War on the eastern front : the German soldier in Russia 1914-1945

279 Pages·2014·4.52 MB·English

by  Kershaw

WAR
on the
EASTERN FRONT
WAR
on the
EASTERN FRONT
The German Soldier
in Russia 1914–1945

James Lucas
Foreword by Robert Kershaw
Frontline Books, London
War on the Eastern Front
A Greenhill Book
www.greenhillbooks.com
This paperback edition published in 2014 by Frontline Books
an imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd,
47 Church Street, Barnsley, S. Yorkshire, S70 2AS
www.frontline-books.com
Copyright © Cooper and Lucas Ltd, 1979
Foreword © Pen & Sword Books Ltd, 2014
The right of James Lucas to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
ISBN: 978-1-84832-787-0
Publishing History
First published in Great Britain in 1979 by Jane’s Publishing Company,
London. Published in 1991 by Greenhill Books, London.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any
means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without
the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any
unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal
prosecution and civil claims for damages.
CIP data records for this title are available from the British Library For more
information on our books, please visit
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Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Contents
Foreword
Introduction and Acknowledgements

1  ‘Operation Barbarossa’
The German dispositions
The Red Army’s dispositions
2  The German Army
3  The last days of tank destruction unit DORA II in Brandenburg during April
1945
4  The foreignness of it all
5  The Waffen SS on the Eastern Front
6  The Red Army of Workers and Peasants
7  Two German views of the Red Army
8  The development of the Red Army
9  Partisans
10  The influence of terrain
11  The influence of climate
12  The effect of winter upon a Red Army unit at Rzhev
13  The German Army resolves the problems of winter warfare
14  The construction of an ice railway bridge across the Dneiper, winter 1941–
1942
15  The frustrating mud and the scouring dust
16  To Moscow by horse
17  The weapons of the Eastern Front
18  Assault artillery in action on the central front in the early days of the war
with the Soviet Union
19  An SP detachment in the closing stages of the encirclement battles around
the Kiev pocket, autumn 1941
A Winter Drive
20  A platoon of SP guns in action against the Soviet thrust to capture Rzhev,
autumn 1942
21  The 249th Assault Artillery Brigade in action during the battle for Berlin,
1945
22  Hugo Primozic: Germany’s most successful SP fighter in Russia
23  Hyazinth von Strachwitz: the German Army’s most successful tank man
24  Anti-tank weapons and tactics
25  Rocket propulsion: a new form of artillery, first used on the Eastern Front
A Red Army infantryman and his first encounter with the Nebelwerfer,
spring 1942
A Nebelwerfer regiment in the German summer offensive towards
Voronezh, 1942
26  A phenomenon of the Eastern Front: encirclement
27  The destruction of the encircled Soviet forces in the fighting around Kiev,
autumn 1941
28  The Cholm pocket, winter 1941–1942

Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
Maps
The battle area across which the Russo-German War was fought
‘Operation Barbarossa’ – The Army High Command’s Plan
The Plan for the passage through the Pripet marshes
Encirclements gained in the first year of the war
Foreword
James Lucas was an admirer of the fighting qualities of the German Army in the
Second World War, having been captured by them in Tunisia in 1942. Working
for the Imperial War Museum he had unprecedented access to contacts and
German documentary wartime material, which he used to the full. War on the
Eastern Front, first published in 1979 was one of the first English accounts at
the German soldier level on what was then, a little known conflict. Lucas offered
this invaluable small unit perspective when there were so few definitive ‘soldier’
accounts of the Russo-German war of 1941–5.
Few of these early accounts, Lucas included, dealt satisfactorily with the
Vernichtungskrieg, or ‘war of annihilation’, that occurred on the Eastern Front. It
was almost absent from Paul Carell’s German translated histories of Hitler
Moves East and Scorched Earth in the early 1960s. Carell wrote about closely
fought titanic battles invariably lost on the German side because of Hitler and
the lack of resources at crucial moments in the epic struggle. The Russo-German
conflict was fought between two totalitarian and ideologically motivated
enemies, who indulged in inhuman excesses. Germany waged a genocidal war
against the Jews. Recent modern wars have time again illustrated the extent to
which moral responsibility becomes blurred around political edges. As one
Wehrmacht veteran admitted in a TV interview, ‘if some people say that most
Germans were innocent, I would say they were accomplices.’
Not all the combatants, as Lucas indicates, committed or witnessed atrocities,
but an uncomfortable number did. Of the 19 to 20 million soldiers who fought
for the Wehrmacht, about 17 to 19 million fought in Russia. The survivors were
to populate and influence opinion in contemporary Germany today, so the