Ostkrieg (35 page)

In a strict sense, no plan yet existed for the coordinated murder of Europe's Jews, although, since October, Heydrich had been sending reports to various ministries in the Berlin bureaucracy both to acquaint them with the ongoing annihilation of Soviet Jewry and to prepare the ground for their eventual cooperation. To that end, Heydrich had on 29 November sent out invitations to those in the civilian bureaucracies most concerned with Jewish policy for a conference to be held on 9 December to clarify matters. The worsening military situation forced
a postponement of the meeting, and not until 20 January did Heydrich convene the conference, with lunch included, at a confiscated Jewish villa on the Wannsee, a large lake on the outskirts of Berlin. In the meantime, Hitler and other top Nazis had not been idle. In the two days following his speech to party leaders, Hitler and Himmler had a flurry of meetings with Philipp Bouhler and Viktor Brack, the key figures in the euthanasia organization, securing the extensive use of euthanasia personnel in the solution to the Jewish question. Himmler also expressed a new sense of urgency, stressing to Brack, “One must work as quickly as possible.” Then, in a meeting with Alfred Rosenberg on the sixteenth, Hitler remarked that the Jews “had brought the war down on us, they had started all the destruction, so it should come as no surprise if they became its first victims.” Time and again in these momentous mid-December days, Hitler referred to the retribution that would be visited on world Jewry for its alleged anti-German activities and responsibility for the war. The Jews having lost their role as hostages who might deter American entry into the war, nothing now stood in the way of their mass annihilation.
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Back from Berlin, Hans Frank on 16 December conveyed to his subordinates in the General Government the attitude at the top: “The Jews will disappear. . . . We must destroy the Jews wherever we find them. . . . But what is going to happen to these Jews? Do you imagine there will be settlement villages for them . . . ? In Berlin we were told . . . : Liquidate them yourselves!” As if to confirm Frank's assessment, in a reply on 18 December to an official inquiry from Reichskommissariat Ostland asking whether all Jews were to be liquidated, Berlin indicated: “Clarity on the Jewish question has been achieved through oral discussion: economic interests are to be disregarded . . . in the settlement of this problem.” That same day, Himmler, following a meeting with Hitler, expressed clearly in his appointment book what that meant: “Jewish question/to be exterminated as partisans.”
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By the time of the Wannsee Conference, then, none of the participants harbored any doubts about the fate of the Jews: what they were to organize and prepare was not a resettlement operation but the deportation and systematic destruction of Europe's Jews. Although Heydrich referred to using Jewish labor to build roads in the east, during which project a large number would die from overwork and starvation (which, in fact, was already occurring in Polish Galicia), the idea of annihilating Jews through forced labor after a victorious war had given way to the recognition that the Jews would be destroyed during the war, and not in the Soviet Union but in the newly created death camps in Poland. “Practical
experiences,” Heydrich mentioned cryptically, were being gathered that would be of great significance for the “imminent” Final Solution. Heydrich had been quite pleased at the outcome of the meeting. He had anticipated difficulties, but, instead, his authority had been recognized, no objections had been raised to the extermination of the Jews, the state secretaries of the relevant bureaucracies were enthusiastic about doing their part, and the basic outline for the practical implementation of the Final Solution had been agreed on. Not all the details had been settled, and the methods and techniques being experimented with were still untried on a large scale, but no one at the conference could doubt the ultimate goal: every Jew in Europe was to be killed.
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The gas chambers at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz did not begin operation until March 1942, and not until July would large-scale deportations from Western Europe begin, but the key decision about the fate of the Jews had been taken. Until the summer of 1941, the Nazi leadership had envisioned the solution to its self-imposed Jewish problem through emigration, expulsion, and resettlement, only to be frustrated at every turn. With the magnitude of the problem increased through territorial conquest in Russia, military success itself led to a further radicalization: the Jews of the Soviet Union would be shot where they were found, with the fate of the remainder of the European Jews left hanging. By mid-October, the expectation of imminent victory led to the ultimate radicalization: no European Jews were to be allowed to escape what would now not be a slow death through hunger, disease, and harsh labor. Instead, the goal would be the immediate physical destruction of the Jews even as the war continued, as the regional killing operations were merged into a comprehensive program of systematic mass murder. The decision was not made all at once but instead reflected a process of incremental radicalization within which Hitler often responded to, and approved, the initiatives of his subordinates. But, for the ultimate step to mass murder, both Hitler's authorization and the context of the war were vital. On 30 January 1942, just ten days after the Wannsee Conference, Hitler spoke before a packed house at the Sportpalast, where he once again referred to his prophecy. The war, he declared, “can only end either with the extermination of the Aryan peoples or the disappearance of Jewry from Europe.” He thought, however, that the war would not end as the Jews imagined: “The result of this war will be the annihilation of Jewry. For the first time the old Jewish law will now be applied: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. . . . And the hour will come when the most evil world-enemy of all time will have played out its role.”
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The Wehrmacht had invaded the Soviet Union as the vanguard of a regime with
murderous intentions; Barbarossa had now become a war of annihilation in the fullest sense.

The genocidal process now set in motion came, ironically, just at the moment the German attack passed the culmination point, the crucial stage at which an offensive degenerates into nothing more than a dangerous gamble vulnerable to enemy counterattack. In late October, the OKW estimated the actual fighting power of the 136 divisions in the Ostheer to be the equivalent of only 83 divisions; moreover, the morale and combat strength of individual soldiers and units had also declined perceptibly. Having already conceded that the war against the Soviet Union would continue into 1942, the Germans now sought primarily to weaken the enemy to such an extent that he could not recover and to gain favorable jumping-off positions for the spring offensive. In order to weaken the enemy decisively, however, the Germans had to capture key railway lines and armament centers, which meant that even the minimum goals—reaching Voroshilovgrad, Ivanov, Yaroslavl, and Rybinsk—were ambitious, if not completely unattainable given the parlous state of the Ostheer. The maximum goals set by Halder—advancing to Maikop, Stalingrad, Gorky, and Vologda in order to seize the oil fields of the Caucasus and the armaments centers of the interior while cutting the transport routes for Lend-Lease supplies—were so utterly unrealistic that they bordered on the delusional.
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Bock, in fact, vigorously opposed Halder's aims, telling the latter, “The objectives . . . surely cannot be reached before winter, because we no longer have the required forces and because it is impossible to supply those forces.” To Bock, the only realistic remaining operational goal was a line along the Moskva River and the Moscow-Volga Canal (i.e., the western outskirts of Moscow) since the reduced strength of the army group made any encirclement of the city unlikely. Moreover, the supply situation necessitated a staggered advance of individual armies rather than a unified strike against the capital, even though Bock knew that the only chance for success lay in a concentrated thrust. More worrisome, if anything went amiss, Bock did not believe that the front as it then stood could be defended. His doubts, in fact, highlighted the key question of how to proceed: whether it was best to stop early, conserve strength, and rebuild for the following spring or press ahead in an attempt to achieve the maximum disruptive effect in the time left for campaigning.
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In order to discuss these options, Halder convened a conference of chiefs of staff of the army groups and armies at Orsha on 13 November. Desperately hoping for six more weeks of suitable weather that would allow
major operations to be carried out, he posed the question of the extent to which the next year's offensive could be prepared through further winter advances. Like Hitler, he clearly intended one last great effort to achieve the maximum possible effect. He found himself opposed virtually across the board by staff officers who, concerned about the sheer survival of the Ostheer, stressed that the serious deficiencies in manpower and supplies, the imminent physical and psychological collapse of the troops, and the lack of winter clothing and equipment ruled out any further large-scale offensives. Even the limited attack on Moscow proposed by Bock's chief of staff, a direct thrust without any broad envelopment of the city, involved major risks that made success highly unlikely. Despite this uniformly bleak picture, however, Halder demanded that the attack on Moscow proceed and that all the army groups push on until mid-December. When pressed a few days later by a member of the quartermaster-general's office who pointed out that it would be impossible to supply Army Group Center even as far as the Moskva River, Halder replied, “Your calculations are certainly correct, but we should not like to stand in Bock's way if he thinks he can succeed; you also need a little bit of luck in war.”
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Amazingly, German operational assessments had been reduced to the hope for a streak of gambler's good fortune, hardly an adequate response at such a critical moment, especially in view of the condition of German forces.

Having from the outset of planning argued for the key importance of Moscow, and having done everything he could operationally to force a decision there, Halder now seemed compelled to push on, despite all available information indicating that the attack would miscarry. In spite of the failure of earlier encirclement battles to cripple the Red Army, he still sought to destroy its vital fighting strength at Moscow. Perhaps one more tactical success, the capture of the enemy's capital, would produce a Soviet collapse, just as a little over a year earlier the fall of Paris had achieved just such decisive results. The conviction was general, after all, that the Soviets were making a last effort and that the stronger will would prevail. “We are not doing too well,” Halder summed up the situation, “but the Russians are doing far worse!” This attitude meant that the OKH did not attach much importance to reports indicating the transfer of fresh Soviet units from the Far East to Moscow. Instead, it simply placed its hopes in the superiority of its own soldiers. This inaccurate assessment of Soviet strength fueled a further consideration, one replete with historical significance. The Army High Command feared a repeat of the battle at the Marne in September 1914, when the fight was prematurely abandoned and an imminent strategic victory thrown away. A final
effort seemed mandatory in view of the proximity of the enemy's capital and the presumed weakness of his forces; having squandered possible victory in an earlier war through a failure of will, army commanders would not now repeat the same mistake. After all, aid from the Anglo-Americans might enable Stalin to recoup his losses, just as France had recovered in 1914. A final effort thus seemed mandatory, even though Bock was ambivalent (as were others) and displayed little optimism about a possible triumph.
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Political calculations also played a role, for the mood in Germany had darkened considerably since the heady days of early October when Hitler had confidently predicted imminent victory. By November, people had begun to wonder whether it would be possible to end the war at all; a peace with Stalin seemed hardly possible, nor could Germany, in view of its limited manpower, reasonably expect to occupy all of the Soviet Union. Moreover, the lack of official announcements was disturbing. After hearing that the bulk of the Red Army had been destroyed and that German troops had advanced to within forty miles of Moscow, the German people found that reports suddenly stopped. Goebbels, in fact, had already begun shifting German propaganda from an emphasis on when Germany would win to the more important topic of how the war would end: “If we win, then we have won everything. . . . If we lose . . . we have lost all.” A triumph at Moscow was necessary to restore optimism at home and the old conviction that the Wehrmacht was invincible. As a result, the OKH ignored warnings from the front such as that from General Sodenstern, the chief of staff of Army Group South, who cautioned at the end of October: “It is no longer possible to mitigate the situation by saying: ‘It will be all right, it has always been all right up to now despite frequent reports that the troops cannot go on any longer.' There comes a time when—physically—they really cannot go on any longer. . . . I believe that this point has now . . . been reached.”
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With time short, and facing the imminent transfer on 18 November of part of Luftflotte 2 to the Mediterranean, Army Group Center hastened preparations to resume the offensive. As it was considered virtually impossible to envelop Moscow, the plan now called for the Ninth Army and the Third Panzergruppe in the north to advance to the Volga reservoir and the Moscow-Volga Canal, then turn south toward the capital. In the center, the Fourth Panzergruppe and elements of the left wing of the Fourth Army would strike toward the northwest suburbs of Moscow, although Kluge opposed the idea of attacking with his right wing. To the south, the Second Panzer Army was to swing north through Tula and Kolomna. The pitifully weak Second Army was to protect the
southern flank of the army group while also thrusting to the Don and capturing Voronezh, even though it could expect no help from the Sixth Army of Army Group South. Even this limited attack, which Bock dismissed as “no great strategic masterpiece,” had little chance of success since the mobile forces on the wings were too weak to meet at Moscow and the troops to be used in the frontal assault were no longer considered capable of attack. Moreover, to succeed, the operation would have to be launched simultaneously in every sector to prevent the Russians from shifting forces to imperiled areas. The Fourth Army's inability to attack with most of its units, however, meant that it would be incapable of tying down enemy troops. Moreover, the attacking units faced crippling shortages of men and materiel, with infantry companies down to fifty to sixty men. Since the start of Operation Typhoon, Army Group Center had suffered 87,000 casualties, which brought its total to nearly 317,000 men, or almost half of all the casualties in the Ostheer to date. Despite this, the army group had received no replacements since the beginning of October and had been forced to transfer four divisions. In literally throwing his last battalion into the battle in hopes of tipping the balance, Bock had to remind his commanders at the outset that they were on their own since the army group had only a single division in reserve.
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