All Hell Let Loose (25 page)

During early-summer operations, the Germans had suffered just 3,360 casualties, the British 50,000 – most of these taken prisoner. Much of Auchinleck’s armoured force had been destroyed. Churchill, in Washington to meet Roosevelt, was shocked and humiliated. The end of June 1942 found the British occupying a line at El Alamein, back inside Egypt. One of Auchinleck’s soldiers wrote: ‘The order came to us, “Last round, last man.” This was chilling. It was curious to see that this legendary phrase of heroic finality could still be used. Presumably it was intended to instil a steely resolve … But being interpreted, it meant that there was no hope for Tobruk and that we were being left to our fate – the very reverse of morale building … We were a downcast, defeated lot.’ Britain’s fortunes in the Middle East, and the global prestige of its army, had reached their lowest ebb. Churchill’s attempt to exploit Africa as a battlefield against the Axis had thus far served only to make Rommel a hero, and grievously to injure the morale and self-respect of the British people at home. It was fortunate indeed that the desert was not the cockpit of the war; that events elsewhere, on the Russian steppe, had drastically diminished the significance of British failure.

At 0315 Berlin time on 22 June 1941, Russian border guards on the Bug river bridge at Kolden were summoned by their German counterparts ‘to discuss important matters’, and machine-gunned as they approached. Wehrmacht sappers tore away charges laid on the railway bridge at Brest-Litovsk, then waved forward the assault units at 0330. German special forces – ‘Brandenburgers’ who included some Russian-speakers – had been parachuted or smuggled across the lines during the preceding days, and were already at work sabotaging communications behind the front. Some 3.6 million Axis troops began to advance into the Soviet Union on a nine-hundred-mile front from the Baltic to the Black Sea, smashing into the defences with devastating effect. A Russian, the poet David Samoilov, said later, ‘We were all expecting war. But we were not expecting
that
war.’ Divisions and soon whole armies dissolved in the Germans’ path, so that collapses and surrenders characterised the first weeks of the Red Army’s campaign. A Soviet officer wrote of an exchange with a comrade: ‘Kuznetsov informed me, with a tremble in his throat, that the only thing left of the 56th Rifle Div was its number.’ This was merely one among a thousand such disasters.

Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union was the defining event of the war, just as the Holocaust was the defining act of Nazism. Germany embarked upon an attempt to fulfil the most ambitious objectives in its history, to push back the frontiers of Slavdom and create a new empire in the east. The Nazis argued that they were merely following the historic example set by other European nations in pursuing
Lebensraum
, living space, by seizing an empire in the territories of savages. The British historian Michael Howard has written: ‘Many, perhaps most Germans, and certainly most German intellectuals, saw the First World War as a battle for cultural survival against the converging forces of Russian barbarism and, far more subversive, the decadent civilisation of the West, embodied no longer by French aristocrats but by the materialist societies of the Anglo-Saxon world. This belief was taken over in its entirety by the Nazis and provided the bedrock of their own philosophy.’

Millions of young Germans had been conditioned since childhood to believe that their nation faced an existential threat from the Soviet Union. ‘The situation is ideal for the Bolshevists to launch their attack on Europe in furtherance of their general plan for world domination,’ wrote an ardent Nazi Luftwaffe pilot, Heinz Knoke, in 1941. ‘Will Western capitalism, with its democratic institutions, enter into an alliance with Russian Bolshevism? If only we had a free hand in the west, we could inflict a shattering defeat on the Bolshevist hordes despite the Red Army. That would save Western civilisation.’ Imbued with such logic, Knoke was thrilled to find himself participating in the invasion of Russia. So were some more senior officers. Hans Jeschonnek, the Luftwaffe’s chief of staff, was chastened by the 1940 failure against Britain, a campaign which he thought ill-suited to his force’s capabilities. Now, he exulted, ‘At last, a proper war again!’

Eighteen-year-old Henry Metelmann, a Hamburg locksmith turned tank driver, wrote later: ‘I accepted as natural that it was a German duty for the good of humanity to impose our way of life on lower races and nations who, probably because of their limited intelligence, would not quite understand what we were on about.’ Like many young Germans at that stage of the war, he viewed his deployment to the east without trepidation. ‘Few of us realised the serious situation we were in. We looked on this journey, if not the whole war, as one great adventure, an opportunity to escape the boredom of Civvy Street, a lesser object being to fulfil a sacred duty to our Führer and Fatherland.’

Much of Hitler’s strategy, insofar as it was planned rather than the product of opportunism, derived from the knowledge that time favoured his enemies, empowering them to arm and coalesce against him. As part of Stalin’s deterrent strategy, before
Barbarossa
the German military attaché in Moscow was allowed to visit some of the vast new weapons factories under construction in Siberia. His reports, however, had the opposite effect to that which was intended. Hitler said to his generals: ‘Now you see how far these people have already got. We must strike at once.’ The destruction of Bolshevism and the enslavement of the Soviet Union’s vast population were core objectives of Nazism, flagged in Hitler’s speeches and writings since the 1920s. Overlaid on them was the desire to appropriate Russia’s enormous natural resources.

Stalin probably intended to fight his menacing neighbour at some moment of his choosing. If Germany had become engaged in a protracted attritional struggle against the French and British on the Western Front in 1940, as Moscow hoped, the Russians might have fallen upon Hitler’s rear, in return for major territorial concessions from the Allies. Stalin’s generals prepared plans for an offensive against Germany – as they did also for many other contingencies – which could conceivably have been launched in 1942. As it was, however, in 1941 his armies were unfit to meet the almost undivided attentions of the Wehrmacht. Though progressively mobilising – Russia’s active forces doubled in size between 1939 and the German invasion – they had scarcely begun the re-equipment programme that would later provide them with some of the best weapons systems in the world.

In Hitler’s terms, this made Operation
Barbarossa
a rational act, enabling Germany to engage the Soviet Union while its own relative advantage was greatest. Hubris lay in its underestimate of the military and industrial capability Stalin had already achieved; reckless insouciance about Russia’s almost limitless expanses; and grossly inadequate logistical support for a protracted campaign. Despite the expansion of the Wehrmacht since the previous year and the delivery of several hundred new tanks, many formations were dependent on weapons and vehicles taken from the Czechs in 1938–39 or captured from the French in 1940; only the armoured divisions were adequately provided with transport and equipment. It did not occur to Hitler, after his victories in the west, that it might be more difficult to overcome a brutalised society, inured to suffering, than democracies such as France and Britain, in which moderation and respect for human life were deemed virtues.

The senior officers of the Wehrmacht flattered themselves that they represented a cultured nation, yet they readily acquiesced in the barbarities designed into the
Barbarossa
plan. These included the starvation of at least thirty million Russians, in order that their food supplies might be diverted to Germany, originally a conception of Nazi agriculture chief Herbert Backe. At a meeting held on 2 May 1941 to discuss the occupation of the Soviet Union, the army’s armament planning secretariat recorded its commitment to a policy noteworthy even in the context of the Third Reich:

Barbarossa
was therefore not merely a military operation, but also an economic programme expected to encompass the deaths of tens of millions of people, an objective which it partially attained. Some generals protested against orders requiring their men to participate in the systematic murder of Soviet commissars, and rather more questioned Hitler’s invasion strategy. Maj. Gen. Erich Marcks, the brilliant officer responsible for early planning, proposed that the decisive thrust should be delivered north of the Pripyet marshes, because Russian deployments anticipated an assault further south. Several commanders argued that a conquered population which was treated mercifully would be more manageable than one which gained nothing by accepting subjection. Such objections were framed in pragmatic rather than moral terms; when Berlin rejected them, the critics lapsed into acquiescence and faithfully executed Hitler’s orders.

Industrialised savagery was inherent in
Barbarossa
. Goering told those charged with administering the occupied territories: ‘God knows, you are not sent out there to work for the welfare of the people in your charge, but to get the utmost out of them, so that the German people can live.’ Col. Gen. Erich Hoepner, the fifty-five-year-old cavalryman commanding Fourth Panzer Group, said: ‘The war with Russia is a vital part of the German people’s fight for existence. It is the old fight of German against Slav, the defence of European culture against the Muscovite-Asiatic flood, and the repulse of Jewish Bolshevism. This war must have as its goal the destruction of today’s Russia – and for this reason it must be conducted with unprecedented harshness. Every clash, from conception to execution, must be guided by an iron determination to annihilate the enemy completely and utterly.’ From June 1941 onwards, few German senior officers could credibly deny complicity in the crimes of Nazism.

The Soviet Union on the eve of Hitler’s invasion was the most rigorously regulated and policed society in the world. Its machinery of domestic repression was much more elaborate, and in 1941 had killed far more people, than that of Nazism: six million peasants perished in the course of Stalin’s programme of enforced industrialisation, and vast numbers of loyal comrades had fallen victim to his paranoia. Germans, other than Jews, had greater personal freedom than did any Russian. Yet Stalin’s tyranny was less adequately organised to defend itself against foreign enemies than against its own people. The Red Army’s formations in the west were poorly deployed, in a thin forward line. Many of its best commanders had been killed in the 1937–38 purges, and replaced by incompetent lackeys. Communications were crippled by lack of radios and technical skills; most units lacked modern arms and equipment. No defensive positions had been created, and Soviet doctrine addressed only offensive operations. The dead hand of the Party crippled efficiency, initiative and tactical prudence.

Stalin dismissed many warnings from his own generals as well as from London about the impending invasion. The 10 May parachute descent on Britain of Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, in pursuit of a lone peace mission, increased Soviet fears of British duplicity, and suspicion that Churchill intended a bilateral deal with Hitler. Stalin also rejected explicit intelligence about
Barbarossa
from Soviet agents in Berlin and Tokyo, scrawling across one such report from Beria: ‘You can tell your “source” from the German Air Headquarters that he can go and fuck his mother. This is not a source, but a disinformant. I.St.’ The Luftwaffe played its part in Berlin’s deception operations by dispatching five hundred bombers against London on 10 May, inflicting 3,000 casualties, days before most of its squadrons redeployed eastwards.

The huge troop movements preceding
Barbarossa
became the stuff of café gossip on the streets of Europe: writer Mihail Sebastian was telephoned by a friend in Bucharest on 19 June who said, ‘The war will begin tomorrow morning if it stops raining.’ Yet Stalin forbade every movement that might provoke Berlin, overruling repeated pleas from his commanders to alert the front. He ordered anti-aircraft defences not to fire on Luftwaffe overflights of Soviet territory, of which ninety-one were reported in May and early June. Himself a warlord of icy purpose, Stalin was confounded by the apparent perversity of Hitler’s behaviour. Under the terms of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, Germany was receiving enormous material aid from Russia: supply trains continued to roll west until the very moment of the invasion; the Luftwaffe’s aircraft were largely fuelled by Soviet oil; the Kriegsmarine’s U-boats had access to Russian port facilities. Britain remained undefeated. Stalin thus refused to believe that Hitler would precipitate a cataclysmic breach with him, and was personally responsible for the fact that the German onslaught, no surprise to his senior commanders, caught the defences unprepared. Georgy Zhukov, chief of the general staff, dispatched an alert order to all commands late on 21 June, but this reached them only an hour before the Germans attacked.

On the Western Front, some 2.5 million of Stalin’s 4.7 million active soldiers were deployed – 140 divisions and forty brigades with more than 10,000 tanks and 8,000 aircraft. Hitler launched against them 3.6 million Axis troops, the largest invasion force in European history, with 3,600 tanks and 2,700 aircraft of superior quality to those of the Russians. Under the overall command of Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, the Germans struck in three army groups. Hitler rejected the urgings of his best generals to make a single thrust towards Moscow, insisting upon a simultaneous drive into Ukraine, to secure its vast natural and industrial resources. This is sometimes described as a decisive strategic error. It seems more plausible, however, to question whether Germany had the economic strength to fulfil Hitler’s eastern ambitions, in whichever way these were addressed.

Many German people were shocked, indeed appalled, by news of the invasion. Goebbels wrote: ‘We must win and win quickly. The public mood is one of slight depression. The nation wants peace, though not at the price of defeat, but every new theatre of operations brings worry and concern.’ A young translator at the Soviet Embassy in Berlin, Valentin Berezhkov, recorded a notable experience during his confinement with the rest of his delegation after the outbreak of war. He was befriended by a middle-aged SS officer named Heinemann, who took him out to a café for a drink, where they were embarrassed to be joined by six other SS men. Heinemann hastily covered himself by saying that his guest was a relation of his wife’s, engaged in secret work that he could not discuss.

They talked about the war for a while, until the SS officers declared a toast to ‘Our victory.’ Berezhkov raised his glass ‘To
our
victory’ without attracting unwelcome attention. Heinemann was desperately anxious that his son, who had just joined the SS, should not perish in Russia, and was also short of cash to fund medical treatment for his wife. Berezhkov gave him a thousand marks from the Embassy safe, knowing that the Russians would not be allowed to take large sums with them when they were repatriated. At their parting Heinemann, who helped to organise the mission’s eventual evacuation in the exchange of Moscow and Berlin diplomats, gave the Russian a signed photo of himself, saying, ‘It may so happen that some time or other I’ll have to refer to the service I rendered to the Soviet Embassy. I hope it won’t be forgotten.’ The two never heard of each other again, but Berezhkov always wondered if the German, even though an SS officer, secretly apprehended his nation’s defeat in Russia.