A World at Arms (55 page)

The whole German offensive had been predicated on the assumption that this campaign would be a short one. No replacements were available or planned for either personnel or equipment after the first weeks, and no one was worried about this situation.
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One of the astonishing features of the detailed situation maps kept by the Germans is the absence of substantial numbers of formations in reserve, a characteristic of these maps that would hold true from the first to the last days of the campaign in the East. The air force expected to be back fighting the British after two months in the East; most of the anti-aircraft guns were at home or in the West in any case.
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During July Hitler and many German leaders believed that their gamble had paid off.
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For a short time it looked as if the war in the East had been won and that the Germans could do whatever they wanted, both in the occupied Soviet Union and in the rest of Europe, while implementing prior planning for the next steps in the war against England. Hitler explained to his associates that the new border of Germany would be at the Urals, and whenever there appeared to be a revival of danger beyond that line,
German forces would drive further East. The bulk of the urban population in European Russia was to be starved to death, as would the captured Red Army soldiers, a subject on which Hitler, his economic experts, and the military were all in agreement.
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At a meeting with Alfred Rosenberg, the new Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Hans Lammers, the head of the state chancellery, Field Marshal Keitel, the head of the OKW, Göring, and Martin Bormann, Hess’s former chief assistant and now replacement as head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, Hitler explained on July 16 how he expected to exploit the newly won empire for Germany’s benefit. No rights would be allowed any remaining local population, least of all the possibility of bearing arms. Bits of the occupied territory might go to Germany’s allies, but some of these, especially Finland, would be absorbed by Germany anyway. The Germans would never give up their conquests; all local inhabitants who looked doubtful would be shot. There was considerable discussion of personnel questions–who was to be appointed to run which section of the occupied territory–but the key point was that all policy and personnel were to aim in the direction of exploitation for Germany’s benefit and German settlement in the conquered lands.
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What all this certainly did
not
mean was freedom for any of the peoples now or soon to be under German control. Individuals from the Baltic States and some Ukrainians, who imagined that the Germans might be willing to help them gain or regain their independence, had already been rebuffed in the preceding days.
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The Germans had no intention of “freeing” anybody. On the contrary, the Baltic States and the Ukraine, as well as other portions of the occupied territories, were to be settled by Germans, and it is no coincidence that much of the serious resettlement planning, sometimes referred to under the heading of “General Plan for the East”
(Generalplan Ost)
was first developed in July of 1941.
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Closely related to this is Hitler’s decision of late July to resettle Germans from Southeastern Europe and other more distant places, presumably also in the East.
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In those same days of late July, as victory seemed certain, Hitler also appears to have given instructions, most likely verbally, for the extension of the program for killing the Jews in the occupied Soviet territories and among the POWs to all the Jews of German-controlled Europe. This whole program is discussed later in this chapter, but the decision to inaugurate the second stage of the murder program has to be seen in the context of other decisions made in July 1941. The mass murder of Jews in the newly conquered territories had started in the first days of the invasion and was by this time claiming thousands of lives daily. There had been little objection; now was the time to expand the project. On
July 22 Hitler spoke of getting all the Jews out of every European country and predicted that Hungary would be the last to surrender its Jews.
¹²
On July 31,1941, the head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), Reinhard Heydrich, obtained from Göring a commission to plan and carry out the final solution of the Jewish question in German-controlled Europe, a commission phrased so that he could use it to obtain the assistance of those German agencies and offices which, unlike the murder squads already busy shooting civilians and prisoners, were not under his control.
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Major new steps in this endeavor would soon follow, the first being the development of gas vans which began in August.
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If these were the plans for the newly seized lands and those believed about to fall into German hands, what about the war against Great Britain? Here too the euphoria of July brought new decisions. On July 14 Hitler ordered the armaments program reoriented toward the air force and the navy, with their planned employment to include both the direct attacks on England and its shipping in the Atlantic as well as the British position in the Middle East.
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This had been the intention before the attack on Russia was launched; now seemed to be the time to begin implementing the projects designed to follow victory in the East. As in the summer of 1940, when victory in the West was thought to have been attained, so now once again the plans for the great battleship and aircraft carrier navy were reactivated. The immense surface fleet for which the contracts were now reactivated would be fed by the oil from conquered Russian wells; the tools for the expected war against the United States could now be forged and sustained. For a short time all looked rosy.

By the time these new projects were being started or at least contemplated in late July, however, the realities of the situation at the front were beginning to dawn on a few in the German hierarchy. In spite of the enormous losses in men and equipment suffered by the Russians, there was clearly both a continuing front and a steady, if not yet massive, stream of new formations and replacements. Furthermore, the men of the Red Army were fighting hard; there were local counter-attacks; and there were signs of revival from the Red Air Force, which the Germans had misassessed both as to its frontline strength and its replacement capabilities.
¹⁶
The Soviet system was clearly holding together, and as word spread of the killing of all captured political officers of the Red Army, of the slaughter of numerous other prisoners of war and the horrendous mistreatment of the rest, of the murder of tens of thousands of civilians-Jews, party officials, people in mental institutions, and anybody who looked unpleasant–the fate which awaited those who fell under German control began to become increasingly obvious to Soviet citizens on both sides of the front. From World War I there had
remained a residue of memory that the German army fought hard but generally treated prisoners and civilians decently; it was now obvious that there had been a dramatic change.

The earliest signs of an awakening can be detected in the second half of July.
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By the first week of August it was beginning to be recognized that the Caucasus and Murmansk would probably not be reached in 1941 and that the campaign could be expected to continue into the following year.
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The German units had to be refurbished, and during the ensuing pause of late July and August, decisions had to be made as to the direction of the next offensives in the East. The very fact that such decisions as to priorities for further major offensive operations were necessary showed that the original German plan to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union by stupendous initial blows had failed. If anyone still had doubts on that score, the heavy Soviet counter-attacks on the Central front removed them. On July 20, 1941, the Germans had captured the town of Yelnya, 25 miles southeast of Smolensk; on September 5 the Red Army drove them out as part of one of the first Soviet local victories in the war.
¹⁹

The Germans now had to decide whether to resume the offensive on the Central front or in the south and north. The very fact that they could not repeat the earlier simultaneous offensives in all three sectors shows the weakening of German assault strength, or the lengthening of the front as one moves further east, and the obvious existence of continued Soviet resistance. The relatively more effective defense of the Red Army or the less spectacular offensive success of the Germans on the southern portion of the front gave the arguments over what to do next a peculiar twist for the Germans. If they pushed ahead in the center toward Moscow, they risked very serious dangers on the southern flank of such a thrust, dangers which they lacked the reserves to meet. If they took advantage of the further advance in the center in order to cut in behind the Soviet forces holding them back in the south, they would lose time on the Central front.

The argument went forward at the time as vehemently as it has among historians since; the dispute in my judgement ignores the fact that the German assault on the Soviet Union had failed to attain its objective and that at this point they could win further tactical successes on one or another of the front segments but had already lost whatever chance they might theoretically have had to defeat the Soviet Union.
^c
Furthermore, as a careful analysis of the transportation and supply problems has
conclusively shown, the Germans were simply incapable of immediately resuming the offensive on the central portion of the front after they had reached the geographical limits of the truck supply system on which their initial advance depended. Whatever they planned to do next, they first had to repair the railways so that these could bear the burden of logistical support for operations further east.
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After some hesitation, Hitler decided to transfer some of the forces from Army Group Center to assist the attacks toward Leningrad in the north while others were to be detached for an assault into the rear of the Soviet forces defending Kiev in the south.
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And soon after, on September 11, Hitler saw himself obliged to reverse priorities in war production again: the army and the anti-aircraft defenses had to be put on top once more so that the German army could carry on in the East and the home front be defended against British air attacks. The navy and air force, the main means for the offensive against Britain, would have to wait.
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The renewed drive toward Leningrad scored considerable gains, including a narrow foothold on Lake Ladoga from the south, thus cutting off land communications to the city and inaugurating a long and bitter siege. Hitler had ordered a halt on the approaches to Leningrad itself because in 1941, unlike 1942, he did not want German troops engaged in large-scale house to house fighting in big cities. Furthermore, he had decided earlier that both Leningrad and Moscow should be razed to the ground, their population killed or driven into wasteland further east.
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These bloodthirsty designs, understood in broad outlines if unknown in detail at the time, now recoiled upon the Germans as the Russians defended themselves in desperation.
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FIGHTING IN THE FALL AND WINTER

An important aspect of the German drive in the north had been the hope of making land contact with Finnish forces moving southward on both sides of Lake Ladoga. Here, too, things worked out very differently from German–and Finnish–expectations. Soviet forces were pushed back, and the Finns quickly recovered the territory they had been required to cede to Russia in the peace treaty of March, 1940, but thereafter the Finnish offensives stalled, never to be effectively resumed in the war. Several factors were responsible for this crucial and permanent shift at the northern end of the Eastern Front. Determined Soviet resistance assisted by the employment of Red Army reserves eventually stabilized the front. In the far north, the German attack toward Murmansk was halted, ironically at the same point, Zapadnaya Litsa Bay, at
which the Soviets during their earlier alignment with Germany had provided the German navy with a secret base to use against the Allies. In the central portion of the northern front, the combined German-Finnish forces were stopped by the Red Army short of Kandalaksha and the railway from Murmansk. In neither sector could the invaders ever make a decisive advance against Soviet forces which had obviously learned the lessons of the earlier Russo-Finnish war.

In the southern portion of the Finnish front, the Finns were eventually blocked by a combination of military and political factors. The primary military factor was that the continuing resistance of the Red Army drained the reserves of a country small in population and still recovering from the earlier conflict. By late August, 1941, the Finns were experiencing very serious difficulties in maintaining the strength of their front–line units.
²⁵
The new German push of September 1941 southeast of Leningrad inspired the Finns to a new effort which brought them to and even at points across the Svir river, but there the advance was stopped never to be resumed; and although this advance did cut the direct railway to Murmansk, it left open the railway connection into the interior of Russia which branched off at Belomorsk.

A political factor also restrained the Finns as they approached the border they had had before the Russian attack of 1939. They came under increasing pressure from Britain and the United States to stop at that old border. There were elements within Finland which favored such a halt; and in their hour of peril in October-November 1941, the Soviets through the United States offered to return to that border if Finland would make peace. The euphoria caused by the same German victories which produced this Soviet offer misled the Finns into disregarding it and continuing in the war for expansionist objectives in eastern Karelia and in the far north. The British thereupon declared war on Finland, while, in fear that the United States would do the same, the Finns refrained from even further offensives.
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They had managed to secure the worst of all the alternatives; they were at war with the Soviet Union and Great Britain; they had not cut the Murmansk railway; and they had missed their one chance to get out of the war cheaply before the German disaster of December near Moscow altered the whole picture.
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