June 22, 1941: Operation Barbarossa
Willi Graf and Fritz Hartnagel both participated in Operation Barbarossa. The two men had radically different perspectives. White Rose as rarely discussed.
Unbelievably, before Hitler had secured his Western front, before he had blockaded or bombed the United Kingdom into an armistice, he undertook a risky move that baffled military experts everywhere. He called for Germany to invade the Soviet Union.
Likely knowing what was coming, Adolf Hitler’s beloved friend and party comrade Rudolf Hess defected to Scotland in May 1941.
As part of Division 7 [Kommando 7], a medical unit, Willi Graf had been moving slowly through Eastern Europe from April through June 1941. Serbia, Poznań. Then Warsaw. He bore witness to the Warsaw Ghetto as it was before the wall was built, a wall that obscured the crimes against humanity in that place. His letters home as the division traveled across Poland became ever bleaker. Willi Graf was already in a “do something” state of mind, although he remained unclear as to what that “something” should be.
And now he was in Russia. Willi Graf had hoped his country would not make such a critical blunder. In his first letter from Belarus to friends on the home front on June 29, 1941, he said that until his unit had joined that final eastward trek early on June 22, he had hoped it would not come to war.
One week in, he had seen little of “Russia.” Hitler clearly wished to replicate the successes of his Blitzkrieg in the West. Division 7 moved lightning fast across Belarus. Willi’s division was not billeted on civilians, as had been the case in Poland and Yugoslavia. They camped out in tents, hidden from enemy bombs by dense forests.
Willi already knew it was an immoral war. It was also a miserable war. Oppressive heat, sizzling nights, scorching sun, dust storms. And mosquitoes. Everywhere mosquitoes. The German army had sent its men to fight in Russia in June wearing wool uniforms. Not warm enough for winter, itchingly hot in summer.
Once their march slowed, the landscape and people mesmerized Willi Graf. Wide open spaces, all that room.
Back in Germany, Nazi radios blared news of the invasion. Of course, the propaganda machine worked overtime. Otl Aicher and Inge Scholl happened to visit Sophie Scholl in Krauchenwies that weekend as she served her Reich Labor Service term. Otl recalled “an evening of sadness.” The death toll was sure to be high. “What is a glimpse of hope if it flourishes in a cemetery of millions?”
Alexander Schmorell remained safe ‘at home’ in Munich as German soldiers invaded his homeland. In earlier conversations with Hans Scholl, he had expressed concern about the animosity that National Socialism exhibited towards the Russian people.
Now with war going on, forced to conform to German “patriotism,” he felt his loyalties pulled in two directions. Alex had no illusions about Communism and recognized the threat that system posed to his homeland. Yet he feared that Russia would suffer a great loss – not merely militarily, but loss of land area as well – through the advances of the German armies.
As June turned into July, days on the Russian front heated up. Russians were fighting back, not caving to German troops to protect paintings and buildings as the French had done. “The other army knows how to fight,” Willi wrote to family and friends. Fleas had joined mosquitoes and made life in a wool uniform unbearable.
Willi Graf therefore sought escape in literature. Hölderlin. Guardini. Poetry. Theology. Beauty in the midst of ashes. Yet the Beautiful only confused him more, frustrated him, made it hard to distinguish reality from dreams. He tried to think of happy days at home in Saarbrücken, of the friends he sorely missed. That made things worse.
“One may not think about such things too much.”
In stark contrast, Fritz Hartnagel’s signal corps unit was attached to the Heeresgruppe Mitte [Army Group Central] under the command of Field Marshal von Bock. Like Willi Graf’s medical division, Fritz’s signal corps unit participated in Operation Barbarossa from the very first day. Unlike Willi, First Lieutenant Fritz Hartnagel knew the objective of Heeresgruppe Mitte: They were marching to Moscow via Minsk and Smolensk.
Unlike Willi Graf, Fritz Hartnagel despised the people and landscape he saw in Belarus. Roads were “frightful and clogged,” a personal inconvenience because it meant that mail would be delayed. He barely got a few hours sleep every night, because the Russians were defending themselves! Fritz advised Sophie he would not have time to read.
Nevertheless, he appeased Sophie with beautiful words. “We still have blue skies overhead, the flowers are still blooming, and the little birch forests are still standing with their fresh greenness. Isn’t this enough reason to rise above these events?” His bond with her, he said, allowed him to maintain his balance and “remain of good courage.”
By July 10, 1941, army brass told Fritz that the war would probably last “another couple of weeks.” Fritz was more pessimistic. Not August, but surely they would have beaten back the Russians by September, about the same time that Sophie’s Reich Labor Service ended. He wanted her to start planning a nice September vacation.
A little over a week later, sitting in his military vehicle while it rained, smoking cigarettes and writing Sophie, Fritz vented. Mail was too slow. And on top of everything else, how he hated Russia! All the songs he had treasured in the days of bündische youth, the Russian tunics he had thought beautiful – all of it had lost its charm now that he saw it for himself.
“Russia is desolation personified,” he said. “Both the landscape and its people and their dwellings. The faces we encounter during our advance are either full of deceit and barbarism, or contorted by anguish and sorrow.” It made him homesick for Swabia, “for the domesticity of its inhabitants, and above all, for one of those songs we often sang together in the evening.”
Heeresgruppe Mitte continued its relentless advance. By July 22, they had reached a village 100 km (60 miles) north of Smolensk. They were the first Germans to push that far inside the country. Initially the villagers fled from the invaders. When Fritz wrote Sophie on July 24, the town’s inhabitants had returned.
“Now the people have become more trusting,” he said. “The women peel our potatoes, and the men chop wood for the kitchen. The Russians are happy to provide us whatever services we need. Apparently because they are happy and thankful that we treat them decently.”
Ever the realist, Fritz understood that the Russians’ cooperation had nothing to do with joy at being liberated from Bolshevism (Communism). His attitude had changed slightly from his letter five days earlier. He now saw the peasants as people first, people who had been abused and misused no matter who was in power. “Things are the same for these people in their misery regardless of whether they are ruled by the Czar or Stalin or Hitler.”
He pondered the question, what was best for the Russians? And he found no answers, not even one. Whether he contemplated the issue from a purely materialistic viewpoint, or from a spiritual or intellectual perspective, nothing made sense. “I believe the only remaining justifiable reason for a war must be religious,” he said, too absorbed in his attempt to read Augustine to comprehend the unjust religious wars that had taken place throughout history.
And Willi Graf, attached to a different division in the same part of Belarus, saw that same world with completely different eyes. He admitted to friends in Bonn that he had had to nurture deafness and blindness in order to survive his duties. If he permitted himself to hear and see what German troops were doing, he would come undone.
Though Willi generally took pleasure in mail he received from friends on the home front, the letter he got from the fellow soldier who had been transferred to a student company in May demoralized him completely. Not only had this man been spared the horrors of Warsaw and the shame of the Russian invasion: He merrily described lectures and lab work, updating Willi on his progress on his dissertation (he’s completed it, Willi groaned) and which concerts he had gone to. It was more than Willi could bear. His tour of active duty had already exceeded normal limits for pre-med students. And there was no end in sight.
He was happy that the awfulness of the war made the days fly by. Their work as a medical unit close to the front lines was so intense that he had little time left over to contemplate what-ifs. That meant that “a good portion of the terrible is often excised from the terror, because one often cannot reflect what would have been otherwise. What remains thereafter is yet to be seen. On the other hand, one will have better opportunity to make comparisons at a later date.”
Willi divulged that his rare free moments – usually just as the sun was setting – felt like walking a tightrope between fantasy and reality. Between sanity and insanity. He feared the fantasies conjured by the sudden release of stress. Yet he wondered if the crazy ideas he came up with during that single hour a day would perhaps one day see fruition. Again, he assumed that his friends in Bonn would read between those shadowy lines until he could talk to them face to face. Were his crazy ideas viable?
By August 1, 1941, Fritz’s signal corps unit had not moved an inch from its position north of Smolensk. So much for making it to Moscow within a few weeks. The men in the trenches had a better overview of the military situation than their bosses in Berlin. In fact, unbeknownst to the men of Heeresgruppe Mitte, Soviet resistance had been so fierce that Hitler had given the order – Directive No. 34 – to switch from offense to defense.
Fritz Hartnagel now thought Russia was “creepy.” [Both Willi Graf and Fritz Hartnagel regularly referred to Belarus as Russia.] The immense bogs and forests, endless and ever-shifting sand dunes, mere huts instead of houses, and a people he found “beggarly and dirty” – it was enough to make him despair that they would ever escape from such an awful place. “How will we get back,” he wondered aloud. “Because in the meantime, we have a long road ahead of us.”
Fritz had begun to suspect that victory in Russia was more elusive than they were being led to believe. He had likely been scouting ahead on reconnaissance duty, although he does not say so directly. Russia’s vastness, combined with its lack of infrastructure (especially roads), presented obstacles unlike any the German army had seen before. The Western campaign in France and Belgium seemed like a cakewalk in comparison.
By August 8, 1941, Fritz’s signal corps still had not moved. The predictions that they would defeat the Russians “in another couple weeks” seemed, well, overly optimistic. Tensions within Heeresgruppe Mitte were rising. Fritz’s C.O. had taken to berating subordinates for no reason whatever.
When Sophie Scholl asked Fritz to buy her a Russian peasant dress, her ‘supply sergeant’ lashed out at the Russians he hated. “Russian women usually only wear a ragged skirt, something like an apron or pinafore. If it’s colder, they wear a heavily padded, filthy, and tattered jacket over that. Usually, one cannot determine the jacket’s original color. The only traditional costume here is a common scarf.”
He attempted to portray the extreme poverty they observed, how the concept of “money” had not reached most of the country. People bartered for everything, he said. He let slip a typically antisemitic remark, when he commented, “It’s always a regular Jewish trade (Judenhandel).”
Fritz said he would have hoped that the one large city they had passed through – Viciebsk, with around 200,000 residents – would have been more modern, with shopping opportunities. But the entire city had been burned to the ground, with its people now starving to death. “If only there were not so many beautiful things in spite of it all!” And he described the loveliness of a nearby valley he had discovered two days earlier.
With the lack of any progress for Heeresgruppe Mitte, Fritz now feared that vacation in September or October would be out of the question. Since tents (and in his case, army vehicles) provided their only shelter, he worried about the probability of success if Germany had not won the war in Russia before then. It was only August 8, and nights were perceptibly colder. What would winter bring?
His only hope for vacation would be a transfer to the long-awaited invasion of England, since it seemed that Hitler intended to renew that option. “Of course, this doesn’t appear to be possible, even though certain signs are in favor of it.”
Barely three days later, still north of Smolensk, Fritz wrote Sophie of a near-death experience. He was enjoying a rare free afternoon, he said, and had chosen to spend it in the little valley he had told her about. He had since discovered that wild raspberries grew in that place, and he decided to spend some quiet hours there, relishing the delicacy.
Almost immediately, his reverie was disturbed. “I heard the sound of a strange motor and quickly discovered four Russian [planes] rather high in the blue skies. But this is an everyday occurrence here, and as the airplanes flew directly towards me, I rather playfully thought that I was well-hidden in my raspberry patch, and that if they should let their bombs go precisely then, they would hit somewhere near me. I had barely thought that through to the end, when I heard the roar in the wind.”
“I immediately threw myself to the ground,” he continued, “but the bombs fell for half an eternity, at least that’s what it felt like. Naturally in reality it was only for a few seconds.” The impact of the bombs hit about 200 meters (620 feet) from his hiding place, where he hugged the ground with all his might. The Russians had scored a direct hit on a German anti-aircraft artillery position, one Fritz had been unaware of as he started his walk.
“But then I allowed myself to enjoy the raspberries,” he told Sophie.
A week later, nearly three weeks into August, Heeresgruppe Mitte was still stuck in the same location north of Smolensk. Things clearly were not going according to plan. Rumors swirled through the signal corps unit, which after all was responsible for military intelligence.
Fritz wrote Sophie on August 18 that the primary rumor involved temporarily giving up the march to Moscow in favor of occupying Ukraine. That would provide the Germans with “sustenance” – especially important in light of the approaching winter. Fritz hoped that was not the case. “That would amount to trench warfare, because the Russians are anything but defeated, although they have suffered significant losses.”
While military brass talked as though the occupation of Moscow would equate to the overthrow of Paris (and bring Russia to its knees), Fritz and his men understood that even if they succeeded in winning a battle for that city, the war would not end. The Russians would not surrender until the Germans had reached Mongolia, “and that seems rather impossible.” He said what every man in the German army surely thought: “I only hope that we are out of Russia before winter.”
Although the occupation of Ukraine appeared to be their destiny, Fritz told Sophie he had heard rumors that his signal corps unit would be transferred to Portugal or Africa. Intelligence reports indicated that the Americans would land in one of those two places soon. (An interesting rumor, since the USA did not enter the war until December 1941.)
No matter what German radio broadcasts and newspapers reported, Fritz was pessimistic about the duration of the war. “There is no foreseeable end to this war,” he wrote Sophie. “One would lose courage should one find his comfort only in earthly things.”
On September 2, 1941, a rainy and “icy cold” Tuesday, Fritz wrote Sophie a half-despondent, half-fantasy letter. It is from this letter that we know he considered becoming a chicken farmer after the war, even down to calculating how many chickens he would have to buy to succeed at that enterprise.
Barely had that letter been handed to the army postman, when Fritz received a telegram from headquarters. “It is imperative that First Lieutenant Hartnagel reports to Heeresgruppe Mitte tomorrow for special assignment.” No explanation, no clue as to where the special assignment would be.
He quickly dashed off another note to Sophie, telling her of the new development and promising more news as he got it.
Although he dreaded the possibility of wintering in Russia, he had also become accustomed to the men under his command. For the most part, he had enjoyed leading that team and would miss them. “It hits me hard, almost as if one had to leave home – forever.” He was sustained by the simple knowledge that he remained “connected” to Sophie.
All thoughts of homesickness for his team vanished once he received his “special assignment.” Fritz Hartnagel was put on a JU 52, jetted to East Prussia, where he boarded a regular passenger train – no military transport! – bound for Weimar via Berlin.
There, amid the blessed normalcy of a plain old military base, far removed from the thunder of artillery and bombers dropping payload while he tried to eat raspberries, he learned that he was being tasked with formation of a new signal corps unit. From scratch. That would operate under his command. And would join the Africa Corps in Libya. In fourteen days! It was almost too much to process.
He regretted to inform Sophie that that meant he probably would not see her until her Reich Labor Service extension (war auxiliary work) was completed in six months. “Hopefully it will not be too hard for you, and you will be able to protect your happy heart.”
What all he had to do in the next fourteen days!
Willi Graf, on the other hand, felt dreadfully alone. He had no one in whom he could confide. To be sure, he had worked out an uncomfortable peace with his army buddies, an uneasy alliance focused on finding shelter, food, and a place to wash up as Russian winter approached. Mid-November, it was dark by 3 pm.
The war had ground to a halt on the Eastern front. Heavy rains turned roads into quicksand, capturing German tanks and trucks that lumbered towards Moscow. If they tried to walk, they would sink up to their knees, mud stuck in every crack and crevice. Then rain turned to ice, and ice to snow, and inevitable victories (so German generals had thought) were frozen solid.
Willi’s unit was billeted on homes in a town on the road to Moscow. He had stopped hoping for a transfer home, home where he could study medicine and be among friends. He thought about it, but he had quit hoping.
As soon as eastward movement ground to a halt, Willi realized that he had come through an entire summer and autumn without seeing a single flower. War ran right over such things, made them superfluous.
That apprehension rendered life at home as something surreal, like something one remembered from a dream but could not touch.
War.
This post stitches together excerpts from White Rose History, Volume I regarding Operation Barbarossa and those whose lives the invasion affected. Next post will cover wintering in Russia and the impact of that part of the war on Willi Graf, Lilo Berndl nee Ramdohr, the Harnacks, Fritz Hartnagel, and the Scholls. December 1941-May 1942 profoundly affected the friends who were becoming White Rose resistance.
If you are curious about supporting documents for this Substack post, check out our White Rose History, Volume I, 1/1933-4/30/1942 © 2002, along with primary source materials. As always, if you have questions or private comments, please contact us. If you find errors, please contact us, or post a comment below.