This is mainly propaganda, there is a lot of exaggeration in it. German Werhmacht troops were not inhumane to the people around them for the most part. Some things you must consider is the enviornment of war, I have seen pictures of devastated villages east of the city of Smolensk. This area is where the Germans and the Russians fought it out for several months over a large heavily populated area. When you have armies of 10s of thousands of men moving across the landscape with tanks and thousands of pieces of artillery trying to get at each others throats it can't be a good place to be a civilian.

People could not get in the harvest, they could not go to other places to get what they needed. Many people did live in holes in the forest because it was safer than the villages. Unfortunately the Russians did not have time to move the civilian population before the Germans arrived and they were caught in the middle. It was the same in the Volkhov region south of Leningrad and many other areas. The system the peasants depended on was broken.

I am not trying to discount such things as Mansteins order that doomed almost all of the people of occupied Russia proper to starvation in favor of his occupying forces, this killed 100s of thousands that could not flee or the atrocities of certain volunteer brigades made up of Finns, Estonians and downright riff raff. NE of Moscow and in the region of Tula they were especially brutal seemingly taking out their frustrations with Stalin on the local populations.

Not all German soldiers were inhumane sadists, some did horrible things just to survive, things that they would not even contemplate in other circumstances. Such things as this are part of war, it is our leaders that begin them that must be punished.