6th Army (Wehrmacht)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

6th Army

Troop registration number of the 6th Army

Troop registration
active October 10, 1939 to May 8, 1945
Country German Reich NSGerman Reich (Nazi era) German Empire
Armed forces Wehrmacht
Armed forces army
Type army
Second World War Western campaign
against the Soviet Union
Battle for Kiev (1941)
Battle of Kharkov (1942)
Company blue
Braunschweig company
Battle of Stalingrad
Operation Jassy-Kishinev
Supreme command
list of Commander in chief

The 6th Army / Army High Command 6 (AOK 6) was a large unit of the Army of the Wehrmacht during the Second World War . She was the high command of changing army corps and numerous special troops. The 6th Army was best known for the Battle of Stalingrad . Units of the 6th Army were used in the war against the Soviet Union for crimes committed by the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD . a. at the Babyn Yar massacre .

history

1939 to 1941

AOK 6 was formed on October 10, 1939 by renaming AOK 10 , which had previously been used in the attack on Poland , when it was moved to the west and was under Army Group B here . In May and June 1940 she took part in the western campaign, forming the left wing of Army Group B and proceeding as the first phase ( yellow case ) over Holland and northern Belgium. In the second phase ( red case ) it advanced to Paris via Somme and Oise and took Orléans . She then stayed in the West until April 1941. The 6th Army was called "Conqueror of the Capitals" after the Western campaign.

1941 to 1942

From the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, the 6th Army was subordinate to Army Group South . Together with Panzer Group 1, it advanced through Volhynia to the east, and strong Soviet counter-attacks were repulsed in the tank battle near Dubno-Lutsk-Rivne .

Structure on June 27, 1941

The 6th Army participated in the Battle of Kiev in September 1941 and in the Battle of Kharkov in May 1942 . Then, in the case of Blau , she operated out of Ukraine in the direction of the Don , which was crossed in early July 1942. As a result, the army fought after the battle of encirclement at Kalach on the Don to the Volga to Stalingrad front.

Battle of Stalingrad

At the end of August 1942, the 6th Army began the attack on Stalingrad and, despite stubborn resistance from the Soviet 62nd Army , brought large parts of the city under their control. In the months of street and house fighting that followed, the Wehrmacht did not succeed in conquering the rest of the city.

Although predicted by some German front-line officers, the Red Army's major offensive Operation Uranus , which began in November 1942, came as a surprise to the OKH , as the Soviet troop concentration had been completely underestimated and the resulting threat had been misunderstood. Their result was the inclusion of the 6th Army and other German and allied troops, a total of almost 300,000 men, in the Stalingrad pocket . According to the war diaries of the 6th Army and daily reports from the Army Corps , on December 18, 1942, there were 230,300 Germans and allies in the kettle, including 13,000 Romanians . In addition, the reports show 19,300 Soviet prisoners or Soviet volunteers .

Outline on November 20, 1942

Between January 31 and February 2, 1943, the 6th Army stopped fighting. Around 100,000 soldiers of the 6th Army had died by the end of the Kessel Battle. By January 24, 1943, 42,000 German wounded, sick and specialists had been flown out. According to Soviet reports, 16,800 Wehrmacht soldiers were captured between January 10 and 29, 1943. When the cauldron was broken up in the last days of January and early February, another 91,000 soldiers surrendered and were taken prisoner by the Soviets; they were distributed to reception camps around Stalingrad. The Red Army was initially completely overwhelmed with the supply and care of the prisoners of war, since it was assumed that only around 90,000 troops were total when the 6th Army was closed. Due to the inadequate nutrition in the boiler, the German “combat units” were so physically weakened that of the approximately 90,000 prisoners of war who were captured during the surrender, only about 33,000 could be taken to labor camps. The majority had died after just a few days in the reception camps, many from weakness, but also from wounds and epidemics. The common soldiers traveled to the labor camps (to rebuild the Soviet Union) in unheated railway wagons. Food was only available every third day, so the death rate was still high here too. Only 18,000 prisoners, men and NCOs - captured officers came to special camps - are said to have reached the labor camps. Only 6,000 soldiers and officers of the 6th Army survived the years of captivity and returned home.

On February 3, 1943, Lieutenant Herbert Kuntz was the last supply plane to fly over Stalingrad and could no longer observe any German troops. This date is considered to be the end of the 6th Army. However, until mid-February 1943, pilots of the German Air Force located small squads of up to five men trying to get to the German lines in the steppe around Stalingrad.

According to recent reports, around 10,000 German soldiers were still fighting, hidden underground, in the completely destroyed city until the end of February 1943. After the cauldron split up towards the end of January 1943, some had not heard of the surrender, others still felt bound by the oath they had taken.

After the reorganization in 1943

On March 6, 1943, the 6th Army from the Hollidt Army Division fighting in southern Russia was reorganized into the new Army Group South. It initially held lines on the Mius and had to withdraw from the Donets Basin to the Dnepr in autumn 1943 .

Outline on October 4, 1943

Here she held a bridgehead at Nikopol until the beginning of 1944 , which she had to vacate in February 1944. It withdrew behind the Ingulez and later the Bug into the Romanian occupation area of Transnistria , where Army Group South and the Romanian 3rd Army formed the Dumitrescu Army Group in April . After further Soviet attacks, they retreated behind the Dniester . In August 1944, as part of Army Group South Ukraine , the unit suffered heavy losses in the course of the Soviet Operation Jassy-Kishinev .

Outline on August 20, 1944

Raised from the remnants of the troops in Transylvania , they were referred to as Fretter-Pico Army Group in September 1944 when the Hungarian 2nd Army was subordinated to them, and as Balck Army Group from January to March 1945 when the Hungarian 3rd Army was subordinated . The last commander in chief, General of the Panzer Force Hermann Balck , surrendered to the Americans in Styria in May 1945 .

War crimes and propaganda

In addition to its main role as a combat unit, the 6th Army was also involved in the policy of conquest and extermination of the National Socialist regime in the Soviet Union and was thus involved in the implementation of this policy. National Socialist propaganda elevated their defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad to the myth of a heroic sacrifice. In post-war German literature it became an army unscrupulously "betrayed" by its leadership.

"As early as August 1941, the 6th Army knowingly made itself an accomplice in the genocide," write Bernd Boll and Hans Safrian , who followed the trail of blood from the 6th Army to Stalingrad. In the period from 1941 to 1943, the High Command and units of the 6th Army worked together with the SS and the SD Einsatzgruppen in the mass murder of Jews, in the fight against partisans and alleged partisans, and in starving the civilian population.

Officers of the XXIX. Army corps were involved in planning the Babyn Yar massacre , in which over 33,000 Jews were murdered within two days in September 1941. In Charkow , the SS-Sonderkommando Sk 4a, in agreement with the General Staff and the Field Command , prepared a “Jewish action”: in December, more than 20,000 Jewish men, women and children from Kharkov were “evacuated” to a barrack camp outside the city and then from the SS shot or suffocated in a gas truck . "Long before their attack on Stalingrad, the 6th Army had turned into a genocidal organization whose task was the mass murder of civilians", summarizes Erich later .

Commander in chief

(Surrender - Reorganization)

Remembrance in Germany

Central German memorial in Limburg

At a central memorial in Limburg, the dead are remembered by a fire bowl.

At the Meinrad Chapel in Inzigkofen, the dead are remembered in the park near the Stalingrad Madonna .

During riots that occurred in connection with the national party congress of the NPD planned for April 12, 1987 in Sigmaringen, the memorial stone was torn from its anchoring.

See also

literature

  • Bernd Boll, Hans Safrian: On the way to Stalingrad. The 6th Army. 1941/42, pp. 260 ff. In: Hannes Heer, Klaus Naumann (Ed.): War of extermination. Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944. Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-930908-04-2 .
  • Georg Tessin : Associations and troops of the German Wehrmacht and Waffen SS in World War II 1939–1945. Volume 3: The Land Forces 6-14 . 2nd Edition. Biblio-Verlag, Bissendorf 1974, ISBN 3-7648-0942-6 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Burkhart Müller-Hillebrand : The Army. 1933-1945. Volume III. The war on two fronts. The army from the beginning of the campaign against the Soviet Union to the end of the war . S. 278 .
  2. ^ Schramm: OKW-Kriegstagebuch Volume 1, p. 1135.
  3. ^ Schramm: OKW-Kriegstagebuch, Volume 1, p. 1386.
  4. ^ Loss of 6th Army in Stalingrad ( Memento from April 13, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Documentation on PHOENIX “Stalingrad Part 3 - The Downfall”.
  5. ↑ Otto Köhler: Hitler left - they stayed. KVV concrete, Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-930786-04-4 , p. 131f
  6. ^ Boll, Safrian: On the way to Stalingrad. The 6th Army in 1941/42. P. 278 ff.
  7. ^ Later, Erich: The third world war. The Eastern Front 1941-45. St. Ingbert 2015, p. 110.
  8. ↑ Meinradskapelle has new sponsors. Retrieved April 16, 2019 .
  9. ↑ Otto H.Becker: Hohenzollerische Heimat . Quarterly papers for school and home. Ed .: Association for history, culture and regional studies in Hohenzollern in connection with the Hohenzollern teachers. No. 2 . Inzigkofen 1998, p. 61 .