Ostkrieg (16 page)

In 1941, as in 1914, Germany was essentially a European continental power striving to become a world power, in both instances firm in the belief that a daring operational plan would accomplish the goal. The failure of the Schlieffen Plan in 1914 had sobered a generation of officers, until the brilliant success of May and June 1940 raised the notion of blitzkrieg from a tactical idea to a war-winning doctrine. Seduced by the myth of blitzkrieg into again believing that they could conquer the resources necessary for the breakthrough to world power, German leaders hoped to solve their conundrum through another gamble. Just one more triumph, they sensed, would provide the nation the means, still lacking despite the previous success, to conduct war at the next level. In this, they resembled a gambler hoping that one more successful throw of the dice would enable him to cover his past debts and finance future operations and harboring the false belief that he has figured out a foolproof scheme to beat the odds and break the bank.

The war that began on 22 June 1941, however, was more than just a gamble. It was, in a very real sense, Hitler's war, the showdown with Jewish-Bolshevism he had sought since the 1920s. His failure to subdue Great Britain meant that it had not come about under the conditions he preferred, but he decided to take advantage of the favorable circumstances of the moment both to secure living space for Germany and to free it from the strategic impasse into which his policy had plunged the nation. Hitler had long accepted the risks involved in his attempt to overturn the global balance of power and break the bonds he saw shackling Germany. Once committed to this policy, he had no choice but to strike fast and hard in an attempt to seize and retain the initiative. The risk of a new war, which he and his military advisers expected to be short, appeared more tolerable than doing nothing and allowing the Anglo-American powers to build up their resources for another contest of attrition. In any case, as Hitler well understood, the areas already conquered by Germany were unsuitable to sustain a material war, so conquest of European Russia was necessary to provide a decisive way out of the Reich's economic dilemma. Moreover, for Hitler, military-political strategy was inseparably intertwined with racial ideology. The realization of Lebensraum in the east and the final confrontation with the ideological and racial enemies of Germany had formed the core of Hitler's program for two decades, so the Führer was being pushed by circumstances in the direction he always intended to go. The threat posed by the emerging Anglo-American alliance only made this aim more necessary and urgent.
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The decision for war against the Soviet Union thus came, as Jürgen Förster has emphasized, not as a result of England's intransigence, but despite it. Even if Great Britain had made peace, Hitler would still have pursued war in Russia, for his ideology made no sense otherwise. As early as February 1939, he had stressed to his army commanders that the next war “would be a pure war of ideologies, that is, consciously a national and racial war.” Brauchitsch, conveying Hitler's ideas to his top commanders, declared in November 1939, “Racial war has broken out [that] will decide who will rule in Europe and the world.” In Hitler's eyes, the final goal, the racial restructuring of Europe, determined from the beginning the methods, with the result that, in the war against the Jewish-Bolshevik deadly enemy, means and ends were identical. The purpose of Operation Barbarossa was not merely the winning of territory for Germany but the final reckoning with Jewish-Bolshevism. As such, victory was more important than morality. When, after the German assault, Stalin responded in kind on 3 July 1941, declaring the struggle
against Germany to be a merciless, life-and-death people's war, Hitler now had what he had long dreamed of, “the chance to exterminate that which is opposed to us.”
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From the beginning, the concept of annihilation constituted an integral part of Operation Barbarossa, as the planning for occupation policy and the formation of the Einsatzgruppen demonstrated. In Hitler's view, military operations and SS actions would fuse into a unique dynamic of destruction. Despite a few rumblings, the belief in an unbridgeable racial and ideological chasm between Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia was accepted by virtually all in the army command. The lack both of opposition to the planned measures of the SS and of any outcry at the hunger policy demonstrated their integration into the National Socialist worldview. The special character of the war in the east was self-evident. Hitler had once boasted, “We have only to kick in the front door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down,” a statement that expressed well his destructive vision. With the commencement of Operation Barbarossa, he now more accurately predicted, “The world will hold its breath.”
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The night of 21–22 June, Goebbels noted in his diary, was oppressively hot and humid, and he worried, with no hint of irony, that “our troops will not have it easy in battle.” At the front, it was not the heat but rather the nervous anticipation that burdened many—most—of the men. Those in the first wave studied maps, surveyed the terrain in front of them, prepared their weapons, reviewed their tasks, and looked anxiously for any sign of enemy activity. Some expected quick victory; a few pondered the example of Napoléon; most were unenthusiastic but determined to do their duty. An unnatural silence hung over the front; movements had halted, vehicles were quiet, and men spoke in hushed tones. With muted voices officers read the Führer's rather pedestrian appeal to small groups of troops, ending with the portentous words: “Soldiers of the eastern front, you are about to enter a difficult and all important struggle. The fate of Europe, the future of the German Reich, the existence of our people henceforth lie in your hands.” The troops stood silently and seriously. For some dawn would bring their baptism of fire, for others their last passage. Then, again in silence, with no talking and no clanking of equipment to betray their movement, the men entered their jumping-off positions. The silence, now an inward muteness, was stifling. Then, at 3:15
A.M
. on the morning of 22 June, exactly 129 years after Napoléon had launched his invasion of Russia, the entire thousand-mile front from the Baltic to the Black Sea erupted: a thunderous cascade of artillery fire, tank engines roaring as they jolted into action, waves of droning aircraft filling the sky, the clatter of machine-gun fire, the sharp burst of mortars and hand grenades, and the earth rumbling and shaking amid the shrill shouts of racing men released from an almost unbearable nervous tension.
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Deploying over 3 million men, 3,600 tanks, 600,000 motorized
vehicles (as well as 625,000 horses), 7,000 artillery pieces, and 2,500 aircraft (a number that was actually smaller than that employed during the invasion of France), the Germans had launched the largest military operation in history. Just as Friedrich Barbarossa over seven hundred years earlier had taken up a crusade against the Muslim presence in the Holy Land, so Hitler now launched his own crusade against the Jewish-Bolshevik menace. Astonishingly, the Wehrmacht found itself opposed by an even larger force: the Red Army possessed well over 5 million men, 24,000 tanks (of which almost 2,000 were new type T-34 and KV models), over 91,000 artillery pieces of all types, and over 19,000 aircraft (of which over 7,000 were based in the western districts). Given the willingness of Stalin to mobilize ruthlessly all elements of his population, the Red Army could also exploit an enormous pool of manpower to make good its losses. By contrast, the Wehrmacht could draw on a population less than half the size of its adversary and one from which the prime manpower had already been conscripted.
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As in France, the Germans again gambled on assembling all their available resources in hopes of deciding the outcome of the battle in the first few weeks. Ironically, while in 1914 the German military had overestimated the Russians and underestimated the French, in 1940–1941 it would prove to be the other way around. If France, the great foe of the First World War, had been defeated easily, the reasoning now went, the Soviet Union, weakened by communism and Stalin's irrational purges, must surely collapse at the first blow. If, however, the Red Army did not disintegrate and survived the first weeks of combat, the Wehrmacht would not have the resources to pursue and destroy it. Barring the expected Soviet collapse, the German forces were simply too small, too poorly equipped, and too badly supplied to accomplish their task of defeating the Red Army before the onset of winter.

The initial assault, however, matched German expectations of a rapid campaign. “Tactical surprise of the enemy has apparently been achieved along the entire line,” Halder noted drily in his diary. “As a result of this tactical surprise, enemy resistance directly on the border was weak and disorganized, and we succeeded everywhere.” That the Soviets had been caught unawares despite numerous warnings to Stalin throughout 1941 has long been recognized by historians, who have struggled to shed light on his seemingly erratic and illogical behavior. Most have dismissed the Soviet dictator's actions as a futile attempt at appeasement of Hitler, while a few have argued that he actually intended a preventive strike against Germany but that the Führer simply beat him to the punch. In reality, a complex mix of factors influenced Stalin's assessment of the
situation, with the relative significance assigned to them largely depending on the perspective of the observer. The most common interpretation, that Stalin simply could not bring himself to believe the warnings or believed them to be an attempt by the British to draw the Soviet Union into the war, have focused on Russian weaknesses. The purge of the Red Army in the late 1930s that resulted in a decimation of the officer corps, the poor performance against Finland that seemed to confirm Soviet military haplessness, the seeming constant reorganization that left the Red Army in a state of disarray, the prompt delivery of food and raw materials to Germany: all these indicated to many observers a policy of abject appeasement.
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Stalin's actions and decisions can be considered from another perspective, however, one that, if not absolving the Soviet dictator, both better illuminates his view of the situation and sheds significant light on the scale of the task facing the Germans. Although still guilty of miscalculations, Stalin, in this view, acted largely from a sense of strength rather than weakness. Thus, he almost certainly understood that Germany would attack; the key questions in his mind were when and where. On numerous occasions, he had dismissed notions that Hitler would launch an attack on the Soviet Union with the (not incorrect) observation that Germany did not have the resources to win a two-front war and, thus, would not risk starting one. He expected that Germany would end the war in the west before entering any conflict with Russia. In the spring of 1941, he most feared being drawn into the war through British duplicity or being the victim of a sudden peace between Germany and England. The flight of Rudolf Hess to England, which most historians dismiss as merely a bizarre episode, appeared to him to raise the prospect of just such a peace. As late as 1944, Stalin still maintained to Churchill that Hess had been involved in a plot to organize a joint Anglo-German crusade against Russia. “All believed,” recalled Maxim Litvinov, “that the British fleet was steaming up the North Sea for a joint attack, with Hitler, on Leningrad and Kronstadt.”
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Given previous German behavior toward its intended victims, Stalin also thought that any military action would be preceded by an ultimatum, which would provide time for a Soviet military response. This assumption was important since from the mid-1930s Soviet military doctrine had stressed the notion of quickly transferring a war to the enemy's territory. The task of defense, then, involved absorbing the attacker's initial blow on the frontier while establishing the preconditions necessary to wrest the initiative away through a counteroffensive. Unknown to Stalin, however, Hitler intended to act differently this time, as Goebbels noted in
his diary on 16 June: “We will take a completely different approach than usual . . . : we will not polemicize in the press, we will wrap everything in deepest silence and simply attack on X-day.” Still, in anticipation of a possible German attack at some point, and in accordance with Red Army doctrine, Stalin had ordered large numbers of Soviet troops to the border areas.
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This concentration of force was also intended as a deterrent to any German attack. In early April, when Soviet intelligence had identified only seventy-two German divisions on the border facing over three hundred Red Army divisions, Stalin's brash reply to rumors of a German attack, “Let them try it,” seemed appropriate. Similarly, Stalin rejected a mid-May proposal by Timoshenko and Zhukov to launch a preemptive strike against Germany, arguing that mobilization for such an action might provoke the very attack he thought he could avoid. Since the Wehrmacht deliberately brought units in at the last moment so as to avoid detection, Stalin's exchange with Timoshenko and Zhukov on the night of 13–14 June also revealed confidence rather than weakness. When Timoshenko requested that more units be moved into the border areas, Stalin refused, then asked how many divisions were in place already. When told 149, he replied, “Well, isn't that enough? . . . According to our information the Germans do not have so many troops.” At roughly the same time, Molotov expressed similar confidence in Russian strength, telling an associate, “Only a fool would attack us.”
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From these and other such statements, the conclusion can be only that, although Stalin and the Soviet High Command were aware of the German military buildup, they thought that they had more than matched it and were, thus, acting from a position of strength, not weakness. Stalin's miscalculation, then, was believing that the Germans would be deterred by these massive Russian forces. His angry remark to Churchill in late 1943—“I did not need any warnings. I knew war would come, but I thought I might gain another six months or so”—was in line with his expectations that Hitler could not wrap up the war with England before 1942 and would not dare launch an assault on Russia in late June. Undone by an odd combination of intense suspicion and rational calculation, Stalin feared stumbling into war through outside provocations but at the same time could not bring himself to believe that Hitler would disregard the evidence of Soviet strength and risk a two-front war. The mood of confusion and anxiety noted by Zhukov on 21 June reflected a man struggling to make sense of the inexplicable.
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