Darkest Days 

Homework # 4 - Darkest Days

Reading on the Darkest Days - click here

Printable Copy of Assignment - click here

Class Discussion Materials - Darkest Days

Source # 3 - Order issued by German Field Marshall Walter von Reichenau on October 10, 1941 (Soldiers under his command participated in the killing of Jews at Baba Yar in Kiev, Ukraine in 1941)

The soldier in the east is not just fighting by the rules of war, he also represents implacable national determination, he is avenging all the bestialities inflicted on the German people and their kind.  The soldier must therefore have full understanding of the necessity of harsh but just retaliation upon the inferior Jewish race. 

Source # 4 - German General Gotthard Heinrici in a letter to his wife in 1941

You feel the destructive violence of war only when you think of the details or individual human fates.  I expect books will be written about this later.  The populations of towns disappeared almost without a trace.  The only people left in the villages are women, children and the old.  All the others have been uprooted and are drifting around the huge expanses of Russia.  According to accounts by prisoners, they huddle together on railway stations begging for a crust of bread.  I believe the number of victims claimed by the war from among these displaced people who die of illness or over exhaustion is as great as the number lost in bloodshed. 

Source # 5 - Henry Metelmann, German soldier, describing how his unit took housing away from Russian peasants

Our orders were to occupy one cottage per [tank] crew, and throw the peasants out.  When we entered "ours", a woman and her three young children were sitting around the table by the window, obviously having just finished a meal.  She was clearly frightened or us, and I could see that her hands were shaking, while the kids stayed in their seats and looked at us with large non-understanding eyes.  Our sergeant came straight to the point: "Raus" ["Out'] and pointed to the door.  When the mother started to remonstrate and her children to cry, he repeated "Raus!", opened the door and waved his hand towards the outside in a manner which could not be mistaken anywhere... ... Outside it was bitterly cold... ... I watched them through the small window standing by their bundles in the snow, looking hopelessly in all directions, not knowing what to do... ... When I looked back a little later, the were gone; I did not want to think about it anymore.

Source # 6 - Excerpt from a Speech by Heinrich Himmler to the leadership of the SS  in 1943 

What happens to the Russians, what happens to the Czechs, is a matter of utter indifference to me.  Such good blood of our own kind as there may be among the nations we shall acquire for ourselves, if necessary by taking away the children and bringing them up among us.  Whether the other peoples live in comfort or perish of hunger interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture... Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging a tank ditch interests me only in so far as the tank ditch is completed for Germany.  We shall never be rough or heartless where it is not necessary; that is clear.  We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude to animals, will also adopt a decent attitude to these human animals, but it is a crime against our own blood to worry about them and to bring them ideals.  

Source # 7 - Excerpt from The War of the World  by Naill Ferguson - A Soviet Prisoner told his German interrogators, "We have badly mistreated our [own] people, in fact so bad that it was almost impossible to treat them worse.  [But] you Germans have managed to do that ... Therefore we will win the war." 

Source # 8 - Lyudmyla Pavlychenko, a Soviet sniper who killed 309 enemy soldiers, including 100 German officers, describing her feeling toward killing German soldiers, “Every German who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Germans are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a German, I am saving lives.” 

Source # 9 - Except from The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich - Alexievich is a Belorussian writer who interviewed Russian women who fought in World War Two and complied their stories into the book The Unwomanly Face of War.  The book was published in the Soviet Union in 1985 after years of being stopped by Soviet censors.  Alexievish won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015

Klavdia Grigoryevna Krokhina, Sniper - The first time is frightening... Very frightening...

We were hiding, and I was the lookout.  And then I noticed one German poking up a little from a trench.  I clicked, and he fell.  And then, you know, I started shaking all over, I heard my bones knocking.  I cried.  When I shot at targets it was nothing, but now: I killed!  I killed some unknown man.  I knew nothing about him, but I killed him.

And then it passed.  And here's how... It happened like this...  We were already on the advance.  We marched past a small settlement.  I think it was in Ukraine.  And there by the road we saw a barrack or a house, it was impossible to tell, it was burned down, nothing left but back stones.  A foundation... Many of the girls didn't go close to it, but it was something that drew me there...  There were human bones among the cinders, with scorched little stars among them; these were out wounded or prisoners who had been burned.  After that, however many I killed, I felt no pity.  I had seen those blackened little stars.