By August, the consequences of this systematic neglect had become obvious. “News from the east is terrible again,” wrote Helmuth James von Moltke, later one of the leading figures in the German resistance to Hitler, in an August 1941 letter to his wife. “Again and again one hears reports that in transports of prisoners or Jews only 20 percent arrive, that there is starvation in the prisoner-of-war camps, that typhoid and all the other deficiency epidemics have broken out.” In the autumn, the military leadership launched a propaganda campaign opposing the humane treatment of Soviet prisoners of war. German troops were urged to avoid “false” sympathy for the starving and were reminded that “every item of food that is granted to the prisoners… must be taken from relatives at home or from German soldiers.” Since many Russians were already undernourished when they were captured, it was not surprising that thousands perished during the forced marches from the front. Some camps reported that only a fifth of prisoners arrived alive on transports; many desperate prisoners tried to survive by eating bark, leaves, and grass. In Minsk, where over 140,000 prisoners were kept in an extremely small area, men killed each other for a piece of bread or a drop of water.54
Conditions, and the mortality rate, became catastrophic in the autumn. The great encirclement battles netted the Germans hundreds of thousands of malnourished captives, most of whom were immediately sent off in columns on long marches lasting days or weeks. Those who dropped out along the way were simply shot, while the unlucky ones who survived found themselves confined in appalling conditions behind barbed wire in huge open-air camps that lacked even the most rudimentary accommodations. Already in a state of extreme exhaustion, the prisoners lived in the most primitive manner, with only holes dug into the ground or rude sod houses as shelter. In a rear-area camp near Rzhev supporting the Ninth Army, 450 people were shoved into one-story barracks measuring thirty-six by seventy-two feet. Death was endemic since there were only two latrines for eleven thousand men. Prisoners subsisted on bark, leaves, grass, and nettles, with occasional instances of cannibalism reported. One German soldier noted with shock that many Soviet prisoners carried human body parts with them in order to have something to eat, not surprising since watchdogs received fifty times the rations of a Soviet prisoner of war. Mortality rates soared as men suffering from malnutrition succumbed to infectious diseases and hunger-induced epidemics.55
Despite this, in late October General Wagner, the army quartermaster-general, ordered a reduction in rations for those prisoners unable to work. This, coupled with the onset of severe winter weather, resulted in skyrocketing death rates, sometimes as much as 1 percent per day. Since army officials forbade the transporting of prisoners in anything but open railcars, large numbers, perhaps 20 percent of the total, now froze to death en route to camps. Even when the army relented and allowed them to be transported in closed but unheated cars, the effect, in the brutal Russian cold, was little different. Since these catastrophic conditions also existed in camps in the Reich, the mass deaths of Soviet prisoners of war was not due to ignorance or incompetence. To the Nazi leadership, it was axiomatic that Germans and Russians could not both be fed; the former would, thus, be supplied at the expense of the latter, regardless of the consequences. In a particularly macabre episode, beginning in December 1941 wounded Soviet prisoners were simply released into the civilian population because they had become “an unnecessary burden on the supply situation.” The result was that, during the extraordinarily harsh winter of 1941–1942, thousands of former prisoners, “who appeared to be almost emaciated, living skeletons, with festering, stinking wounds,” wandered among the local population.56
An earlier, mid-July decision meant a more immediate death for untold thousands of Soviet prisoners. That month, representatives of the OKW and the RSHA agreed that politically and racially “unacceptable elements” among the prisoners should be separated out of prisoner-of-war camps by special SS units and murdered. Over the course of the next few years, this action resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners. All these actions, of course, were from the outset stamped by Nazi racial and political ideology and fit seamlessly into the war of annihilation. On the eve of the invasion, Hitler had demanded that German troops be prepared to take extraordinary measures to exterminate the enemy mercilessly and totally. As events illustrated, many officers and men of the Wehrmacht possessed the necessary qualities to carry out their Führer’s wishes. It was, however, a Pyrrhic victory since Russian soldiers quickly came to realize that they had no alternative but to fight on, thus strengthening their resolve to resist.57
Even if Russian labor had been readily available, the second key problem facing the German armaments industry, a critical shortage of raw materials, could not easily be remedied. With the desperately needed materiel from the Soviet Union unavailable, German industry was unable to meet the requirements of even the most important production programs. Even though the severe shortage of fuel and rubber had forced the OKW in mid-September to curtail considerably the use of motor vehicles, not until the beginning of November did the implications of the military failure in Russia affect German industry as a whole. The lack of skilled workers and the scarcity of key raw materials and machine tools prevented any immediate, substantial increase in production. An acute shortage of aluminum, for example, meant that, from November, Luftwaffe losses in the east could no longer be replaced. A lack of steel and vital alloys made it impossible for industry to reach production goals for key army weapons programs such as panzers and antitank guns, although ammunition levels would just about suffice to meet needs. The OKH estimated in early November that the output of tanks and antitank guns would reach only 68–73 percent of the production targets and that the situation would not improve in 1942. That same month, however, a drastic shortfall in coal production led to power reductions and the closure of some factories, further burdening armaments production.58
Moreover, the length of the eastern campaign resulted in such a shortage of oil that it was impossible to provide the required quantities of fuel to the Wehrmacht and industry. Even before the invasion, German officials understood that, if the war persisted beyond early September, there would be severe repercussions. At the end of October, therefore, the civilian and nonarmament sectors of the economy experienced sharp reductions in allocations of oil. Despite this, the quartermaster-general, Eduard Wagner, warned that, by January 1942, supplies would be exhausted and new oil fields would need to be captured. Confronted with the “unexpected urgency” of the oil situation, Goering sought, to no avail, to persuade the Rumanians to increase their oil production, even insisting that their wells should be pumped dry. The only alternative was a severe restriction on the operational mobility of the troops. Nor could Goering’s demand on 8 November that “the eastern territories… be exploited economically as colonies and using colonial methods” rectify the situation in the short term, owing to widespread destruction by the Russians. Even in the absence of such sabotage, the German transportation system still could not have coped: the Reichsbahn lacked sufficient locomotives and, in any case, could provide only 142,000 of a daily requirement of 240,000 freight cars. By late autumn, the bitter fighting, difficult terrain, appalling weather, and worn-out engines had combined to cause the Germans to use three times the quantity of fuel originally supplied.59 Little wonder, then, that Hitler kept insisting on distant economic objectives or that Bock and Rundstedt had been driven to despair, given the utopian objectives set for them by the OKH.