By October 1941 the German leadership had every reason to believe the German-Soviet war virtually won. The fall of Leningrad was a matter of time and in encircling Kiev the Soviets had suffered losses in manpower and precious resources. All that remained was taking Moscow before winter set in. This overconfidence led the Germans to launch offensives across the Eastern Front rather than concentrating all their forces on Moscow. They also failed to account for the arrival of autumn and the rasputitsa (Russian for “time without roads”), which worsened the abysmal supply situation. Nevertheless, the Red Army faced the same mud and cold, yet performed much better than the Germans did. In the words of Geoffrey Megargee: “The weather did not defeat the Germans: their failure to plan for it did.”

With Kiev cleared, Guderian’s panzer group returned to Army Group Center while Army Group South resumed its advance east. As was typical throughout the first year, the German tanks and motorized units of Kleist’s First Panzer Army (no longer a group) reached the Donbass and was headed to Rostov while its infantry tried to keep up. The cautious army group commander, Gerd von Rundstedt, wanted to mop up Soviet forces west of the Don River, but German high command ordered him to advance toward Stalingrad and the Caucasus. Along the way, however, they needed to capture Kharkov (Kharkiv in Ukrainian), the major industrial city (which it remains today) in northeast Ukraine. By the time German units reached the outskirts of the city on October 20, however, the evacuation of industrial materials from Kharkov was completed.

As Rundstedt predicted, Army Group South faced harsh Soviet opposition plus poor weather and exhaustion. The Eleventh Army under General Erich von Manstein stalled as it advanced on the Crimea until Kleist’s Panzer Army threatened to encircle Soviet troops around the Sea of Azov. The German Sixth Army under Field Marshal Walther von Reichenau was meant to advance as far as the Don River and construct bridgeheads to prepare for an offensive against Stalingrad. This was far too ambitious given the mistakes and other obstacles that the Germans faced; taking Kharkov alone required a planned, carefully coordinated attack by the Sixth and Seventeenth armies. This was the most Sixth Army could realistically achieve until it was better supplied and the ground froze. This meant, however, that the knock-out punch intended by taking the Soviet Union’s industrial capacity and oil reserves in the south in one swoop would have to be delayed until there were better conditions, and thus that the German-Soviet war would not end before wintertime.

Heavy German casualties incurred in taking Kiev meant that, formally, German units were forbidden from entering urban areas, but in this case, the rule was not followed. The Germans occupied Kharkov on October 24. The occupation was a harsh one. On October 10 Reichenau had issued his infamous Severity Order, which called for the “complete destruction” of the “Jewish-Bolshevik system” and “the extermination of the Asiatic influence in European civilization.” It called for soldiers to understand “the necessity for the severe but just retribution that must be meted out to the subhuman species of Jewry.” (Army Group South’s commander, Rundstedt, would be so impressed with this he ordered his other commanders to issue similar directives.) As a result of the Severity Order, Jews in the populous city of Kharkov received even less rations than non-Jews (rations were already scarce). Photographic evidence shows victims of the Germans strung up from balconies as a warning against potential partisans.

Sonderkommando 4a, one of the Einsatzgruppen death squads, arrived in November and murdered around 305 Jews; in December, around 1,500 more were massacred at Drobytsky Yar, a ravine, where there now stands a memorial to the Kharkov victims: https://www.jta.org/2002/12/19/life-religion/features/memorial-to-ukraine-massacre-erected

Sources

Fritz, Stephen. 2015. Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press.

Glantz, David and Jonathan House. 1995. When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press.

Megargee, Geoffrey. 2007. War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment/orl-greg-dawson-travels-to-ukraine-071909-story.html

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/wwii-massacres-drobitsky-yar-were-result-years-scapegoating-jews-180961466/