Despite a critical shortage of fuel and supplies, Kleist’s First Panzer Army began its attack on Rostov on 5 November and achieved good initial success, advancing eighteen miles to the east. Two days later, however, torrential rains paralyzed all movement and gave the Soviets time to regroup and prepare their defenses. Kleist could resume the attack only on 17 November, after the rains had given way to temperatures as low as –8°F. Rostov fell three days later, but an enemy counterattack was already in the works. Soviet armies moved to reclaim Rostov on the twenty-second, putting such heavy pressure on Kleist that he was forced to abandon the city on the twenty-eighth. The psychological impact was marked on both sides: this was the first time the Germans had been forced out of a key city by a well-orchestrated Soviet counterattack.49
Since neither troops, supplies, nor operational assistance was available, a withdrawal of the armored army from the hard-won Don crossing was inevitable, a proposition unthinkable to the OKH, whose directives were now so completely unrealistic as to border on the ludicrous. Hitler agreed that Army Group South no longer had the mobility or the strength to mount any further attacks but considered the location of a winter defensive line to be of the utmost importance. He objected to Rundstedt’s proposed withdrawal to a position running from Taganrog along the Mius to the mouth of the Bakhmut and demanded that the retreat from Rostov be halted farther to the east. Although both Rundstedt and Kleist regarded Hitler’s intermediate position as completely untenable—the army group commander remarking that the order could not be carried out—through a series of miscommunications Hitler received the impression that Rundstedt was openly defying his wishes. At 2:00 A.M. on 1 December, therefore, the Führer relieved the field marshal of his command and replaced him with Reichenau, ironically the army commander most vocally critical of any offensive operations. Later that day, Reichenau telephoned with the news that the Russians had broken through and requested permission to withdraw to the line originally proposed by Rundstedt. Hitler granted Reichenau’s request. On the second, Hitler flew to Kleist’s headquarters to see the situation for himself. There, not only did he realize that Rundstedt had been correct in his assessments, but he also learned of the full sequence of events. He exonerated both Rundstedt and Kleist of any blame but did not reinstate the former; such an action would have been an admission of his own error. Reichenau’s earlier assessment had been correct: an attack with exhausted troops who could not be supplied was irresponsible.50
Even had the logistic organization been a model of efficiency, however, German forces would have faced dire straits that autumn. A study by General Thomas’s War Economy and Armaments Office concluded in early October that deliveries from the United States and Great Britain would to a great extent offset the lost industrial production of western Russia while the Germans could do little to interrupt the flow of such goods. At the same time, Thomas also made it clear that only the capture of the oil regions of the Caucasus along with the industrial areas of the Urals and Donets, targets hundreds of miles distant, would lead to a considerable weakening, but not necessarily a collapse, of the Soviet war economy. Thomas thus shattered Hitler’s key assumption, that a seizure of western Russia would necessarily cripple the Soviet economy, although the Führer refused to believe this analysis. The Soviets had lost so much material, he asserted, that it would take the democracies five years to replace it all; in any case, the Russians were beaten, and the campaign in the east had “essentially finally been decided.”51
If this sobering assessment of Soviet capabilities was not depressing enough, by October it had also become obvious that the German armaments industry could not satisfy the most pressing needs of the front. The German war economy suffered from two serious deficiencies, both of which had been aggravated by the failure to win a quick victory: a shortage of manpower and a lack of vital raw materials. Because of the extensive losses on the eastern front, in the autumn more young men had to be drafted for the army, while many skilled laborers in reserved occupations were also sent to the front. This resulted in a serious shortage of workers in the armaments industry that the Germans attempted to remedy by employing more women and older men. The only really effective solution, however, was to use Russian prisoners of war. Not until the very end of October, however, did Hitler drop his racial and ideological objections to the employment of Russian labor within Germany. On 31 October, he ordered the greatest possible exploitation of Russian labor, but, for most prisoners of war, this change of policy came too late. Amazingly, even as economic officials hoped that the serious labor problems could be overcome by deploying a large number of the 3 million Soviet prisoners, they seemed unaware of the fact that most of these men were either dead or physically unable to work. By German estimates, only 200,000 could be used immediately, as most of the others were “unfit for employment owing to typhus and malnutrition.” Goering, as head of the Four-Year Plan, should have had more than a passing interest in providing suitable workers for the German armaments industry. Instead, he joked about the plight of Russian prisoners of war, telling Ciano in November, “Hunger among Russian prisoners had reached such an extreme that… it was no longer necessary to send them under armed guard [to the rear]. It is enough to put at the head of a column of prisoners a camp kitchen… ; thousands and thousands of prisoners trail along like a herd of famished animals.” The situation did not begin to improve until the spring of 1942, when Hitler ordered that Russian prisoners be given enough to eat.52
Soviet prisoners of war were, in fact, among the first to feel the full brunt of Nazi racial policy; of those taken in 1941, few survived. In the first six months of the war, the Germans captured some 3.3 million Red Army soldiers, of whom barely a million were still alive by the end of 1941, with less than half of those in sufficiently good physical condition eventually to be employed as workers. Given the assumption of the Nazi leadership that success in the larger struggle against the Anglo-Saxon powers depended on maintenance of solid morale at home, which in turn hinged on the provision of near-peacetime levels of nutrition, the food supply of the east had to be ruthlessly exploited. The logic of the hunger policy meant that countless millions of people in the east had to starve: the first to do so were Soviet prisoners of war. From the start, preparations for handling prisoners had been inadequate, deliberately so. Since the Soviet Union had signed neither the Hague nor the Geneva conventions on the treatment of prisoners, German authorities issued orders even before the invasion to disregard these standards of treatment. Reports from the summer of 1941 indicated that Red Army prisoners of war received daily rations as low as “20 grams of millet and 100 grams of bread without meat” or “100 grams of millet without bread.”53