Let the reader spend a moment or two studying the very simplified map I have prepared. Further on, in my operational narrative, there are more than forty situation maps from the archives. Here is the picture of the Barbarossa assault in a nutshell.
Line A was our main effort, or jump-off line in Poland. It was about five hundred miles long, running north and south from the Baltic Sea to the Carpathian Mountains. (There was also a holding action out of Rumania, intended to safeguard the Ploesti oil fields.)
Line C was our goal. Almost two thousand miles long, it ran from Archangel, on the White Sea, south to Kazan and then along the Volga to the Caspian Sea. Its farthest objectives were about twelve hundred miles from the starting point.
Line B was as far as we got in December 1941. The line runs from Leningrad on the Gulf of Finland, down through Moscow to the Crimea on the Black Sea, falling just short of Rostov on the Don. It is nearly twelve hundred miles long, and more than six hundred miles from where we started. We were apparently stopped by the Russians, therefore, about halfway. But that is not really so. We were halted at the last moment, in the last ditch.
The Attack Concept
During the spring of 1941, our intelligence reported that the Red Army was massing in the west, near the line cutting Poland in two. This menacing pileup of armed Slavs threatened to inundate Europe with Bolshevism. It was a main reason for the Führer’s decision to launch his preventive war, and certainly justified all our earlier planning.
This menacing disposition of Stalin’s forces nevertheless pleased us, because he was giving up the great Russian advantage of maneuvering space, and crowding the Red Army within reach of a quick knockout blow. Stalin was superior both in numbers and equipment. Our best information was that we would be marching with about one hundred fifty divisions against perhaps two hundred, with about thirty-two hundred tanks against as many as ten thousand, and with an unknown disadvantage in aircraft. Obviously, then, our hope lay in superior training, leadership, soldiers, and machines, and in the swift decisive exploitation of surprise. After Finland, this seemed a reasonable risk.
The strategic aim of Barbarossa was to shatter the Soviet state in one colossal summer stroke, and to reduce its fragments to disarmed socialist provinces garrisoned and ruled by Germany, from the Polish border to the Volga. The primitive land east of the Volga, the frozen Siberian deserts and the empty forests beyond the Urals, could then be cordoned off or taken at leisure. From those remote areas no existing bomber could reach Germany, a vital factor to consider.
Operationally, we expected to break through the thick crust at the western border with three huge simultaneous lightning attacks—two to the north of the marshland, one to the south—and encircle and mop up the broken forces within a couple of weeks. Thus, the main bulk of the Red Army would cease to exist almost at the outset.
This we estimated we could do; but we knew that would not be the end. We realized the enemy would maintain heavy reserve forces between the borders and Moscow, and that at some point these forces would dig in. We also knew that the stolid Slav fights best in defense of his fatherland. We therefore expected, and planned for, a second big central campaign during the first part of July, probably in the region behind the Dnieper-Dvina line, to round up and destroy these reserve forces. Finally, we expected that as we penetrated to the line Leningrad-Moscow-Sevastopol, we would encounter a last-ditch surge of Russian resistance (as we did), including a levee en masse of the populations of the capital and the other big industrial cities lying along this spinal column of the Soviet Union. Once we broke that spine, nothing lay beyond, in our judgment, to the Archangel-Volga line which was our goal, except for a gigantic mop-up of a panic-stricken population, with perhaps some minor partisan warfare.
This was, of course, a difficult undertaking, a gamble against odds. The battlefield was Soviet Russia itself, a funnel-shaped landmass five hundred miles wide at one end, seventeen hundred miles wide at the other. The northward slope of the funnel lay along the Baltic and the White seas; the southward slope, along the Carpathian Mountains and the Black Sea. Our forces had to fan out into the vast level monotony of the Russian plain, stretching our lines of communication and thinning our front as we went. This we expected, but we were surprised by the primitiveness of the roads and the wildness of the countryside. Here our intelligence was faulty. This was not terrain suited for blitzkrieg. In fact, the very inefficiency and low standards of Communist Russia proved a formidable defensive factor. They had not troubled to build decent highways, and their railroad beds were defective and—deliberately, of course—of a different gauge than ours.
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TRANSLATOR’S NOTE:In Roon’s view, German staff plans for attacks on other countries are always defensive and hypothetical; but the other fellow always does something stupid or evil that triggers off the plan. Historians still debate Stalin’s intentions in 1941, but it seems he had no offensive plans. The Soviets were frightened to death of the Germans, and did everything possible, to the last moment, to appease them and keep them from attacking.—V.H.
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Cutting the Pie
Barbarossa clicked from the start, despite various problems. All along the front, we achieved surprise. This will remain a supreme wonder in the annals of warfare. Guderian records how German artillerymen around Brest-Litovsk, poised to start a barrage on the unsuspecting Bolsheviks before dawn, watched the last Russian supply train chug faithfully out of the Soviet Union into our sector of Poland. Nothing could show more clearly how Stalin and his henchmen were fooled by the Führer’s adroit politics. Western writers now call this a “perfidious attack,” as though, at the outset of a struggle to the death, Germany could afford parlor-game niceties.
With this advantage in hand, Barbarossa proceeded according to plan. The Luftwaffe caught the enormous frontline Red air force on the ground and wiped it out in a few hours. In the center and in the north our armored pincers advanced by timetable, with the infantry rolling forward in their support. Six days saw us in Minsk and at the Dvina, bagging nearly half a million prisoners and thousands of guns and tanks. Only in the south did Rundstedt encounter some real resistance. Elsewhere, the Red Army was like a huge thrashing body without a head. Stalin was invisible and silent, paralyzed in the throes of melancholia.
Two more weeks, and a second vast armored encirclement had closed around Smolensk, two-thirds of the way along the main Moscow road. In the north we had overrun the Baltic states, turning the Baltic into a German lake, and were rapidly approaching Leningrad through wild terrain. Rundstedt’s drive in the south had picked up steam and was nearing Kiev. We had rounded up several hundred thousand more prisoners. The Russians fought bravely and stubbornly in little pockets, but operationally we were no longer encountering the organized resistance of a national force. According to all reports from the field and the picture developing at Supreme Headquarters, we had once again won a war—or, more exactly, a grand police action—in three weeks, and were engaged in mop-up: Poland, France, and now the Soviet Union.
Of course, such a massive advance had taken its toll of men, supplies, and wear and tear on machines. A pause for consolidation ensued, lasting to mid-August. Some writers claim this was a “fatal display of irresolution,” but they obviously know nothing of logistics. This pause was part of our original timetable. Far from being irresolute, the Wehrmacht, triumphant from the Baltic to the Black Sea, regrouped and tooled up in a flush of victorious excitement, which can still make the blood tingle in old soldiers who remember.
As the staff man familiar with the smallest details of Barbarossa, I was present at the famous conference at the Wolf’s Lair Headquarters on July 16, when Hitler, sweeping both hands over his table map, exultantly told Göring, Rosenberg, Bormann, and other high Party brass, “Essentially, the point now is to slice up this gigantic pie for our purposes, in order to be able:
First, to dominate it,
Second, to administer it, and
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Third, to exploit it!”
I can still see the radiant smile on Hitler’s puffy, unhealthy face as he held up fingers to count, and the touch of hectic red that victory had brought to his wan cheeks. After the conference ended, he talked informally of disbanding forty divisions in September, in order to send the men back to the factories. He wanted to reduce tank and gun production, in favor of a swift air and sea building program for the final crushing of England and the end of the war. All this made plain common sense, and not one voice was raised in objection. From the visible facts in the field, the eastern campaign had been won.
The Critiques
Armchair strategists have the advantage not only of hindsight, but of being irresponsible. Nobody really cares what they think. The contest is over, and nothing hinges on their opinions. They are just consuming ink and paper, which are cheap. Before the event, however, every decision in war involves the lives of soldiers, perhaps the national existence itself. It is unwise to dismiss out of hand, long afterward, the judgments of the men in the field who had to do the job. But this caution is seldom exercised in critiques of Barbarossa.
Three fallacious objections to our campaign crop up over and over. They contradict each other, but that does not stop the critics from using one, or two, or all three. It is alleged:
First, that our invasion of the Soviet Union was doomed to fail, no matter how many military victories were won, because a small patch of Europe like Germany, with eighty million inhabitants, could not hope to hold down vast Russia with close to two hundred millions;
Second, that Hitler’s harsh treatment of the Russian inhabitants was fatuous, because they would otherwise have welcomed us with open arms and helped to overthrow the hated Communist regime. In this connection, the old story of village women coming to greet the German invaders with flowers, or with bread and salt, is invariably trotted out;
Third, that the plan made the classic error of seeking territorial or economic objectives, instead of concentrating on destroying the enemy’s armed forces.
Very well. To the first point, I reply that a glance at the world map shows that a tiny island like England, peopled by thirty or forty million, could not possibly have ruled South Africa, India, Canada, and Australia, with almost half a billion inhabitants. Nevertheless, for a long time, England did. Moreover, these subject lands were not contiguous, but thousands of miles away, at the end of thread-thin lines of sea communication. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, was in land communication with Germany, directly under our guns.
These critics forget that the Soviet Union in the first instance was the creation of a small extremist party of Bolsheviks, who overthrew the regime and seized control of a population ten thousand times as numerous as themselves, a conglomerate of many nationalities. Or that a small ferocious Mongolian invader, the Golden Horde, actually did rule the Slav masses for more than a century. In short, these critics know nothing of the history of conquest, or the techniques of military administration, especially with modern communications and equipment. Had we conquered the Soviet Union, we would have administered it. We did quite well in the provinces we held for years.
The second contention of course contradicts the first. If we could not hold down the Russians in any case, what would we have gained by an easy policy toward them? It would only have hastened the day of our overthrow. But this criticism rests on an absurd misconception of the entire nature of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union. This was, in the strictest sense, a war to the death.
History had come to a turn. There were two strong industrial powers left on the Eurasian landmass, and only two. They faced each other. They were dedicated to totally different revolutionary ideologies. If Bolshevism were to triumph, Germany as we knew it had to die. If German National Socialism prevailed, there was no room on this heartland for an independent, armed, menacing Bolshevik nation far bigger than the Reich.
The Green Folder
Much has been made of “The Green Folder,” the master policy directive for the economic exploitation of conquered Russia, prepared by Economic Staff East under Göring. At the Nuremberg trials, I established that I had no part in drawing up this administrative plan, since my responsibilities were operational.
The proposals of the Green Folder were, without question, draconic. They meant the death by starvation of tens of millions of Russians. Göring admitted as much, and the documents are spread on the record, so denying this is absurd. Nor would there be either sense or profit in attempting to prove the “morality” of the Green Folder. However, certain observations of a military nature may be in order.
The Green Folder scheme rested on a plain geographic fact. The fertile “black belt” region of southern Russia feeds not only itself and its own industries, but the whole industrial complex to the north. Northern Russia has always been a scrubby, impoverished area, where bad weather and bad soil combine to create a permanent deficit of foodstuffs. The Green Folder proposed a drastic levy on the corn, meats, coal, oil, fats, hides, and factory products of the south, for the purposes of maintaining our armies in the field and our strained German folk at home. The plan was to feed the southern Slavs a minimum caloric intake, so that they could keep up production. But Germany’s need for so much of Russia’s produce would naturally create a food shortage on a large scale. A serious wastage of the northern Russian population had to be accepted as a result.
Perhaps our administrative plan for Russia was less “moral” than the Americans’ extirpation of the red race and the seizure from them of the richest lands on earth. Perhaps it lacked the religious high-mindedness with which the Spaniards sacked Mexico and South America and destroyed the fascinating Inca and Aztec civilizations. And possibly, in some way not very clear to this writer, the British subjugation of India, or the commercial spoliation of China by all the European colonialists plus the United States, were nicer and more moral programs than the proposals in the Green Folder. But the unprejudiced reader must never forget that, in the German world-philosophical view, Russia was our India.
We Germans have always lacked the singular Anglo-Saxon gift for cloaking self-interest in pious moral attitudes. We honestly say what we think, and thus invariably shock the tender sensibilities of Western politicians and writers. Adolf Hitler was a world-historical individual; that much is now a settled fact. He presented the German nation with a world-historical goal. World-historical changes are, as Hegel taught, far beyond the petty limits of morality. They are revelations of God’s will. Perhaps in the vast effort and the vast tragedy of Germany, Providence had a dark design that will become clear to later generations. The Green Folder was an integral part of that effort. By world-philosophical considerations, it was the just act of a people seeking to strike out new paths in mankind’s endless Faustian journey.
In the light of these ideas, the argument that we should have treated the Ukrainians and other Slavs nicely, so that they would help us overthrow their Communist rulers, becomes clearly ridiculous. Germany, a nation as poor as it was powerful, could not continue the war without confiscating the food of southern Russia. Was it to be expected that the Slavs would accept impoverishment, forced labor, and the death of millions by starvation, without a really serious revolt, unless their spirit had been broken from the start, and unless they had seen nothing in prospect but an iron fist and the firing squad if they did not labor and obey? Adolf Hitler said that the only way to administer southern Russia was to shoot anybody who made a wry face. He had a harsh way of putting things sometimes, but what he said in such matters seldom lacked realism.
Finally, it must be pointed out that the Green Folder administration scheme never became a reality, since we failed to conquer the Soviet Union. It was a hypothetical plan that could not be put into practice. The stress placed on it at the Nuremberg trials therefore seems highly excessive and distorted.
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TRANSLATOR’S NOTE:Roon’s philosophical defense of the Green Folder—possibly the
cruelest set of administrative plans ever put on paper—will no doubt be indigestible to the average reader in the United States. However, it was when I read this passage that I decided to translate World Empire Lost.—V.H.
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The Turn South
Basing themselves largely upon Guderian, many writers further maintain that Hitler lost the war in mid-July, after our amazing three-week advance to Smolensk—two-thirds of the way to Moscow—by ordering Guderian’s panzer armies southward to help Rundstedt close the Kiev pocket, instead of allowing him to drive on. The contention is that precious weeks were thereby lost and the armored equipment became excessively worn, so that the punch was taken out of the final assault on the capital.
There are several gaping holes in this “Turn South” critique. First of all, the closing of the Kiev pocket east of the Dnieper was the greatest military land victory in the history of mankind. At a blow, Germany killed or captured armed forces and equipment equal to almost half the entire Wehrmacht force with which she began the invasion of the Soviet Union! It is a little hard to dismiss such a mighty triumph as a “tactical diversion.” With this victory, we won secure possession of the riches of southern Russia, which alone enabled us to fight on in the years ahead and to come close to winning. We secured the breadbasket, the industrial basin, and the fuel reserve, which Germany had sought for so long, and which was the whole pivot of Adolf Hitler’s politics.