonexistent in the 123rd ID's area of operations. The division arrested several women and children on the grounds of espionage but recorded the deaths of only two partisans from February through December.Footnote ¹³⁴ One soldier wrote with relief that “it is a stroke of luck that the population has not followed Stalin's slogan to attack us in the rear.”Footnote ¹³⁵ Several reasons account for this decrease in activity. First, the concentration of German troops in the Demiansk pocket significantly increased the dangers for partisans of being discovered. Second, the German position was ringed by a fortification system that was much harder to penetrate than the more fluid front line of late 1941 and early 1942. Third, partisans required resources from the surrounding countryside to survive; these foodstuffs simply did not exist in the Demiansk pocket as soldiers and civilians stripped the area bare. Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, the division's more conciliatory occupation policies had helped to ease the plight of the surrounding population; armed resistance accordingly lost some its appeal with the change in circumstances.

Despite this negligible amount of partisan activity, a directive issued by the 123rd ID in October 1942 indicated that it still took guerilla activity seriously.Footnote ¹³⁶ The order opened by stating that “for the struggle against agent and partisan activity in the Demiansk combat area, the attitude of the troops toward the population is decisive.” It then proceeded to detail a picture of a quiescent and generally “obliging” population that even took up arms on behalf of the German cause. The less compliant section of the population, however, required “a strict, but understanding, impartial treatment.” For these civilians, “any weakness from our side will be seen by the Russian population as military weakness. It further undermines their obedience and trustworthiness toward the troops.” The contradictory messages presented in this order served to legitimize both conciliatory and brutal behavior by the Berliners toward the civilian population but, in general, local German authorities were “instructed to have one hundred percent control over every Russian.”Footnote ¹³⁷

This quiescent rear area proved important in late 1942 as combat at the front once again flared up. On November 28, 1942, the First Soviet Shock Army attacked the southeastern section of the land-bridge, squarely hitting the 123rd ID.Footnote ¹³⁸ Unrelenting artillery fire destroyed the majority of the troops' shelters and bunkers, which led the 123rd ID to complain of the “further lowering of the troops' powers of resistance.”Footnote ¹³⁹ Such considerations, however, did not carry over to the remaining civilian population; during the tactical retreat from the town of Demidovo, the troops “burned down almost every building and destroyed almost every bunker.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ While this was surely motivated by a desire to prevent Soviet troops from using the shelters, such actions condemned numerous civilians to death in the middle of the Russian winter. The Berliners continued to implement measures deemed militarily necessary, no matter the collateral cost. Despite these tribulations, the southern front of the land-bridge held; the northern front, however, was pushed back twelve kilometers by strong Soviet attacks.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The Demiansk “Fortress” was becoming increasingly untenable.

Scorched Earth Retreat from the Demiansk Pocket

Soviet pressure on both sides of the pocket continued unabated in January 1943.Footnote ¹⁴² The 123rd ID reported that, after several days of constant combat, its men were “severely overtired and no longer [had] inner reserves [of strength] at their disposal.”Footnote ¹⁴³ The majority of the units' bunkers had been once more destroyed and this was reflected in increasing cases of frostbite.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The southern front held due to the use of reserves from the Eighteenth Army, which were desperately needed to staunch simultaneous Soviet offensives in the Leningrad area.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Finally, on January 30, 1943, after contentious debate between Hitler and the new Chief of the General Staff, General Kurt Zeitler, the latter convinced the Führer to allow the Sixteenth Army to abandon the position.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The following day, Army Group North sent the evacuation plan to the German High Command and began preparing for the withdrawal.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

The execution of the Demiansk withdrawal began almost immediately as II Corps ordered the removal of all non-essential equipment and supplies from the pocket, in anticipation of the complete clearing of the position.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Finally on February 13, II Corps alerted the troops that Fortress Demiansk was to be evacuated due to the “development of the situation across the entire front”; the troops in the pocket had “fulfilled their task of defending the Demiansk combat area … in glorious and successful combat.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The 123rd ID was charged with holding its section of the line to allow the 12th and 30th IDs to leapfrog it as they withdrew from their positions.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Thus began the third distinct phase in the 123rd ID's occupation in the Demiansk pocket.

Unlike previous withdrawals by formations in Army Group North, which were accompanied by destruction but fell far short of anything approximating total devastation, the evacuation of the Demiansk pocket marked the passage to an extraordinarily comprehensive policy of “scorched earth.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ On February 13, the same day that the troops were alerted to the impending evacuation of the position, Hitler issued Führerbefehl Nr. 4 in which the general guidelines for German retreats for the remainder of the war were first promulgated.Footnote ¹⁵² Arguing that retreat without any accompanying destruction “brought the enemy incalculable advantages,” he then listed the numerous missions that needed to be fulfilled before Wehrmacht units pulled out of the line. In addition to the demolition of all military equipment and ammunition that could not be transported to the rear, everything that could be worthwhile to the enemy was to be destroyed or burned, including all dwellings. The entire civilian population was to be deported with the troops; when this was not possible, all men between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five years old were to accompany the retreating Wehrmacht. With this order serving as the basis for the cleaning out of the Demiansk pocket, the 123rd ID and the remainder of II Corps began the evacuation.

Though II Corps noted that the engineers had “only a few days for [their] extensive blocking and destruction tasks,” the troops were very successful in carrying out their mission and the Corps congratulated its units on their success.Footnote ¹⁵³ One historian has described the former pocket as “dead territory” following the evacuation.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ An order distributed by another division in the pocket, the 126th ID, made clear the extent of the destruction.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ All “military structures and dwellings” as well as anything else that would make the construction of a forward line by the enemy “easier” were to be ruined. Larger swathes of forest, individual trees, and even solitary bushes were to be destroyed to deny their use to the enemy for either construction or tactical purposes. Accompanying the order was a detailed list of more than twenty separate planned demolitions. The retreating troops methodically implemented scorched earth as they trudged west, destroying all shelters, bunkers, bridges, and roads while some attempts were made to “contaminate” the ground, leaving it useless for the advancing Red Army.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ All available foodstuffs, from flour and oats to animal feed and cattle, as well as all clothing and other loosely defined “goods” were evacuated with the troops.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

In addition to seizing all material goods in the area, the Wehrmacht also carried out the large-scale deportation of every single individual residing within German lines. Earlier German practice usually consisted of the evacuation of draft-age men; here, the Army resorted to a much more comprehensive effort. The Ortskommandanten were ordered to make the necessary preparations for the registering and seizure of all men ages sixteen to sixty-five within a brief period of time, without, however, alerting the population to the upcoming action.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ All women who had “proven themselves loyal” to the Germans were allowed to accompany the retreating army as a type of privileged refugee; the rest were to be driven to the German rear. Even the majority of the sick were loaded onto panje sleds and evacuated, though some were diverted to the Ortskommandanten, where they faced a much grimmer fate. Despite the short notice, II Corps' units evacuated the civilian population in a more efficient and humane manner than similar earlier actions. The Engineer Battalion of the 126th ID, for example, constructed a temporary camp for refugees to stay the night in and provided them with food.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ This, of course, merely indicated that forced evacuations were becoming part of the Wehrmacht's everyday activities. By the conclusion of the retreat, the 123rd ID evacuated 168 men of military age and an additional 1,114 civilians to the western bank of the Lovat River.Footnote ¹⁶⁰

The desire to deny these civilians to the Soviet war effort formed part of the rationale for the deportation of these civilians. German authorities in the rear area also needed them to fill the gaping holes in the ranks of their workforce; with these deportations, the 123rd ID became increasingly entangled in the Third Reich's forced labor program. The branch of Economic Staff East attached to Army Group North reported that it faced a deficit of some 93,000 workers in January 1943 and this rose to more than 98,000 workers the following month.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Such shortages were blamed on Germany's deteriorating military situation, the increasing activity of the partisan movement, the ineffectiveness of German counterpropaganda, and the general conditions of privation that had followed the German advance: as one officer pithily noted, “films and photos cannot overcome shortages and desperation.”Footnote ¹⁶²

Economic authorities painted a depressing picture of the Porchov and Pasherivizy areas into which the new evacuees were shepherded.Footnote ¹⁶³ Due to a shortage of workers and beasts of burden, agricultural production continued to decrease. Partisan kidnappings and assassinations of local collaborators and agricultural specialists created a vacuum in the political and economic arenas as no replacements were available.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ The population was dreadfully poor: the war diary for the northern branch of Economic Staff East noted that small gestures such as the “distribution of pieces of clothing in the Ordesh district caused great joy.” Footnote ¹⁶⁵ This destitution of the area's population was only exacerbated by the arrival of the evacuees from the Demiansk pocket; these “streams of refugees terribly burdened the available food stocks.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Refugees forced west overwhelmed the already precarious food supply systems in villages, causing “restlessness and uncertainty” in the affected communities.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ By adding an additional 30,000 people incapable of labor to the rolls of Economic Staff East, the evacuation of Demiansk further tipped the balance between civilians who could work—628,500—and those who could “make no contribution to their housing, food supply, or clothing”—647,000—in favor of the latter.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ This was confirmed by the Economic Staff East branch headquartered in Dno which noted that “the evacuees out of the Demiansk pocket thought to be replacement [workers] have been proven overwhelmingly unable to work.”Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Four months later, this same branch still complained that feeding these evacuees proved extremely difficult as the majority of them had no food stocks of their own.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Since it uprooted these individuals from the Demiansk area and then dumped them into such a chaotic and miserable situation, the 123rd ID shouldered a great deal of responsibility for the fate of these refugees.

Ideology and Military Necessity

That a significant number of soldiers in the Wehrmacht internalized some aspect of Nazi ideology appears likely. Attitudes, such as those displayed by a Lieutenant in the 123rd ID who claimed in a letter home that “the living standard of the White Russians (they should be called European niggers) is scarcely above the level of the Bronze Age,” certainly made drastic measures such as forced deportations and scorched earth easier to carry out.Footnote ¹⁷¹ They do not, however, adequately explain the three distinct periods of occupation that characterized the 123rd ID's period of time in the Demiansk Pocket. An army motivated by purely ideological considerations, especially ones based on Nazi racism and nihilism, would be expected only to increase its repression and brutal behavior as the siege dragged on. Since the 123rd ID failed to conform to this model, a different explanation needs to be found. Only by examining the question from a different angle—that of military necessity—can the actions of the 123rd ID be properly understood.

As Christian Hartmann has pointed out, the Wehrmacht's primary mission during the war was to defeat the Red Army in the field.Footnote ¹⁷² This professional focus on victory filtered down the army's hierarchy to the divisional level and below. It ensured that German formations, such as the 123rd ID, would place an overriding emphasis on securing military victory. Ethics and morality were pushed into the distant background by the fervent quest for the Endsieg, or final victory. In a period of crisis, such as the Soviet attack in January 1942 and the desperate fighting of the following month, military necessity meant that the division's myopic focus on combat ensured the ruthless treatment of civilians. They were exploited for labor and supplies with no concern for their fate as human beings.

Once the situation stabilized, however, in the late spring and early summer of 1942, the 123rd ID reversed track. The division began to offer medical services to Russian civilians and, even more surprisingly, supplied food to refugees in its area of responsibility. The renewed emphasis on bringing in the harvest and ensuring that civilians were adequately provisioned for the upcoming winter also indicates an occupation far removed from one dedicated to exterminating the population. While the German High Command soon forced the division to end its more ambitious programs of assisting the surrounding Russian population, the 123rd had nevertheless fundamentally altered its occupation policies.

Increasing fraternization between the occupiers and the occupied mirrored the transformation of official policies. Instead of viewing the surrounding civilian population as a mass of faceless Untermenschen, or sub-humans, it is clear that German soldiers looked at Russian women in a more complex manner. While the desire for sexual relations certainly played into this, the repeated issuing of orders banning fraternization indicate that other, more complicated issues were at stake here. In any case, such relationships suggest that the radical violence that characterized the Nazi-Soviet war did not always manifest itself at the lowest levels.

The changing military situation—the final chapters of the catastrophe at Stalingrad and the renewal of the Soviet offensive against the Demiansk pocket occurred within several weeks of one another—again led to a transformation of the division's policies. Determined to leave absolutely nothing that could assist the advancing Red Army, the division participated in one of the very first comprehensive scorched-earth processes undertaken by the German army. Again, a pragmatism defined by securing and maintaining combat efficiency (and assisted, in no small part, by an internalization of at least some parts of the Nazi ideological message) provided the necessary motivation for a radical about-face in the troops' relationship with the surrounding civilians and the absolute destruction of the area within the Demiansk pocket.

While Bartov's provocative analysis of the German army certainly broke new ground and asked important questions regarding the Wehrmacht's unquestionably barbaric behavior in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, his emphasis on ideology fails to provide an accurate explanation for this behavior. Developments internal to the army itself, such as the privileging of military necessity, were just as, if not more, important than ideology in leading to the German Vernichtungskrieg in the east. This emphasis on final victory, however, could also have the effect of modifying German behavior; when local German units believed that the population's support was necessary for victory, they quickly introduced conciliatory policies designed to win over civilians.Footnote ¹⁷³ It was this type of pragmatism that drove the 123rd ID's occupation policies within the Demiansk pocket and accounted for its alternation between policies of unmitigated violence and pacifying conciliation.