It was the end of November; on the vast circular square, rebaptized Adolf-Hitler-Platz, a gray snow, pale as motes of light, was falling softly from the noon sky. A woman was hanging by a long rope from Lenin’s outstretched hand; some children playing beneath raised their heads to look up her skirt. The hanged were increasingly numerous; the Ortskommandant had ordered that they remain strung up, to set an example. Russian passersby walked quickly in front of them, their heads lowered; German soldiers and children examined them curiously, and the soldiers often photographed them. For several days now I had stopped vomiting, I was beginning to hope I was getting better; but it was only a respite; and when it took me again, I vomited up my sausage, cabbage, and beer, an hour after the meal, in the street, half hidden in an alleyway. A little farther on, at the corner of the Trade Unions Park, they had raised a gallows, and that day they were leading two very young men and a woman there, their hands tied behind their backs, surrounded by a crowd made up mainly of German soldiers and officers. The woman had a large sign around her neck explaining that she was being punished in retaliation for a murder attempt on an officer. Then they hanged them. One of the young men looked dumbfounded, astonished at finding himself there; the other was simply sad; the woman grimaced terribly when they snatched the support out from under her feet, but that was all. God alone knows if they had in fact been involved in the attack; we were hanging almost anyone, Jews but also Russian soldiers, people without identity papers, peasants loitering in search of food. The idea was not to punish the guilty but to prevent new attacks by spreading terror. In Kharkov itself, it seemed to work; there had been no more explosions since the hangings. But outside the city the situation was getting worse. Oberst von Hornbogen, the Ic from the Ortskommandantur whom I often visited, had a large map on his wall of the area around Kharkov dotted with red push-pins, each representing a partisan attack or a bombing. “It’s becoming a real problem,” he explained to me. “We can only leave the city in force; isolated men get shot like rabbits. We raze all the villages where we find partisans, but that’s not helping much. Food supplies are getting difficult, even for the troops; as for feeding the population this winter, it doesn’t even bear thinking about.” The city had about six hundred thousand inhabitants; there were no public food supplies, and already the elderly were dying of hunger. “Could you tell me about your discipline problems, if you don’t mind,” I asked the Oberst, with whom I had already developed fairly good relations.—“It’s true, we’re having difficulties. Especially cases of looting. Some soldiers emptied the apartment of the Russian mayor while he was visiting us. A lot of soldiers are taking coats or fur hats from the populace. There are also some cases of rape. A Russian woman was locked up in a basement and raped by six soldiers, one after the other.”—“What do you attribute that to?”—“A question of morale, I guess. The troops are exhausted, dirty, covered with vermin, they’re not even being provided with clean underwear, and also winter is coming, they sense it’s going to get worse.” He leaned forward with a faint smile: “Between you and me, I can tell you that they’ve even painted some inscriptions on the AOK buildings, in Poltava. Things like
We want to go back to Germany or We’re dirty and we have lice and we want to go home. The Generalfeldmarschall was mad with rage, he took it as a personal insult. Of course, he realizes there are tensions and privations, but he thinks the officers could do more for the political education of the men. But ultimately, the most worrisome thing is still the problem of the food supplies.”