Hitler asked Goebbels about public opinion. The Propaganda Minister replied that people believed that relations with the Soviet Union were still sound, but would be behind the regime ‘when we call on them’. He pointed out that the veil of secrecy had meant an entirely different approach to that previously deployed. Pamphlets were now being produced en masse by printers and packers who were confined to the Propaganda Ministry until the invasion took place. In fact, Goebbels was less in touch with opinion than he imagined. Given the extent of the military build-up in the eastern provinces of the Reich, it was hardly surprising that rumours had been rife for weeks about an imminent conflict with Russia.268 Even so, the concealment was broadly successful. According to one internal report, ‘the concentration of numerous troops in the eastern areas had allowed speculation to arise that significant events were afoot there, but nevertheless probably the overwhelming proportion of the German people did not think of any warlike confrontation with the Soviet Union’.269
Goebbels himself, after his meeting with Hitler on 18 June, had been driven out of the back gate of the Reich Chancellery and through the city, ‘where people are harmlessly walking about in the rain. Happy people,’ he wrote, ‘who know nothing of all our concerns and live for the day.’270
By 18 June, 200,000 pamphlets had been printed for distribution to the troops.271 On 21 June Hitler dictated the proclamation to the German people to be read out the next day.272 Hitler was by this time looking over-tired, and was in a highly nervous state, pacing up and down, apprehensive, involving himself in the minutiae of propaganda such as the fanfares that were to be played over the radio to announce German victories.273 Goebbels was called to see him in the evening. They discussed the proclamation, to which Goebbels added a few suggestions. They marched up and down his rooms for three hours. They tried out the new fanfares for an hour. Hitler gradually relaxed somewhat. ‘The Führer is freed from a nightmare the closer the decision comes,’ noted Goebbels. ‘It’s always so with him.’ Once more Goebbels returned to the inner necessity of the coming conflict, of which Hitler had convinced himself: ‘There is nothing for it than to attack,’ he wrote, summing up Hitler’s thoughts. ‘This cancerous growth has to be burned out. Stalin will fall.’ Since July the previous year, Hitler indicated, he had worked on the preparations for what was about to take place. Now the moment had arrived. Everything had been done which could have been done. ‘The fortune of war must now decide.’ At 2.30a.m., Hitler finally decided it was time to snatch a few hours’ sleep.274 ‘Barbarossa’ was due to begin within the next hour.275
Goebbels was too nervous to follow his example. At 5.30a.m., just over two hours after the German guns had opened fire on all borders, the new Liszt fanfares sounded over German radios. Goebbels read out Hitler’s proclamation.276 It amounted to a lengthy pseudo-historical justification for German preventive action. The Jewish-Bolshevik rulers in Moscow had sought for two decades to destroy not only Germany, but the whole of Europe. Hitler had been forced, he claimed, through British encirclement policy to take the bitter step of entering the 1939 Pact.277 But since then the Soviet threat had magnified. At present there were 160 Russian divisions massed on the German borders. ‘The hour has now therefore arrived,’ Hitler declared, ‘to counter this conspiracy of the Jewish-Anglo-Saxon warmongers and the equally Jewish rulers of the Bolshevik headquarters in Moscow.’278 A slightly amended proclamation went out to the soldiers swarming over the border and marching into Russia.279
On 21 June, Hitler had at last composed a letter to his chief ally, Benito Mussolini, belatedly explaining and justifying his reasons for attacking the Soviet Union. The letter was delivered to Ciano at 3a.m. next morning, just as the attack was about to begin. Ciano had to disturb Mussolini to convey the news to him – greatly to the annoyance of the Italian dictator, who complained that the Germans told him nothing then broke his sleep to announce a fait accompli.280 Once more, the same arguments, all resting on the need to undertake a preventive strike, were rehearsed. Characteristically, Hitler underlined the dangers of waiting. Time, as always, was not on Germany’s side. The Soviet Union would be stronger in a year’s time, England – pinning its hopes on the USSR – would be even less ready for peace, and by then the mass delivery of material from the USA would be coming available. His conclusion was typical: ‘Whatever may now come, Duce, our situation cannot become worse as a result of this step; it can only improve.’ Hitler ended his letter with sentences which, as with his comments to Goebbels, give insight into his mentality on the eve of the titanic contest: ‘In conclusion, let me say one more thing, Duce. Since I struggled through to this decision, I again feel spiritually free. The partnership with the Soviet Union, in spite of the complete sincerity of the efforts to bring about a final conciliation, was nevertheless often very irksome to me, for in some way or other it seemed to me to be a break with my whole origin, my concepts, and my former obligations. I am happy now to be relieved of these mental agonies.’281
The most destructive and barbaric war in the history of mankind was beginning. It was the war that Hitler had wanted since the 1920s – the war against Bolshevism. It was the showdown. He had come to it by a roundabout route. But, finally, Hitler’s war was there: a reality.
For almost a year this war had been consciously worked towards and prepared by the German leadership. Hitler’s inability to bring Britain to the conference table had provided the spur to contemplate the bold move of a strike in the East even while the contest in the West remained unsettled. The perceived shortage of time, given the looming threat of the USA and the near-certainty of at least indirect involvement in the war through massive supplies of material if the war dragged into a further year, was the driving-force. The need to secure unlimited sources of raw materials from Soviet territory and to ensure that there would be no interruption to oil supplies from Romania was an additional central motive. Ideological considerations – the need to eradicate Bolshevism once and for all – deeply embedded in Hitler’s psyche for almost two decades, had not been the primary determinant of the timing of the showdown. But they gave it its indelible colouring, its sense not just of war, but of crusade.
Had Britain been ready to come to terms, the war against the Soviet Union would nonetheless have still gone ahead at some point – in the conditions Hitler had always hoped for. Hitler had sought the conflict. He was the main author of a war which had been a central element in his thinking for almost two decades. But when it came actually to planning, not just imagining, the showdown, the Wehrmacht leadership, including the leaders of the army, the key branch of the armed forces as regards the war in the east, had gone along with every step. They had let Hitler dictate the course of events. At no point had they seriously attempted to discourage him. On the contrary, the combination of anti-Bolshevism and gross underestimation of Soviet military capabilities had prompted army chiefs to be no less optimistic than Hitler himself about the ease with which the USSR would be defeated.
If the initial aims had been forged by strategic consideration, the ideological input had not been long in coming. Himmler and Heydrich, rapidly spotting a chance to extend their own empire and to create an entire new vast area for their racial experiments, had no difficulty in exploiting Hitler’s long-established paranoia about ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ to advance new schemes for solving ‘the Jewish problem’. By March, Hitler had laid down the parameters of a genocidal war which willing agents in the Wehrmacht as well as the SS leadership were only too ready to translate into firm guidelines for action.
The war in the East, which would decide the future of the Continent of Europe, was indeed Hitler’s war. But it was more than that. It was not inflicted by a tyrannical dictator on an unwilling country. It was acceded to, even welcomed (if in different measure and for different reasons), by all sections of the German élite, non-Nazi as well as Nazi. Large sections of the ordinary German population, too, including the millions who would fight in lowly ranks in the army, would – once t
hey had got over their initial shock – go along with the meaning Nazi propaganda imparted to the conflict, that of a ‘crusade against Bolshevism’. The more ideologically committed pro-Nazis would entirely swallow the interpretation of the war as a preventive one to avoid the destruction of western culture by the Bolshevik hordes. They fervently believed that Europe would never be liberated before ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ was utterly and completely rooted out. The path to the Holocaust, intertwined with the showdown with Bolshevism, was prefigured in such notions. The legacy of over two decades of deeply rooted, often fanatically held, feelings of hatred towards Bolshevism, fully interlaced with antisemitism, was about to be revealed in its full ferocity.
9
SHOWDOWN
‘It is thus probably no overstatement to say that the Russian campaign has been won in the space of two weeks.’
General Halder, 3 July 1941
‘The whole situation makes it increasingly plain that we have underestimated the Russian colossus.’
General Halder, 11 August 1941
‘What India was for England, the eastern territory will be for us.’
Hitler, speaking privately in the Führer Headquarters,
August 1941
At dawn on 22 June over 3 million German troops advanced over the borders and into Soviet territory. By a quirk of history, as Goebbels noted somewhat uneasily, it was exactly the same date on which Napoleon’s Grand Army had marched on Russia 129 years earlier.1 The modern invaders deployed over 3,600 tanks, 600,000 motorized vehicles (including armoured cars), 7,000 artillery pieces, and 2,500 aircraft. Not all their transport was mechanized; as in Napoleon’s day, they also made use of horses – 625,000 of them. Facing the invading armies, arrayed on the western frontiers of the USSR, were nearly 3 million Soviet soldiers, backed by a number of tanks now estimated to have been as many as 14–15,000 (almost 2,000 of them the most modern designs), over 34,000 artillery pieces, and 8–9,000 fighter-planes.2 The scale of the titanic clash now beginning, which would chiefly determine the outcome of the Second World War and, beyond that, the shape of Europe for nearly half a century, almost defies the imagination.
I
Despite the numerical advantage in weaponry of the defending Soviet armies, the early stages of the attack appeared to endorse all the optimism of Hitler and his General Staff about the inferiority of their Bolshevik enemies and the speed with which complete victory could be attained. The three-pronged attack led by Field Marshals Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb in the north, Fedor von Bock in the centre, and Gerd von Rundstedt in the south initially made astonishing advances. By the end of the first week of July Lithuania and Latvia were in German hands. Leeb’s advance in the north, with Leningrad as the target, had reached as far as Ostrov. Army Group Centre had pushed even farther. Much of White Russia had been taken. Minsk was encircled. Bock’s advancing armies already had the city of Smolensk in their sights. Further south, by mid-July Rundstedt’s troops had captured Zitomir and Berdicev.3
The Soviet calamity was immense – and avoidable. Even as the German tanks were rolling forwards, Stalin still thought Hitler was bluffing, that he would not dare attack the Soviet Union until he had finished with Britain. Stalin had been well informed on the German military build-up and the growing menace of invasion. He had anticipated some German territorial demands but was confident that, if necessary, negotiations could stave off an attack in 1941 at least. By the following year, the Soviet Union would be more prepared. Though two of the top-ranking Soviet generals, Marshal Semyon Timoshenko and General Georgi Zhukov, had put forward a plan on 15 May for a pre-emptive strike against Germany, Stalin had dismissed such a notion out of hand, fearing it would provoke the attack he wanted to avoid. There were no plans to invade Germany. A preventive war against an imminent Soviet invasion of the Reich was a Nazi propaganda legend.4 So convinced was Stalin of the correctness of his own diagnosis of the situation that he had chosen to ignore a veritable flood of intelligence reports warning of the imminent danger, some even predicting the precise date of the invasion.5 Once the attack took place, Stalin fell for days into a state of near mental collapse and deep depression. Amid violent mood-swings, one of his first actions was to hurl abuse at his military leaders and sack some of his top commanders.6
Stalin’s bungling interference and military incompetence had combined with the fear and servility of his generals and the limitations of the inflexible Soviet strategic concept to rule out undertaking the necessary precautions to create defensive dispositions and fight a rearguard action. Instead, whole armies were left in exposed positions, easy prey for the pincer movements of the rapidly advancing panzer armies.7 In a whole series of huge encirclements, the Red Army suffered staggering losses of men and equipment. By the autumn, some 3 million soldiers had trudged in long, dismal columns into German captivity. A high proportion would suffer terrible inhumanity in the hands of their captors, and not return.8 Roughly the same number had by then been wounded or killed.9 The barbaric character of the conflict, evident from its first day, had been determined, as we have seen, by the German plans for a ‘war of annihilation’ that had taken shape since March. Soviet captives were not be treated as soldierly comrades, Geneva conventions were regarded as non-applicable, political commissars – a category interpreted in the widest sense – were peremptorily shot, the civilian population subjected to the cruellest reprisals.10 Atrocities were not confined to the actions of the Wehrmacht. On the Soviet side, Stalin recovered sufficiently from his trauma at the invasion to proclaim that the conflict was no ordinary war, but a ‘great patriotic war’ against the invaders. It was necessary, he declared, to form partisan groups to organize ‘merciless battle’.11 Mutual fear of capture fed rapidly and directly into the spiralling barbarization on the eastern front. But it did not cause the barbarization in the first place. The driving-force was the Nazi ideological drive to extirpate ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’. Hitler’s response in private to Stalin’s speech was revealing. The declaration of partisan war, he remarked, had the advantage of allowing the extermination of anyone who got in the way.12 The wide interpretation of ‘partisans’ by the Security Police ensured that Jews were particularly prominent among the increasing numbers liquidated.
Already on the first day of the invasion reports began reaching Berlin of up to 1,000 Soviet planes destroyed and Brest-Litowsk taken by the advancing troops. ‘We’ll soon pull it off,’ wrote Goebbels in his diary. He immediately added: ‘We must soon pull it off. Among the people there’s a somewhat depressed mood. The people want peace… Every new theatre of war causes concern and worry.’13
The main author of the most deadly clash of the century, which in almost four years of its duration would produce an unimaginable harvest of sorrow for families throughout central and eastern Europe and a level of destruction never experienced in human history, left Berlin around midday on 23 June. Hitler was setting out with his entourage for his new field headquarters, chosen for him the previous autumn, near Rastenburg in East Prussia.14 The presumption was, as it had been in earlier campaigns, that he would be there a few weeks, make a tour of newly conquered areas, then return to Berlin. This was only one of his miscalculations. The ‘Wolf’s Lair’ (Wolfsschanze) near Rastenburg was to be his home in the main for the next three and a half years. He would finally leave it a broken man in a broken country.
The Wolf’s Lair – another play on Hitler’s favourite pseudonym from the 1920s, when he liked to call himself ‘Wolf (allegedly the meaning of ‘Adolf’, and implying strength) – was hidden away in the gloomy Masurian woods, about eight kilometres from the small town of Rastenburg.15 Hitler and his accompaniment arrived there late in the evening of 23 June. The new surroundings were not greatly welcoming. The centre-point consisted of ten bunkers, erected over the winter, camouflaged and in parts protected against air-raids by two metres thickness of concrete. Hitler’s bunker was at the northern end of the complex. All its windows faced north so that he could avoid the sun str
eaming in. There were rooms big enough for military conferences in Hitler’s and Keitel’s bunkers, and a barracks with a dining-hall for around twenty people. Another complex – known as HQ Area 2 – a little distance away, surrounded by barbed wire and hardly visible from the road, housed the Wehrmacht Operations Staff under Warlimont. The army headquarters, where Brauchitsch and Halder were based, were situated a few kilometres to the north-east. Göring – designated by Hitler on 29 June to be his successor in the event of his death – and the Luftwaffe staff stayed in their special trains.16
Hitler’s part of the Führer Headquarters, known as ‘Security Zone One’, swiftly developed its own daily rhythm. The central event was the ‘situation discussion’ at noon in the bunker shared by Keitel and Jodl. This frequently ran on as long as two hours. Brauchitsch, Halder, and Colonel Adolf Heusinger, chief of the army’s Operations Department, attended once or twice a week. The briefing was followed by a lengthy lunch, beginning in these days for the most part punctually at 2p.m., Hitler confining himself as always strictly to a non-meat diet. Any audiences that he had on non-military matters were arranged for the afternoons. Around 5p.m. he would call in his secretaries for coffee. A special word of praise was bestowed on the one who could eat most cakes. The second military briefing, given by Jodl, followed at 6p.m. The evening meal took place at 7.30p.m., often lasting two hours. Afterwards there were films. The final part of the routine was the gathering of secretaries, adjutants, and guests for tea, to the accompaniment of Hitler’s late-night monologues.17 Those who could snatched a nap some time during the afternoon so they could keep their eyes open in the early hours.18 Sometimes, it was daylight by the time the nocturnal discussions came to an end.19