When 300,000 Men from Hitler’s 6th Army Paid For What They Did JJ
22 June 1941. Before dawn, more than 3 million soldiers cross the border of the Soviet Union as Nazi Germany launches Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in history. Adolf Hitler presents the campaign as a war against the Soviet state, communism, and the Jews, while seeking to conquer Lebensraum, meaning “living space”, in Eastern Europe.
The soldiers moving east carry orders that allow executions, starvation and violence against civilians and prisoners of war. Among the armies advancing into the Soviet territory is one formation that will become deeply involved in this war of destruction, supporting mass murder and helping enforce policies that leave thousands to die from starvation.
Yet little more than 1 year later, the same army will itself be surrounded at Stalingrad, where most of its men, between 250,000 and 300,000 soldiers, will be killed, captured or left to die from hunger and cold. This infamous formation is the 6th Army. The 6th Army was created on 10 October 1939, 5 weeks after the Second World War began with the German invasion of Poland on 1 September.
Its commander was Generaloberst Walter von Reichenau, an early and open supporter of Adolf Hitler and a man who had argued for years that the army should abandon its claim to stand above politics. Under his command, the 6th Army fought in Western Europe in May 1940, advancing through the Netherlands and Belgium into France in a campaign that, compared with what would follow on the Eastern Front, remained largely conventional.
On 22 June 1941, under the code name Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and the 6th Army crossed the border as part of Army Group South, advancing into Soviet Ukraine, whose grain, coal and industry made the region one of the main German objectives. This was a very different kind of war from the campaigns fought in Western Europe, and the orders issued before the invasion made that clear.
The Commissar Order of 6 June 1941 required captured Soviet political officers to be shot rather than treated as prisoners of war, while another decree removed German soldiers from the jurisdiction of their own military courts for crimes committed against Soviet civilians. The 6th Army put both orders into practice and soon became directly involved in mass murder after entering the city of Bila Tserkva, about 80 km or 50 miles south of Kyiv, in July 1941. After the city was occupied, army police forced the Jewish population into a ghetto.
In August 1941, members of Einsatzgruppe C, one of the mobile killing units consisting of SS and police personnel that followed the German armies, murdered around 800 Jewish men and women. The 6th Army supported the massacre with guards, drivers, weapons and ammunition. Around 90 children, all aged 12 or younger, were left behind after their parents had been killed and were locked in a building in terrible conditions.
Oberstleutnant Helmuth Groscurth of the 295th Infantry Division tried to stop their planned murder and appealed to army headquarters, but the final decision was made by Reichenau, who personally approved the killing and later criticised Groscurth for questioning it. The children were then taken outside the town and shot. Groscurth was so horrified that he wrote to his wife: “We cannot and should not be allowed to win this war.
” Bila Tserkva was not an isolated case, and only a few weeks later the same cooperation between the 6th Army and the SS killing units reached a far greater scale in Kyiv, then the capital of Soviet Ukraine. The city fell to German forces on 19 September 1941 after weeks of fighting.
On 24 September explosive charges and radio-controlled mines planted by retreating Soviet forces began to detonate across the city centre, destroying buildings already occupied by the Germans. The German authorities blamed the Jewish population for the destruction, and on 28 September notices appeared across Kyiv ordering all Jews to report the following morning with documents, money, valuables and warm clothing, supposedly for resettlement.
Instead, they were marched towards the ravine of Babyn Yar, where on 29 and 30 September Sonderkommando 4a, a special killing detachment of Einsatzgruppe C, murdered 33,771 Jewish men, women and children with the support of German police units and local auxiliaries. This is where the work of our team of historians, researchers and editors becomes the story you hear.
I’m Marchand Steenkamp and since 2022, I’ve had the privilege of being the voice behind World History. In an era of automated content, we wanted to step out from behind the screen to show you the real people that bring these documentaries to life. Every word I record, every hour of research, every video our team edits is crafted by human creators who genuinely care about preserving and telling history with accuracy and respect.
So if you value documentaries created by passionate storytellers, we’d really appreciate it if you left a like, subscribed to the channel, or shared your thoughts in the comments below. Now, let’s get into today’s story. The shootings were carried out mainly by SS and police forces, but the 6th Army again helped make the massacre possible by supporting its preparation and providing military assistance.
Generalmajor Kurt Eberhard, the military commandant of Kyiv within the 6th Army’s area of command, participated in the meeting with senior SS and police officers at which the massacre was planned. A few days after the massacre, on 10 October 1941, Reichenau explained the ideology behind such actions in his own order named Conduct of Troops in Eastern Territories.
Later known as the Severity Order, it told soldiers that they were not simply fighting a military enemy but taking part in an ideological struggle, and called for severe revenge against what Reichenau described as “subhuman Jewry”. The order also prohibited feeding Soviet civilians and prisoners of war from army field kitchens.
Reichenau’s superior, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, approved the document and distributed it to other army commanders as an example, while Hitler ordered it circulated across the Eastern Front. On 24 October 1941, the 6th Army captured Kharkiv, the 2nd-largest city in Soviet Ukraine, and became responsible for its occupation.
In mid-November, Soviet radio-controlled mines and explosives destroyed several buildings used by German troops and headquarters, killing German personnel, and the occupation authorities responded by taking hostages and carrying out public executions. Civilians were hanged in the main streets and from the balconies of large buildings, and their bodies were left there to terrorise the population and warn against further resistance.
At the same time, food was taken for German troops while the city’s residents were increasingly left to survive on their own. In mid-December, the remaining Jewish population was forced into overcrowded barracks on the eastern edge of Kharkiv, and over the following weeks thousands were taken to Drobytsky Yar, a ravine outside the city, and murdered.
Estimates vary, but around 15,000 to 20,000 Jews were killed there, and witnesses later alleged that some small children were thrown into the pits alive to save ammunition, with the killers expecting the freezing temperatures to kill them. Walter von Reichenau did not remain in command long enough to see the full consequences of his actions.
On 1 December 1941, he was ordered to command Army Group South, but only 6 weeks later, on 14 January 1942 he suffered a stroke. He died on 17 January 1942 while being flown back to Germany for medical treatment, after the aircraft carrying him crash-landed at Lemberg, today Lviv in Ukraine. Whether he died from his stroke or from injuries sustained in the crash is unknown. Reichenau was given a state funeral in Berlin and never faced prosecution for his crimes.
The command of the 6th Army after him passed to General of Panzer Troops Friedrich Paulus, a highly regarded staff officer who had never commanded an army in the field. In the summer of 1942, the 6th Army became the main striking force of “Fall Blau”, the German summer offensive towards the oilfields of the Caucasus and the River Volga, with the industrial city of Stalingrad, today Volgograd in Russia, as one of its main objectives. On 23 August 1942, as German forces reached the Volga north of the city,
the Luftwaffe, the German air force, launched a massive bombing raid that destroyed large parts of Stalingrad and killed tens of thousands of civilians. Through the autumn, the 6th Army fought its way into the ruins of the city suffering losses on a scale neither side had expected. On 19 November 1942, the Red Army launched Operation Uranus around Stalingrad in southern Russia, but instead of attacking the German forces fighting inside the city, it struck the Romanian armies defending their northern and southern flanks across the steppe between the Don and the
Volga rivers. Both fronts collapsed within 2 days, and on 23 November the Soviet spearheads met about 70 km or 43 miles west of Stalingrad, closing the encirclement. Between 250,000 and 300,000 soldiers were trapped inside the pocket, but Hitler refused to allow a breakout, while Hermann Göring, commander of the Luftwaffe, assured that the army could be supplied from the air, a promise that quickly proved impossible to fulfil.
A German relief offensive launched on 12 December also failed, and as the weeks passed rations were reduced and thousands of men died from hunger, cold and untreated wounds. The 6th Army, which a year earlier had helped strip food from occupied cities such as Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine and had been ordered not to feed Soviet prisoners of war, was now itself starving inside a Soviet encirclement that it could not escape.
On 30 January 1943, Hitler promoted Paulus to Field Marshal, the highest rank in the German Army, a clear signal that he was expected to die rather than become the first German field marshal to be captured alive. Paulus, however, refused to kill himself and surrendered the following day, while the remaining German forces in the northern part of Stalingrad held out until 2 February 1943.
By the end of the battle, around 150,000 men of the 6th Army had been killed or wounded and about 91,000 were captured by the Red Army. For the 91,000 prisoners of war, surrender marked the beginning of another ordeal. Already weakened by hunger, illness and wounds, they were marched away from Stalingrad through freezing conditions, and tens of thousands perished within the following weeks.
Those who survived were dispersed among labour camps across the Soviet Union, where exhaustion, poor treatment and harsh conditions claimed many more lives. The destruction at Stalingrad ended the history of the original 6th Army, but not its name. In March 1943, only 1 month after the surrender, another German formation was given the same designation.
It retreated west across Ukraine into Romania, where it was largely destroyed during the Soviet Jassy–Kishinev Offensive in August 1944. Rebuilt once again, the 6th Army fought in Hungary, failed to relieve the German and Hungarian troops trapped in Budapest, then withdrew through western Hungary into Austria, where its remaining units surrendered to American forces on 9 May 1945, one day after the end of the Second World War in Europe.
Although only a small number of those responsible for the crimes of the original 6th Army were ever prosecuted, many did not escape the consequences of the war they had helped wage. Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau died in 1942 before he could be prosecuted, while Generalmajor Kurt Eberhard, the military commandant of Kyiv during the Babyn Yar massacre, killed himself in American custody in Stuttgart in 1947.
Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus survived, later testified for the prosecution at Nuremberg and was released from Soviet captivity in 1953. For the ordinary soldiers, the reckoning came through Stalingrad and its aftermath. Of the approximately 91,000 men who surrendered there, only around 5,000 to 6,000 eventually returned to Germany, with the last prisoners released in 1955.
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