In the post-Soviet era, the idea of "the excessive cost of Victory" was insistently introduced into the mass consciousness, that the human losses of the Red Army "in the overwhelming majority of battles were many times greater than the German ones." This primarily applies to the Moscow defensive operation (September 30 - December 5, 1941).
The beginning of the distorted ideas was laid, apparently, in 1990, an article by A. Portnov, published in the Stolitsa magazine, "The Defeat of Soviet Troops near Moscow." It was "proved" that Soviet casualties in defensive battles were many times higher than German casualties. Since then and to this day, in the publications of some authors who identify themselves as military historians, it has been argued that the Red Army, defending the capital, lost 20 times more soldiers than the Wehrmacht. Defending such absurd figures is explained by a poor understanding of the realities of the Moscow battle, ignoring the differences in the concepts of military-operational losses used by the Red Army and the Wehrmacht, and blind faith in German statistics.
Let's agree on terms
Comparison makes sense only with a single interpretation of the concept of "loss". In domestic and foreign studies, the losses of the Red Army and the Wehrmacht are considered from two positions: demographic and military-operational. Demographic decline in battles is all deaths of personnel, regardless of the reasons that caused them. In the military-operational sense, losses are considered based on the impact on the combat capability of troops. The attrition reports were used by the higher headquarters of the Red Army and the Wehrmacht in assessing the results of hostilities, determining the number of reinforcements required to restore their combat effectiveness. Therefore, in the second case, any failure is taken into account, at least for a while, and not just death.
The military-operational losses of the Red Army were divided into irrecoverable and sanitary losses. The first included the dead and the dead, missing and taken prisoner. The sanitary losses included wounded and sick servicemen who had lost their combat capability and were evacuated to medical institutions for at least a day.
This classification is widely used in domestic studies, but for a comprehensive assessment of the Red Army's human losses in specific battles, it does not have the required completeness and clarity. The fact is that the division into irrecoverable and sanitary, justified for reporting, turns out to be not so unambiguous for the historian. A certain part of sanitary losses (wounded and sick who did not return to service during the operation) should be attributed simultaneously to irrecoverable. The problem is that such information was not contained in the reports, so it is impossible to accurately assess this part of sanitary losses. But it can be assumed that all the wounded and sick sent from the battlefield to the rear hospitals will not return to service until the end of the battle. Then the concept of "irrecoverable losses in battle" is interpreted as follows: "The dead, captured, missing, as well as the wounded and sick, sent to the rear hospitals during the battle."
The concept of "decline" used in the Wehrmacht practically coincides with the content of the above concept. from the line of action of the armies.
The identity of the domestic concept of "irrecoverable losses in battle" and the German "loss" allows a correct comparison of the Red Army and the Wehrmacht.
Oddities without secrecy
The team of authors of the well-known work "The secrecy stamp is removed" (head - GF Krivosheev) estimated the number of dead, captured and missing Red Army soldiers near Moscow at 514 thousand people, wounded and sick - at 144 thousand. A number of researchers (S. N. Mikhalev, B. I. more - 855 thousand people. The substantiation of this figure was given by S. N. Mikhalev in the article "Losses of the personnel of the opposing sides in the battle for Moscow" (collection "The 50th anniversary of the Victory in the battle of Moscow. Materials of the military scientific conference"). He calculated the losses as the difference between the size of the Western, Reserve and Bryansk fronts on October 1, 1941 (1212, 6 thousand people) and the Western (including the surviving troops of the Reserve Front), Kalinin and Bryansk fronts on November 1 (714 thousand people.). “Taking into account the replenishment received during this time (304, 4 thousand people), the losses in people in October amounted to 803 thousand people. Taking into account the decrease in November, the total losses of the fronts in the operation reached 959, 2 thousand people, of which the irrecoverable - 855 100 (and this is without taking into account the losses for 4 days in December)."
In my opinion, these numbers are overstated.
First, the number of front personnel as of November 1 (714 thousand people) did not include servicemen who were still surrounded. The withdrawal of troops from the Vyazma and Bryansk "cauldrons" continued in November-December. So, in the report of the Military Council of the Bryansk Front on the hostilities from October 1 to November 7, it is indicated that after the breakthrough and the advance of troops at the end of October to a new combat line (like 4 cd, for example) lasted for at least a month. " According to A. M. Samsonov in the book "Moscow, 1941: from the tragedy of defeats to the greatest victory" residents of the Moscow region helped out about 30 thousand soldiers who were surrounded. It is impossible to name the total number of Red Army soldiers who left the encirclement in November-December 1941: it could be 30 thousand people, and much more.
Secondly, as A. V. Isaev notes in the article "Vyazemsky Cauldron", "a number of subunits from the 3rd and 13th armies of the Bryansk Front withdrew to the zone of the neighboring Southwestern Front (these armies were eventually transferred to him)", their number was not included in the composition of the Bryansk Front on November 1, 1941.
Third, a significant number of the encircled people continued to fight in partisan detachments. In the rear of Army Group Center, they numbered over 26 thousand people. The people around them were in the majority (approximately 15–20 thousand people).
Fourth, a number of rear units that escaped encirclement and retreated to Moscow were transferred to the emerging GVK reserve armies. The number of these units could be significant - up to tens of thousands of people.
Finally, some of the Red Army soldiers who were surrounded but escaped captivity remained in the occupied territory. After her release, they were again drafted into the Red Army. Their exact number cannot be established, but it may be tens of thousands of people.
Additional research is required, but it is obvious that the number of dead, captured and missing Red Army soldiers in battles in the Moscow direction in October-November 1941 by S. N. Mikhalev is overestimated by about 150-200 thousand people and is approximately equal to 650-700 thousand … Together with the wounded and sick, the total losses of the Red Army during that period can be approximately estimated at 800-850 thousand people. It should be borne in mind that this includes all sanitary losses of troops in the Moscow battle, but when calculating irrecoverable ones, only the wounded sent to the rear hospitals should be taken into account. The exact number is also unknown. Then the medical service in the armies and fronts had not yet started working in full force, so the bulk of the wounded and sick were sent to the rear hospitals. According to the work "Soviet health care and military medicine in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945", in 1941, out of the total number of the wounded and sick returned to service, the rear hospitals accounted for 67.3 percent. If we take this figure as a share in relation to our calculations, the irrecoverable losses (loss) of Soviet troops in the Moscow defensive operation amount to 750-800 thousand people.
Decrease paper and real
The existing estimates of the loss of the Wehrmacht by most domestic researchers fluctuate in the range of 129-145 thousand people and in fact are based on information from ten-day reports of German troops. Based on the above data, L. N. Lopukhovsky and B. K. Kavalerchik in the article "When will we find out the real cost of the defeat of Hitlerite Germany?" (collection “We washed in blood”, 2012) concluded that if we compare the losses of the Red Army and the Wehrmacht, then “the ratio of the total losses of the sides in the operation will be 7: 1 (1000: 145) not in our favor, but irrecoverable losses (dead captured and missing. - V. L.) of our troops will exceed the German in 23 times (855, 1:37, 5) ".
The resulting ratio of irrecoverable losses of the Red Army and the Wehrmacht (23: 1) attracts attention with its implausibility. It characterizes the Red Army as absolutely helpless, incapable of any resistance, which does not correspond to German estimates of its combat power.
If we believe the decade-long reports of the Wehrmacht and the figures of the named authors based on them, then near Moscow the Red Army fought much worse than the Polish army defeated by the Wehrmacht in a short time (September 1939, the ratio of irrecoverable losses, taking into account the prisoners after surrender - 22: 1) and the French (May-June 1940 - 17: 1). But the German generals don't think so. The opinion of the former chief of staff of the 4th German army, General Gunther Blumentritt, is known about the Red Army: "We were opposed by an army that was far superior in its combat qualities to all others that we had ever encountered on the battlefield."
An analysis of various sources on the losses of the Wehrmacht in the Moscow battle shows that the information of the ten-day reports is significantly underestimated and cannot serve as initial data. German researcher Christoph Rass states in the book “Human Material. German soldiers on the Eastern Front”that“a regular and continuous system for calculating and registering personnel losses was developed in the ground forces only after the defeat in the winter of 1941-1942”.
The data on the loss of German soldiers (dead, dead, wounded and missing) in ten-day reports is much less than the same kind of information in the generalized certificates of loss registration services. For example, a former Wehrmacht officer Werner Haupt, in a book dedicated to the Moscow battle, cites data from a certificate dated January 10, 1942 about the loss of soldiers of Army Group Center since October 3, 1941. This information (305 thousand people) is almost 1.6 times higher than in the ten-day dispatches of the troops (194 thousand people). In addition, it should be borne in mind that, according to the testimony of the modern German researcher of Wehrmacht losses Rüdiger Overmans, the information of generalized references was also underestimated.
The underestimation of the losses of the Wehrmacht in the ten-day reports is also explained by the fact that they often included the loss of only the combat strength of units and formations.
And finally, ten-day data come into blatant contradiction with the testimony of German participants in the war and the research of Western historians. So, according to troop reports from October 11 to December 10, 1941, Army Group Center lost 93,430 people, or 5.2 percent of the total number of troops before the start of Operation Typhoon (1,800 thousand people.), and the former chief of staff of the 4th German Army, General Gunther Blumentritt, in an article about the Moscow battle (collection of Fatal Decisions) writes that by mid-November “in most of the infantry companies, the number of personnel reached only 60-70 people (with a regular 150 people. - V. L.)”, that is, decreased by more than 50 percent.
Paul Carell (the pseudonym of SS Obersturmbannfuehrer Paul Schmidt - executive director of the News Service of the Third Reich and head of the press department of the German Foreign Ministry) reports that from October 9 to December 5, 1941, the 40th motorized corps of the Wehrmacht lost about 40 percent of the nominal combat strength (" Eastern Front. Book One. Hitler goes to the East. 1941-1943 "). In percentage terms, this is almost eight times more than the losses of Army Group Center, reflected in the ten-day reports.
American military historian Alfred Terney in the book “The collapse near Moscow. Field Marshal von Bock and Army Group Center states: “Von Bock's divisions on the front line were losing their combat effectiveness much faster than he could replace them. At times, the losses were so great that he had to disband them altogether. Companies in combat units, which had an average of 150 men at the start of Operation Typhoon, reported that they now had only 30 or 40 men still standing; the regiments, which at the beginning of the operation had 2,500 men, now numbered less than four hundred in each."
At the beginning of December 1941, the commander of Army Group Center, Field Marshal von Bock, wrote in his diary: "The strength of the German divisions as a result of continuous battles and the harsh winter that has come has decreased by more than half: the combat effectiveness of tank forces has become even less."
English historian Robert Kershaw in his book 1941 through the eyes of the Germans. Birch crosses instead of iron crosses "assesses the losses of the Wehrmacht:" Operation Typhoon alone cost Army Group Center 114,865 killed, "and Paul Carell sums up the results of this operation even more harshly:" In October she (Army Group Center. - V. L.) consisted of seventy-eight divisions, the number of which had decreased to thirty-five by December … ", that is, its combat effectiveness decreased by 55 percent.
The statements of the combatants and researchers of the Battle of Moscow show that the real irrecoverable losses of Army Group Center were significantly greater than the ten-day reports of the German troops and the estimates of Lopukhovsky and Kavalerchik.
What was the level of attrition among the Nazis? Unfortunately, the lack of reliable information allows us to estimate the losses of the Wehrmacht only approximately and in several ways. If we take as a starting point the figure given by Robert Kershaw in his book “1941 through the eyes of the Germans. Birch crosses instead of iron crosses (115 thousand people were killed), the number of wounded is the same as B. Müller-Hillebrand, more than three times the amount of killed and missing soldiers of the Army Group Center reports were for Operation Typhoon 3500-4000 people), then the decrease of the Wehrmacht in the Moscow defensive operation amounted to 470-490 thousand people.
If we focus on the estimates of Field Marshal von Bock and Paul Carell (decrease in the combat capability of the army group by more than 50-55%), then with the combat strength of the grouping 1070 thousand people at the beginning of the operation, the decrease of the Wehrmacht will be 530-580 thousand people.
If we consider the proportion of losses of the German 40th Motorized Corps in the period from October 9 to December 5, 1941 (40%) as a baseline and extend it to the entire army group, it should be borne in mind that losses in the first eight days of the operation are not taken into account. "Typhoon". And taking into account the severity of the battles in early October 1941, they can be estimated at four to five percent of the initial strength of the combat personnel. That is, the total share of hull losses is approximately 44–45 percent. Then, given the above-mentioned number of combat strength of Army Group Center, at the beginning of the operation, the decrease of German troops will be 470-480 thousand people.
The generalized range of irrecoverable losses of the Wehrmacht is 470-580 thousand people.
The ratio of irrecoverable losses of the Red Army and the Wehrmacht in the Moscow defensive operation is 750-800 / 470-580 or 1, 3-1, 7 in favor of the German troops.
These figures are calculated using publicly available loss data. Perhaps, with further declassification and the introduction of documents of the Great Patriotic War into scientific circulation, the estimates will be adjusted, but the overall picture of the confrontation between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht near Moscow will not change: it is not at all like “filling the Germans with the corpses of the Red Army soldiers”, as some authors draw. Yes, the Soviet casualties were higher than the German ones, but by no means many times.
It is important to note that most of the losses of the Red Army fell on the tragic days of the first half of October, when the troops of eight Soviet armies were encircled near Vyazma and Bryansk. But by the end of the Moscow defensive operation, the situation leveled off. At the end of November 1941, Count Bossi-Fedrigotti, a spokesman for the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the headquarters of the 2nd German Army, noted the growth of the Soviet soldiers' combat skill: "Russian troops outnumber us not only in number, but also in skill, since they have studied German tactics very well."
In 1941, the enemy was objectively more cunning, stronger, more skillful. Until mid-1943, a fierce confrontation went on with varying success, and then the superiority in military skill of soldiers, officers and generals firmly passed to the Red Army. And its losses became significantly less than that of the gradually degraded Wehrmacht.
I'll get the birch cross faster
Letters and diaries of soldiers and officers of the Wehrmacht are part of the trophies of the Red Army in the counteroffensive near Moscow. These are living testimonies left by the enemy who was on the front lines. They are frank. This is their value.
“In the last fourteen days we have suffered almost the same losses as in the first fourteen weeks of the offensive. We are located seventy kilometers from Moscow. The order to the troops said that the capture of the capital would be our last combat mission, but the Russians mustered all their strength to hold Moscow."
From a letter from Corporal Jacob Schell, item 34175, to his wife Babette at Kleingheim. December 5, 1941
“Narofominsk. December 5 … The general offensive ran out of steam … Many comrades died. Only two officers remained in the 9th company, four non-commissioned officers and sixteen privates. In other companies it is not better … We walked past the corpses of our killed comrades. In one place in a small space, almost one on top of the other, were 25 corpses of our soldiers. This is the work of one of the Russian snipers."
From the diary of the commander of the 7th company of the 29th German infantry regiment, Lieutenant F. Bradberg
“… We are going through very difficult days and nights. We have been retreating for several days now. Something terrible is happening here. All roads are clogged with a continuous stream of retreating German troops."
From a soldier's letter to his bride Lina, December 17, 1941. Western front.
“It is impossible to describe the hardships we experienced, coldness and fatigue. And at home they keep repeating on the radio and in the newspapers that our situation is favorable. We have been on the road for more than a week, and what this means in winter, those who have not experienced it themselves cannot imagine. Many people have already got frostbitten on their feet. And hunger torments us too."
From a letter from corporal Karl Ode, item 17566 E, to his wife. December 18, 1941
“In our former company, there are only twenty-five people, but when we set out for Russia there were one hundred and forty. When I think about all this, I just cannot understand why I am still alive. Those who survived this hail of bullets were especially lucky … On December 1, we went on the offensive. But already on the 3rd they were forced to return back to our old positions. If they had not retreated, now they would all be in captivity."
From a letter from corporal Joseph Weiman, item 06892 B, Hanne Bedigheimer. December 18, 1941
6. XII. We are starting to retreat. All villages are burned down, wells are rendered useless.
8. XII. We get away at 6:30. We turn our backs to the front. Parts come out from everywhere. Almost a "victorious retreat." Sappers diligently play the role of "arsonists".
11. XII. Alarm at night: Russian tanks broke through. It was a one-of-a-kind march. The snow is lit with a crimson flame, the night turned into day. From time to time, explosions of ammunition flying into the air. So we retreated sixteen kilometers into the snow, ice and cold. They settled down like herring in a barrel, with cold and wet feet, in the same house near Istra. We must equip positions of the front line of defense here.
12. XII. They held the position until 13:00, then began to retreat. The mood in the company is terrible. I look at our fate very, very gloomily. Hope it's too dark. As soon as we left the village, the Russians burst in with seventeen tanks. Our retreat continues relentlessly. Where to? I keep asking myself this question and cannot answer …"
From the diary of corporal Otto Reichler, item 25011 / A
5. XII. This day cost us again eleven killed, thirty-nine wounded. Nineteen soldiers have severe frostbite. The losses among the officers are significant.
Our uniforms are in no way comparable to Russian winter equipment. The enemy has wadded trousers and jackets. He is wearing boots and fur hats.
15. XII. With dawn, we move on. The retreating troops stretch in a long line. The anti-tank company of the regiment loses several guns, as well as artillery tractors. We have to abandon many cars due to lack of fuel.
16. XII. What stunning pictures appear to our eyes! I thought that they were only possible with the retreat of the French troops in the Western campaign. Wrecked and overturned vehicles with scattered cargo, they were often abandoned too hastily. How much precious ammunition is thrown here for no good reason. In many places, they didn't even bother to destroy them. We can fear that this material will fall on our heads later. Morale and discipline suffered greatly during this retreat.
29. XII. The course of the campaign to the east showed that the ruling circles were many times mistaken in assessing the strength of the Red Army. The Red Army has heavy grenade launchers, automatic rifles and tanks."
From the diary of Lieutenant Gerhard Linke, headquarters officer of the 185th Infantry Regiment
“Maybe I will get a birch cross faster than the crosses for which I have been presented. It seems to me that the lice will gradually seize us to death. We already have ulcers all over our body. When will we get rid of these torments?"
From a letter from non-commissioned officer Laher to soldier Franz Laher
“We miscalculated about the Russians. Those who are at war with us are not inferior to us in any kind of weapon, and in some they are superior to us. If you only survived the Russian dive-bombers raid, you would understand something, my boy …"
From a letter from non-commissioned officer Georg Burkel. December 14, 1941
“All the villages we are leaving are burned down, everything in them is destroyed so that the invading Russians have no place to settle. We do not leave behind a carnation. This destructive work is our business, sapper …"
From a letter from Sapper Carl to his parents. December 23, 1941
“January 12th. At 15 o'clock the order was received: “The battalion is retreating from Zamoshkino. Take only light things with you, everything else should be burned. The guns and field kitchens explode. Horses and wounded prisoners are shot."
From the diary of Chief Corporal Otto. 415th para. Item of the 123rd German infantry division
“Ten days ago, a company was selected from all the companies in our regiment to fight enemy parachute assault forces and partisans. This is just madness - at a distance of almost two hundred kilometers from the front, in our rear, there are active hostilities, as on the front lines. The civilian population is waging a partisan war here and is annoying us in every possible way. Unfortunately, it costs us more and more losses."
From the diary of the soldier Georg, friend Gedi. February 27, 1942
