A World at Arms (40 page)

In 1940, the Germans had won quickly over France and had then needed weeks to gear up staff work for the invasion of England; they did not want to be caught short like that again. In retrospect, this loss
of momentum looked most serious to the Germans, and they were determined that this time they would be all set for the next operations. To the post-war observer, this pre-occupation with planning for the steps to follow the quick victory over the Soviet Union may appear ludicrous, but it must be understood as one of the lessons drawn by the Germans from their difficulties in following up on the great victory over France.

The perception of a weak Soviet Union could not be remedied by accurate intelligence. The Germans had very little, and they would not be dissuaded by those whose estimates of Soviet strength were more perceptive, primarily because the prejudices against Slavic peoples were reinforced by the euphoria of victory in the West. Having practically no agents inside the Soviet Union, except for those actually working for Moscow and feeding them disinformation,
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the Germans could add to their knowledge only by two other methods: signals intelligence and overflight. Their signals intelligence never penetrated higher-level Soviet codes and therefore, although useful for tactical details, never provided any major insights (with neither of these conditions changing after 1941). The Germans began a substantial program of aerial reconnaissance over the Soviet Union in October 1940, but this, too, was primarily of tactical significance.
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In general, assumptions were not affected by understanding in spite of the simultaneously obvious errors in the German assumptions about a British collapse under bombing. They quickly forgot that the Red Army had learned fast from its early defeats at the hands of the Finns;
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it was now assumed that they would or could not learn from defeats inflicted by Germans.

A second area of preparation was the economic one. The invasion was, after all, designed to seize vast agricultural land for future settlement by German farmers. That involved the eventual displacement of those currently living in the area to be occupied, but in the interim there was the prospect of endless loot and ruthless exploitation. At the Nazi Party rally on September 12, 1936, Hitler had asserted that the ores of the Urals, the forests of Siberia, and the wheat fields of the Ukraine could provide all Germans with a life of plenty.
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Here was the opportunity to translate these dreams into reality. The seizure of food would cause famine in the rest of Russia, but the death of millions of Russians from starvation was perceived as an advantage, not a disaster.
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The mines of the Don and Donets basins and the forests of northern Russia would
serve as fine substitutes for the riches of the Urals and Siberia of which Hitler had spoken earlier.

The extensive preparations for organized looting and exploitation of the areas to be seized point to the special character of the campaign in the East. It is, of course, correct that as a by-product of their conquest of Holland, Belgium, and France, the Germans stripped those countries and harnessed their economies to their own war effort while extracting enormous sums on the pretext that these were occupation costs, all this on a scale which showed that the post-World War I reparations charges imposed on Germany had been small change. But although a final accounting–if an accurate one can ever be developed–might well show that the economic benefits extracted by the Germans from the rapidly over–run and basically wealthy Western economies were in reality considerably greater than those taken from the more heavily war-ravaged and in part less wealthy occupied portions of the U.S.S.R., the intention was clearly different. The economic exploitation of the territory to be seized in the East was from the beginning a critical element in the whole German perception of the campaign against the U.S.S.R., formed a major part of the preparations for that campaign, assumed permanent German control of most of European Russia, and provides an important key to any understanding of the different type of warfare the Germans from the very beginning intended to wage in the East.

The attack on Poland was in some ways a rehearsal for the invasion of Russia. In that case also Hitler had made it clear to his military associates that destroying the life of the Poles as a people, not breaking the strength of the Polish army, was the aim of German policy. At that time, there had still been some reluctance among the military leaders to become involved in mass murder; and, in any case, the focus of attention had shifted to the great campaign ahead in the West. Now all this was changed. The war in the West was, or at least appeared to be, over, and almost all restraints were cast aside. As Hitler explained in ever greater detail, especially in a speech to military leaders on March 30, 1941, the new campaign would differ from the prior ones, that a war of extermination was at hand, and that a massive demographic revolution was about to begin in Eastern Europe. His views were met with understanding, agreement, and support. A minute number had reservations, and one of these, Admiral Canaris, the chief of intelligence, had the courage to voice them, but most either went along with or showed their support for such schemes by putting all their considerable energies into developing careful plans for their implementation.
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In post-World War II Germany, a steady stream of military memoirs on the book market and perjury in court proceedings obscured these
sad truths for some time, but recent publications based on research in the archives instead of post-war fabrications have provided a more accurate picture–and have not surprisingly been met by vocal hostility from some.
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It is now beyond doubt that the orders and procedures worked out in detail before the invasion and calling for the killing of several categories of prisoners of war, including Jewish soldiers and all political officers captured, were very widely carried out and that the assumption was that the huge masses of Russian prisoners that the German army expected to capture would be allowed to die of hunger and disease. The application of these terrible policies, as well as their import for the victims and for the Soviet Union, will be reviewed later; what has to be noted at this point is the inclusion of such ideas in the planning of the invasion.
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Furthermore, it was also anticipated that the mass murder of those in mental institutions and old peoples’ homes, by this time in high gear inside Germany, would be extended to include those found in the areas newly overrun. Here was one of the “benefits” of German culture that was to be spread with German military control. In the early months of 1941 opposition to the killings in German institutions was beginning to make itself heard and felt; those who could be released from their active role in this terrible endeavor in the summer of 1941 would soon find employment for their by now well-developed talents in Eastern Europe.

Although even now all the details are not entirely clear–in part because much was not committed to writing, in part because some of those involved at the time were dead by the end of the war or, if alive, found it expedient to lie about the past–it can be taken as fully proven that before the invasion of the U.S.S.R., and as an integral part of the planning for that invasion, the German government also made new decisions in regard to the treatment of Jews.
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The prior conquest of large parts of Poland and of Western Europe had vastly increased the number of Jews under German control; in fact, these conquests had added more than ten times as many as had succeeded in emigrating from Germany in the pre-war years. The project for moving the approximately four million Jews of German-dominated Europe to a dubious fate on the island of Madagascar had been rendered impractical by the continued resistance of Britain. Now, following a mere trickle of emigration across neutral Spain and Russia, there would be a further massive increase in the number of Jews under Germany’s control as her armies swept eastward across portions of pre-war Poland, the Baltic States and the western U.S.S.R., areas with a very large Jewish population.

While the shooting of certain categories among the prisoners of war the Germans expected to capture would be left to the army, and it was
also to be the army’s function to deal ruthlessly with any real or imagined obstruction by the civilian population–with those shooting civilians promised amnesty in advance–the sorting out of those categories of peaceful civilians who were to be killed would be assigned to special murder commandos, called
Einsatzgruppen,
a term perhaps best translated as Special Employment Units. First established in connection with the occupation of Austria, the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia, they had acquired considerable practice in mass murder during the invasion of Poland.
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Drawing on this experience and calling on individuals throughout the SS apparatus, new and expanded units of this type would accompany the German armies as they invaded the Soviet Union. They were instructed to kill Jews, Communists, and other categories of civilians once the invasion had begun, following upon and assisted by the regular army. In addition, they would shoot those prisoners of war who fell in the proscribed categories but had not been killed immediately upon capture.
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Whether by the time Hitler instructed Himmler to establish these units in March 1941 he had already decided that, after the Jews in the newly occupied areas had been killed this process would immediately be extended to all other Jews in areas under German control, is not known at this time. But since Hitler expected to win, not lose, the war, there was no urgent need at that moment to decide the matter of timing. Victory would make possible the killing of all Jews at a time that suited German convenience, and timing could well be influenced by the reaction inside and outside the Third Reich to the first stupendous massacres. Two points are beyond dispute and essential for an understanding of what followed. First, that in this planned operation of mass murder, the systematic killing of Jews, as opposed to expulsion, forced conversion, or random cruelty, was decided upon for the first time in history and with immediately planned and then implemented measures. Second, this program of mass killing was from the beginning a major portion of the whole ideological war planned for the East with its intended demographic revolution.
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The plans and preparations for the attack on Russia which have been discussed so far were of an essentially theoretical kind until June 1941. A small but growing number of people knew about them, and as they learned, they reacted. A few reacted negatively, warning against the initiation of war on another front while the fighting against England was still under way and in some instances calling in question the whole idea of a war against the Soviet Union. Most of Hitler’s immediate military advisors were reassured by the postponement of invasion from the fall of 1940 until the spring of 1941. The head of the German navy, Admiral
Raeder, believed that the war against Britain should have priority and, on the basis of the navy’s experience with the Soviet Union, argued that Germany would do better to cooperate with her.
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There is some evidence that Göring voiced doubts,
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and there is a detailed letter from the long-time Minister of Finance, Schwerin von Krosigk, arguing against war with Russia.
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Members of the German embassy in Moscow were horrified to hear of the idea and pooled their objections in a memorandum for the German army Chief of Staff,
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while the ambassador later personally argued with Hitler against the attack.
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The second man in the Foreign Ministry, State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker, wrote out his objections,
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and Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop himself at first expressed doubts.

None of these arguments made any difference to Hitler, primarily it would seem because they could not engage the critical point in the whole project: the decision grew not out of either some possibly remediable circumstance of the moment, or a sense of being threatened, but out of purposeful determination. This was what had in general always been intended, as a central project of the whole system, and without it the National Socialist experiment made no sense.

Others were pleased rather than alarmed when they learned of the intended attack. Alfred Rosenberg was happy to receive from Hitler the commission to plan for the occupation which he would head, in title if not always in reality. And when the SS officer Hans Prützmann learned of his forthcoming appointment to head up the police in the Ukraine, he was able to celebrate his new position well ahead of time at a special farewell dinner in the circle of his Hamburg associates.
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Those in charge of Germany’s army had to make some adjustments in their planning. The expected reduction in the size of the military forces was reversed; instead of decreasing from about 140 to 120 divisions’ the army was now to be increased first to 180 and, by August 21, 1940, to a more likely 200.
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Many of the new units were, however, equipped with captured weapons; and though there was some modernization (particularly the replacement of old smaller tanks by newer medium tanks), the army which was to attack the Soviet Union in 1941 was not appreciably greater than the one which had attacked in the West in 1940. Two factors contributed to this situation. First, German underestimation of Soviet defensive power combined with a reluctance to impose total mobilization on the German economy to hold down both production and recruitment levels. Secondly, the need to station at least a quarter of Germany’s army in the West, in Southeast Europe and in the Mediterranean theater meant that whatever increases were arranged for in the year between the two campaigns were tied down elsewhere.
At least in a small way, the army was now to begin fighting a multi-front instead of a one-front war.