Part 1

That is not true and I don't know what research you did that lead you to believe there was such a "pattern" but it can only have been rather cursory and/or superficial.

First of all, the very war the Wehrmacht planned to fight in the Soviet Union was not to be a "normal" war of occupation but rather a war of annihilation. While this included the so-called Commissar Order of 1941, which was to form the basis of the murders of Jews as well as communist functionaries and who was assumed to be a communist functionary, it also included the Kriegsgerichtsbarkeitseralss, a document which specified that no soldier of the Wehrmacht could be tried for any war crimes committed in the Soviet Union. This meant that they were given a free pass to act and do as they pleased when it came to the treatment of virtually everyone they came across, including to a large part Soviet civilians.

But starting with with two of the most obvious examples of Wehrmacht maltreatment of Soviet citizens: How POWs were handled. While Jews and those – rightly or wrongly – identified as political commissars were handed over to the Einsatzgruppen to be shot, the rest of the considerable number of POWs were according to orders given in 1941 not to be fed. Languishing in huge fenced in out-door areas, the Wehrmacht had decided to basically neglect caring for them in order to save foodstuff for the German population and themselves. About half of the initially captured 3 million Soviet POWs starved to death until the German leadership changed there policy in 1942. But even with that change, the death toll is staggering: Christian Streit estimates that about 3.3 million Soviet POWs or 57% of all Soviet POWs captured by the Wehrmacht died while in captivity.

A further mass atrocity that doesn't get discussed often in this context are the mass shootings of Soviet POWs from the Asian parts of the USSR. In line with their stereotype of the Bolsheviks employing "Asian hordes", POWs from Soviet Republics like Kazakhstan or the area around the border of the USSR with Mongolia were also included in the kill order and shot by the thousands, if not hundred thousands.

When it comes to the treatment of the civilian population, it is important to realize the vision Nazi Germany laid out for their future empire in the East: In what can best be characterized as a colonial undertaking, the German East was to be a labor force and resource reservoir with the civilian population of that area consigned to the role of German slaves. The communists as well as other agitators and intellectuals were to be murdered and the vast majority of the population should receive only enough education to write their own name and not anything else. They were to be forced into the roles of Slavic slaves to the German masters catering to growing their wheat and building their autobahns connecting Berlin directly to the Crimean Peninsula.

That working towards this reality was already to begin during the war is not only noticeable in the areas incorporated into the various Reichskommissariate in the East but also in the area directly under Wehrmacht control where schools and universities were closed down and all education basically ceased for the duration of the occupation. Civilians were to be kept from any sort of educational or intellectual pursuit in order for this not to interfere with their roles as German human resources to be used and carried away as they pleased.

This implication also leads us to the first massive crime of the occupying forces, including the Wehrmacht, towards the civilians: The forced labor program. Suffering under man power shortage in the German war industry, the German leadership decided to replace all the men called into the Wehrmacht with forced laborers from the occupied territories. Kidnapped or otherwise forced to go to Germany, about 12 million people during the time between 1939 and 1945 were forced to become laborers in German agriculture and industry, a huge part of the from the Soviet Union. The Wehrmacht was a crucial instrument in violently and forcefully recruiting forced laborers in the occupied USSR. Either forcing villages to give away whole yearly cohorts, carrying out raids or simply setting a village on fire and arresting everyone fleeing to be send off to Germany were the methods employed by Wehrmacht units in the Soviet Union against the civilian population in order to recruit workers for the German war machine. They tore apart families, took women and children hostage and threatened to kill them if the men didn't "volunteer" to go to Germany. Three to four million Soviet citizens were carried off forcibly to Germany between 41 and 45.

Then there was the hunger policy. When the German leadership planned the invasion, the big political decision was that the Wehrmacht was to feed itself off the land in the Soviet Union rather than receiving necessary food stuff from Germany. Thus, especially the urban centers of the Soviet Union were understood as competitors for food with the Wehrmacht. In line with this, the Wehrmacht General Quartermaster together with various other Nazi officials devised what became known as the Hunger Plan, which specified that in order to feed the Wehrmacht, 30 million Soviet citizens should starve to death, especially those in larger cities. While this plan was never fully implemented because it proved virtually impossible, it did have ramifications for the civilian population: The winter of 1941/42 saw mass starvation in the German controlled area around Leningrad, in the Donetsk Basin, in Northeastern Ukraine and Kharkov and on the Crimean Peninsula. In Kharkov for example, the Wehrmacht occupation only gave out rations for about 6% of the 450.000 inhabitants of the city. The rest was left to fend for themselves and many of them did indeed starve to death. While the exact number of victims of this policy is hard to gauge, it is most likely to be somewhere around a million people having been starved to death intentionally.

In addition to all of that, the forced labor program, the deliberate starvation, there also was the violence exacted against civilians during anti-Partisan warfare or rather, what passed as anti-Partisan warfare. The German Wehrmacht used terror against civilians deliberately as a part of warfare. Even early into the invasion, when no Partisan resistance to speak off had been encountered, the Wehrmacht used massive amounts of violence against the civilian population, including but not limited to Jews and Communists. Whole regions were forcibly depopulated, villages summarily burned down, and civilians shots en mass as retaliation for dead and wounded German soldiers. The Wehrmacht in September 1941 instituted a policy that called for 100 civilians shot for every dead German soldiers and 50 civilians shot for every wounded German soldier. In Belarus, the Wehrmacht in conjunction with the SS- and police groups killed a quarter of the total population during the occupation. In the Wehrmacht administered regions of the Soviet Union, 1941/42 saw a policy that all civilians Wehrmacht troops encountered further than 20km from their hometown were summarily shot if not in possession of a special pass issued by the administration. The commander of the 221. Wehrmacht security division reported in late November 1941 that since early September that year, the unit had shot 300-400 civilians daily. Stories like the Wehrmacht forcing the population of a whole village into the local church and then proceeding to set the church on fire and mowing down everybody trying to escape with a machine gun are legion. In 1941 alone, such operations lead to the death of 85.000 Soviet civilians in the Wehrmacht administered territories.

In 1942 the Wehrmacht escalated this tactic and every civilian who couldn't prove that he was actively involved in fighting the Partisans was immediately suspicions and ran a high risk of being murdered by Wehrmacht troops. Not for nothing does the German historian Dieter Pohl write about the conduct of the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union that they "fought a war of aggression, not just against the country but against its people themselves." This conduct is also why after initially celebration of the German invasion by parts of the Ukrainian population, this sentiment soon dwindled to practically non-existent. Starvation, forced labor and mass violence against civilians tended to put a huge damper on any hopes that the Germans would bring deliverance from Soviet rule.