from the Gulag into the army. The diminishing of the preferred manpower pool of ethnic Russians led to increasing numbers of replacements drawn from Soviet Asia and from the newly liberated western regions. Their political reliability was questioned, on racial grounds for the Asians and from fear the Ukrainians and Byelorussians had been contaminated by their years under fascism. “They know absolutely nothing about fighting, military discipline, real soldiers’ spirit,” lamented one frustrated captain. But the Red Army’s riflemen in 1944–45 were more than handmaids to the tanks, more than follow-up and mop-up troops. At the end of the war, especially in the street fighting in Vienna, Berlin, and the dozens of other built-up sites in the Reich, Red Army infantry were an adversary more determined, and more formidable, than their British and American counterparts.
In that last context, Kursk’s fourth watershed involved determination. Since the Middle Ages, at least, war in the Western world had developed a culture of accommodation, of not making things worse than they had to be. Frequently honored in the breach, that culture nevertheless tended to reassert itself constantly, even during civil wars and insurrections, whether the opponents were long-service professionals or hastily uniformed civilians. From the first days of Barbarossa, however, German behavior at the front and behind the lines overtly denied accommodation even at basic levels. At Prokhorovka, a Leibstandarte tank crewman reflected that the Russian soldier fought bravely, “but when taken prisoner … he’d quiver like a mouse….” With no sense of irony, the same crewman described a group of Russian prisoners, forty or fifty of them, walking toward the rear guarded by a single SS rifleman. “So we asked him, ‘Aren’t you afraid?’ ‘Afraid?’ he asked right back. ‘Watch.’” The guard said something in Russian. Two prisoners fell out. “Our guy gave them a burst in the stomach from his machine pistol and shouted, ‘Now there, see just how frightened I am.’”
Russian soldiers for their part were drawn from a society and a culture where suffering pain and inflicting it were the stuff of every day. A quarter century of Soviet rule refined, legitimated, and institutionalized that mentality. On July 10, a Leibstandarte self-propelled antitank gun disappeared in a wooded area. Its four-man crew was captured. The Russians asked each man to give his age. The youngest was spared, the other three summarily shot.
After Kursk, this often documented mutual brutality metastasized and metamorphosed on both sides. From a Soviet perspective, the war was, in Stalin’s words, “a just and patriotic war of liberation.” However complex the conflict’s origins, who had attacked whom on June 22, 1941, was not in question, any more than the United States could be accused of attacking the Japanese fleet at anchor on December 7, 1941. The theme of self-defense was reinforced by the history of German barbarity. Familiar to every man and woman in the Red Army, it was reinforced at political meetings, maintained through newspapers and radio broadcasts, and nurtured by the encouragement to keep personal records of atrocities noted and repaid. For anyone seeking tangible evidence, the Ukraine and Byelorussia provided scenes of devastation inconceivable even to survivors of the great famines. Home leaves and local furloughs were chimeras. Once at the front, men remained there. Mail delivery was haphazard; memories faded into dreams. The Soviet soldiers’ horizons and expectations shrank as the war moved forward. A common meme developed, however, the closer the Red Army came to the Reich’s borders. Its basis was rage at the Germans for attacking and despoiling the USSR in seeming defiance of their own immeasurably higher standard of living. Its matrix was a sense of unfettered triumph. “It was a wonderful life,” recalled a lieutenant, “… loot, vodka, brandy, girls everywhere.” Its scope was comprehensive. Civilian or soldier, German or forced laborer—it made no essential difference. The rapes, the beatings, the killings, the deportations were not even massively random. They were a final, universal, direct manifestation of total war.
The Germans too underwent a moral and behavioral transformation. Since 1941, a frontline culture had developed that combined convenience and indifference, embedded in a matrix of hardness. Hardness was neither cruelty nor fanaticism. It is best understood as will focused by intelligence for the purpose of accomplishing a task—at whatever the cost. It was a mind-set particularly enabling the brutal expediency that is an enduring aspect of war.
As the great retreat began after Kursk, the hardness earlier described as central to Wehrmacht frontline culture became the subtext of a wider mission, moral as well as military. German soldiers saw themselves as defending Western civilization, the German nation, and not least their own homes, against what Hoth called in a memo “an Asiatic mode of thinking and primitive instincts,” inflamed and focused by Jewish-Bolshevik intellectuals. In the West, opponents of the Nazi regime might talk of ceasing resistance, opening the front. In the East, it was war to the knife until the final days—and often after the fighting formally ceased.
War takes two basic forms. One is a matching of superiorities and inferiorities at decisive moments. The other is a test of strengths and wills, a crisis of attrition. The Battle of Kursk was the Eastern Front’s transition point—and its point of no return.
