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Reports about Russians mistreating German POWs, mutilating German wounded, and liquidating German soldiers who tried to surrender continued throughout the war and were too frequent and too well documented to be complete fiction. Today, it is estimated that 90 to 95 percent of German POWs captured in 1941 soon died. Most of them were executed directly at the front.¹⁶⁶ The horror stories about German wounded and prisoners being mutilated only encouraged the German Eastern Army’s willingness to commit acts of unscrupulous violence.

In early July 1941, General Gotthard Heinrici wrote to his family: “Sometimes there’s no mercy at all anymore. The Russian has behaved bestially toward our wounded. And now our people are clubbing and shooting to death anything in a brown uniform. Both sides are driving each other on so that there are enough corpses to fill whole mausoleums.”¹⁶⁷ Similar statements can be found through Wehrmacht files. The daily war report of the 61st Infantry Division, for instance, recorded that on October 7, 1941, the bodies of three Wehrmacht soldiers were discovered, whereupon the division commander ordered ninety-three Russian prisoners shot the following day. Many such atrocities were never registered because soldiers lower down in the chain of command, like Lieutenant Schmidt, “took care of things” themselves.

The frontline murder of countless Red Army soldiers was primarily an act of revenge and retribution. The character of the fighting in Russia was completely different from that in Poland, France, or Yugoslavia. The Red Army put up unexpectedly stiff resistance, and many Soviet soldiers preferred to fight to the death rather than surrender. Embittered hand-to-hand combat led to heavy losses on all sides and further ratcheted up the violence. Consider the following exchange:

FALLER: We killed them. Most of them were killed in this battle (?). They didn’t surrender either. We often had fellows whom we wanted to take prisoner and who, when the position was completely hopeless, took the pin out of a hand grenade and held it in front of their stomachs… we purposely refrained from shooting them because we wanted to take them alive… The women fought like wild beasts.

SCHMIDT: What did you do with the women?

FALLER: We shot them too.¹⁶⁸

Faller’s stories show once again that female members of the Red Army were particularly at risk since women in battle were not part of German soldiers’ frame of reference. Denigrated as “rifle sluts,” they were denied the status of true combatants and thus regarded as on the same level as partisans. For that reason, they were more likely than male members of the Red Army to become the victims of excessive brutality.¹⁶⁹

Along with the determination of individual soldiers to fight to the death, what most angered Germans were the tactics used by the Red Army. Soviet soldiers would often pretend to be wounded or play dead in order to attack from behind—something Germans regarded as a massive violation of the customs of warfare. The Hague Conventions did not explicitly prohibit deceptions of this kind, but they represented a break with the unwritten rules of open warfare. Before the invasion, manuals written by the German military leadership predicted that the Red Army would use such tricks, and German troops punished them with extreme brutality. For example, as early as late June 1941, a regiment of the 299th Infantry Division reported: “Prisoners were not taken because troops were so bitter about the dishonest fighting style of the enemy.”

Other tactics that were part of conventional warfare were unfamiliar to Germans and thus interpreted as evidence of the Red Army’s refusal to fight fairly. They included opening fire from behind, letting the enemy advance before unleashing a barrage at short range, and letting vanguard troops pass by so as to attack them from the rear. A German soldier named Hölscher, for instance, passed on a description of the Eastern Front he had heard from a friend: