A World at Arms (38 page)

The whole project of crushing France and England had, after all, been undertaken only as a necessary preliminary, in Hitler’s eye, to the attack in the East which would enable Germany to take the living space, the
Lebensraum,
he believed she needed. And it is too often forgotten in retrospect that in his view the campaign in the West was always expected to be the harder one. If in World War I Germany had struggled unsuccessfully in the West though victorious in the East, the fortunate willingness of the Soviet Union to assist her in winning in the West this time could make it all the easier to win in the East against inferior Slavs ruled by incompetent Jews, as Hitler believed.

Hitler’s pressure for launching the great offensive in the West already in the fall of 1939 was in part due to his eagerness to get to the offensive eastwards as quickly as possible, originally in the spring or summer of 1940.
²⁴⁴
Circumstances previously mentioned led to a postponement of the attack in the West into the spring of 1940, a postponement which
enhanced rather than dampened his desire to get to the next operation as quickly as possible. Moreover, the appearance of the Red Army in eastern Poland in September-October 1939 and the initial setbacks suffered by the Soviet Union in the Russo-Finnish war only served to reinforce Hitler’s belief that the Soviet Union was incapable of defending itself.
²⁴⁵

In view of this background it should not be surprising that already in mid and late May of 1940, as soon as it became clear that the German offensive in the West was going forward as quickly and successfully as Hitler could possibly hope, he began to turn his thoughts to the attack on the Soviet Union. He was beginning to discuss this project with his military associates in late May, and in June had them starting on the first preparations of plans for such an operation.
²⁴⁶
Initially conceived of as an offensive to be launched in the fall of 1940, the campaign was expected to last only a few weeks. If the mighty French army, which had stopped the Germans in the last war, could be crushed in six weeks and the British driven ignominiously from the continent, then victory in the East would take hardly any time at all. The concept of a “one-front” war always meant one
land
front to Hitler, so that the question of whether or not England remained in the war after the defeat of France was initially irrelevant to the timing of an attack in the East.
²⁴⁷

During the latter part of July, the preliminary discussion of the new offensive coincided with the recognition that Britain would not withdraw from the war. Far from discouraging Hitler, this had the opposite effect of making him all the more determined to attack the Soviet Union. In his eyes, the British were staying in the war in expectation of the Soviet Union and United States replacing France as Britain’s continental ally, something he assumed the English invariably needed. The quick destruction of the Soviet Union would not only remove one of these two hopes but would indirectly eliminate the other as well. Once Japan was reassured by the German attack on the Soviet Union against any threat to her home islands from the Pacific territories of Russia, she could strike southwards into the areas she had long coveted, and such an action would necessarily draw American attention and resources into the Pacific. The destruction of Russia, accordingly, would serve as an indirect means of forcing Britain out of the war as well as opening up the agricultural land and raw materials of the Soviet Union for German settlement and exploitation.
²⁴⁸

In those same days, however, as the indirect fight against England was added to the original aims of the invasion of Russia, Hitler came to the conclusion that the attack in the East had best be launched in the early summer of 1941 rather than in the fall of 1940. Influenced it
would seem by the arguments of his immediate military advisors that the transfer of German forces from the West to the East, their refitting for new operations, and the needed logistical preparations in an area of underdeveloped transportation facilities meant risking that the short campaign could not be completed victoriously before the onset of winter, Hitler had decided by the end of July that it made more sense to wait until the following year when the whole operation could be completed in one blow.
²⁴⁹

Three aspects of this decision deserve additional attention. In the first place, the turn to an invasion of the Soviet Union which Hitler had communicated to his key advisors by July 31 could, of course, have been revoked by him; and since some of those in the National Socialist leadership had doubts about the decision to attack Russia, such a reversal would have met with a good deal of support within military and government circles in Germany. But quite aside from the fact that there is not the slightest evidence that Hitler ever seriously considered reversing himself on this issue, it is important to note that the decision had a whole series of immediate repercussions on German policy. As will be shown in the balance of this chapter, military and diplomatic policy was immediately and in some instances dramatically affected by the new direction embodied in the decision to attack Russia. In fact, many of the changes in German actions in the summer and fall of 1940 can only be understood if they are seen in the context of this great new plan.

Secondly, even as the preparations for the invasion of England went forward, the German belief, shared by Hitler and his associates,
²⁵⁰
that the Soviet Union was incapable of any effective defense, made the planned land operation in the East, in which the spectacularly victorious German army which had just smashed France would crush a Red Army that had had great difficulty defeating Finland, look very much
easier
than the risky attack across the Channel with a Royal Air Force still in the air, the British navy likely to risk all in defense of home waters, and a slowly recovering land army waiting on the far shore. When asked in August of 1944 why he had not invaded England in 1940, Hitler said he would have liked to but lacked the means. Pointing to the fact that the British and Americans had needed two years to prepare for an invasion across the same waters, he explained that he had only enough ships to get the first wave ashore and no ability to send supplies because of the British navy and also no guarantee from the air force.
²⁵¹
By comparison with the risks of an invasion across the Channel, the move on land looked much more certain, and Hitler did not wish to endanger the steady sequence of victories which so enhanced his prestige and the fear which Germany inspired.

The third point which must be stressed is that both of the foregoing factors were self-reinforcing. The diplomatic steps Germany took to prepare for war with the Soviet Union would sooner or later alert and annoy the latter and thus make a prolongation of good relations with her more difficult. And, with the passage of time, the risks of invading England would grow greater: some of the German warships damaged in the Norwegian campaign would be repaired by late 1940, but by then the weather precluded a cross-Channel operation in 1940, while in 1941 Britain would have had even more time to prepare her defenses. And by that time, the fixation on loot and blood in the East was, as we shall see, so strong that any reorientation was practically inconceivable.
²⁵²

The conclusions drawn from the new orientation of German policy in the military sphere were curiously ambivalent. On the one hand, the shift of large numbers of troops from the West to the East began with the transfer of the German 18th Army in late July.
²⁵³
Massive further redeployments were ordered in July and September. Simultaneously, the communication and supply difficulties, which had played a key role in the deferral of an attack from the fall of 1940 to the spring of 1941, were to be remedied by a program ordered on August 9 under the cover name of “Buildup East” (
Aufbau Ost
).
²⁵⁴
There was much discussion of alternative plans for the intended attack on Russia; in fact, there was a cavalier disregard for security in the way numerous officers were simultaneously working on operational plans. A certain lackadaisical quality was also characteristic of the general mobilization and equipment plans for the new stage of the war.

As early as February 9, 1940, Göring had ordered development stopped on new weapons not likely to be finished in 1940 or promising results in 1941.
²⁵⁵
While massive increases in the production of poison gas were ordered as of June 1, 1940,
²⁵⁶
and the furloughing of soldiers from divisions to be demobilized in the summer of 1940 was arranged so as to enable those units to be reactivated on short notice, the increases in the size of the German army structure ordered at that time were not accompanied by any massive arms buildup.
²⁵⁷
The number of armored units was to be increased but without any substantial acceleration in the production of tanks, and there was similarly no big buildup of the air force, which was in any case fully engaged in the war against England. And some priority had to be given to the navy and air force for that fight.
²⁵⁸
Certainly as the prospect of fighting in the East approached, there was some frantic last-minute effort at further buildup, but the basic belief that the Soviet Union was weak and could be hammered to bits by a few well-aimed German blows dominated the preparations as it helped inspire the decision for the attack in the East.
²⁵⁹

The limited industrial resources of Germany at their relatively low level of mobilization were not, however, capable of coping simultaneously with the preparations for the new land campaign in the East and the construction of the great battleship navy. Once again–as in September 1939–these projects had to be postponed. Victory over the Soviet Union would release the necessary resources for a resumption of construction on the big ships; in the interim, Germany would concentrate at sea on the blockade of Great Britain by submarines and airplanes.

The postponement of fleet building, in turn, had immediate implications for Germany’s direct and indirect relations with the United States. In the direct sense, it meant that the German submarines were instructed to be careful of incidents with the United States, and Hitler ordered restraint on a navy ever eager to strike at American shipping. Simultaneously, in the indirect sense the position and role of Japan with its great navy became more important in German eyes. As already mentioned, Hitler anticipated that an attack on the Soviet Union would help propel Japan forward in Asia, thus tying up the United States in the Pacific in the years that Germany was still building her own surface navy. Between the decision to attack Russia and the implementation of that decision, however, there were now the intervening months to consider.

It was in this context that lining up Japan with the Axis came to be seen as increasingly important, a process which met the interests of the new leadership which had come to power in Tokyo in the days of decision in Berlin. The Tripartite Pact of Germany, Italy and Japan was not signed until September 27, but the new impetus from Berlin, in spite of earlier German unhappiness with Japan, needs to be seen in the context of the decisions of late July. Furthermore, the slow dawning on Germany’s leaders of the realization that England was not going to give in operated to reinforce the policy choice previously made. A Japanese attack on Britain’s possessions in Southeast Asia, particularly on Singapore, could not help but assist Germany’s own fight against the United Kingdom.

There were implications of the decision to attack the Soviet Union for German policy at points far closer to home than Southeast Asia. Both were discussed at the conference of July 31, 1940, at which Hitler explained his decision to launch an invasion of Russia in 1941. As Hitler saw it, Finland would make a useful ally at the northern end of the prospective Eastern Front and Romania could serve as a southern anchor. New policies toward both powers were adopted in the immediate aftermath of the decision for war in the East, but the very different circumstances of the two meant that the details and ramifications of German policies toward them differed in detail. Although these policy
changes and their repercussions occurred simultaneously, it will be easier if they are summarized separately, first as regards Finland and then for Romania.

Finland had been assigned to the Soviet Union in the German-Soviet agreement of August 1939, and the German government had respected this arrangement during the Soviet-Finnish war. Had the Soviet Union occupied the whole country either in that war or when it annexed the Baltic States in June 1940, Berlin would presumably have accepted such action. As late as May 20, 1940, in any case, the German government still held to its prior policy; Hitler rejected arms deliveries to Finland even though these were important ways of compensating that country for the copper and nickel Germany wanted from it.
²⁶⁰
In the following weeks, however, policy began to change; and in the July 31 conference Hitler assumed that Finland would fight the Soviet Union alongside Germany.
²⁶¹
Germany began to send weapons to Finland, at first secretly through a semi–official arms dealer who had earlier played a similar role in supplying Franco during the Spanish civil war, and later more openly. In addition, the Germans made their interest in the British-owned nickel mines in northern Finland near Petsamo increasingly obvious and, by September, were signing agreements with Finland for the transit of German air force personnel and troops across that country to northern Norway.
²⁶²

The Finns were by early July hearing from their contacts in Germany about the discussion of a war against the Soviet Union there; they very much wanted German support against the pressures for new concessions coming from Moscow; and they were entering upon the slippery slope which brought them back into the war. That the Soviet Union observed this massive intervention by Germany into the sphere officially assigned to her with a combination of anger and suspicion was hardly surprising. With Soviet assistance the Germans had conquered Poland, Norway, Denmark, France and the Low Countries; what more did they want? And why did they now need Finnish nickel when they had just won a great victory over their enemies in the West without it? The issue would dominate the next major German-Soviet negotiations as a touchstone of German intentions in Soviet eyes.