Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (75 page)

But Hitler’s personal mismanagement of the campaign was not the only, or indeed the chief, reason for his failure in Russia. The cause went deeper, to the very conception of the war, to the roots indeed of Hitler’s whole political purpose. In attacking Russia, he was trying to do two quite different things simultaneously, to achieve a military victory and to set in motion an enormous enterprise of social
engineering. The two aims were mutally incompatible. It is not of course unusual for a military campaign to have an accompanying political purpose, to be a ‘war of liberation’. That indeed would have made sense in 1941. Stalin ruled by terror alone. His regime was universally unpopular at home, and hated and feared throughout Europe. There were many in Germany, and still more outside Germany, who wished to view a war against Bolshevism as a crusade; waged on behalf of dozens of oppressed European peoples, from the Arctic to the Black Sea, who had been plundered and oppressed by half-Asiatic Russians. Taking part in Barbarossa were more than twelve divisions from Romania, two from Finland, three from Hungary, three from Slovakia; to which were later added three Italian and one Spanish division.
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Many of these soldiers were volunteers. In addition, there were many Russians themselves, at home and abroad, who saw the occasion of Hitler’s assault as an opportunity to seize their own freedom, and destroy the regime which had brought more than twenty years of misery and cost over 15 million lives.

Hitler might have put himself at the head of such a crusade. But to have done so would have been false to himself. Hitler was not in the business of liberation. Like Stalin, he was in the business of slavery. The accident of race made them opponents, and pitted their regimes against each other. But in essential respects they were fellow-ideologues, pursuing Utopias based on a fundamental division of mankind into élites and helots. Hitler’s aims in Russia were in no sense idealistic. They were narrowly and ruthlessly acquisitive. He tried to explain them, on 30 March 1941, to a meeting of 250 senior German officers of all three services.
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The war against France, he said, had been a ‘conventional’ war. So was the whole of the war against the West. It was military in character. The rules of war applied. But in the East things were to be quite different. Against Russia Germany would wage total war. ‘We have a war of annihilation on our hands.’ The purpose of the campaign was to be extermination, expansion and settlement on a colonial basis. The generals do not seem to have grasped the enormity of what Hitler proposed.
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That did not surprise him. He was prepared for it. That was why he had embarked on a vast expansion of the ss, which was now to fulfil the real purpose for which he had created it. He formed bodies of ‘specialists’, 3,000 in each, which were termed
Einsatzgruppen
, and which moved in the wake of the regular army units, to begin the most audacious exercise in social engineering ever conceived.

Thus poor, tortured, misruled Eastern Europe, which had already for an entire generation borne the brunt of Lenin’s ideological adventurism, and Stalin’s brutally magnified version of its worst aspects, was to be the theatre of yet another totalitarian experiment.
The military object of Barbarossa was incidental. The real aim was to exterminate Bolshevism and its ‘Jewish catchment area’, to acquire territory for colonial settlement, to enslave the Slav masses in four ‘Reich Commissariats’ (termed Baltic, Ukraine, ‘Muscovy’ and Caucasus), and to create an autarchic economic system which would be proof against any blockade the Anglo-Saxon powers might impose.
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Hitler’s ultimate aim was to create a German
Volk
of 250 million. He said that he proposed settling 100 million Germans on the great plains to the west of the Urals. In 1941 he envisaged that over the next decade the first 20 million would move east. Though he saw the colonization process clearly, he was vague about where the settlers were to come from. Those eligible and willing to settle, the
Volksdeutsche
from south-east Europe, numbered only 5 million, perhaps 8 million at most. His colleague Alfred Rosenberg considered the idea of ‘drafting’ Scandinavian, Dutch and English settlers, being racially approximate to Germans, when the war was won. Some aspects of this great population transfer, to be the most formidable and decisive in history, were determined in meticulous detail. There was to be polygamy and a free choice of women for servicemen with decorations. The Crimea, after being ‘cleansed’ of Slavs and Jews, was to be turned into a gigantic German spa under its old Greek name of Tauria, populated by a mass transfer of peasants from the South Tyrol.
²⁹
Over vast areas of the Ukraine and south European Russia, a new
Volk
civilization was planned. As Hitler described it:

The area must lose the character of the Asiatic steppe. It must be Europeanized! … The ‘Reich peasant’ is to live in outstandingly beautiful settlements. The German agencies and authorities are to have wonderful buildings, the governors palaces. Around each city, a ring of lovely villages will be placed to within 30 or 40 kilometers …. That is why we are now building the large traffic arteries on the southern tip of the Crimea, out to the Caucasus mountains. Around these traffic strands, the German cities will be placed, like pearls on a string, and around the cities the German settlements will lie. For we will not open up
Lebensraum
for ourselves by entering the old, godforsaken Russian holes! The German settlements must be on an altogether higher level!
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As Hitler’s vision expanded, in the heady days of 1941, it came to embrace all Europe. Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, the whole of France north of the Somme were to be incorporated in a Greater Germany, the names of the cities being changed – Nancy would become Nanzig, Besançon Bisanz. Trondheim would become a major German city and naval base of 250,000 inhabitants. The Alps would be the boundary between ‘the German Empire of the
North’, with a new ‘Germania’ as its capital, and ‘the Roman Empire of the South’. The Pope would be hanged in full pontificals in St Peter’s Square. Strasbourg Cathedral would be turned into a giant ‘Monument to the Unknown Soldier’. New crops, such as perennial rye, would be invented. He would forbid smoking, make vegetarianism compulsory, ‘revive the Cimbrian art of knitting’, appoint a ‘Special Commissioner for the Care of Dogs’ and an ‘Assistant Secretary for Defence Against Gnats and Insects’.
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Most of these ‘constructive’ proposals had to wait. But from 22 June 1941 onwards, the preliminary work of destruction could begin. The ‘Final Solution’ for the Jews was organically linked to the Russian settlement programme. We shall examine that in the next chapter. In military terms, what was important in 1941 was the decision, embodied in orders issued by Heydrich in May and confirmed by a ‘Führer’s decree’ exempting from punishment members of the forces who carried them out, to categorize Communist officials along with Jews, gypsies and ‘Asiatic inferiors’ as targets for immediate extermination. The ‘Commissar Order’ of 6 June 1941 insisted that Soviet functionaries ‘are in principle to be disposed of by gunshot immediately’. ‘Guidelines’ issued just prior to Barbarossa called for ‘ruthless and energetic measures against Bolshevistic agitators, guerrillas, saboteurs, Jews and total elimination of all active and passive resistance’.
³²
In practice, the
Einsatzgruppen
rounded up all educated men and social leaders in areas occupied by the Germans, and began to shoot them in large numbers. About 500,000 European Russian Jews were shot in 1941, and perhaps as many Russians. Otto Ohlendorf, one of the
gruppen
commanders, admitted at Nuremberg that his unit alone murdered 90,000 men, women and children in 1941. By July, the Russian nation as a whole began to grasp the horrifying fact that they faced what appeared to be a war of extermination.

The result was the salvation of Stalin and his regime. By the time Stalin finally brought himself to speak to the Russian people on 3 July, it was clear that he could turn the struggle into the Great Patriotic War. He compared Hitler with Napoleon. He called for guerrilla warfare and a vast ‘scorched earth’ policy. This appeal met with some response. For the first time since 1918, the practice of religion was generally permitted. This was perhaps the biggest single factor in the recovery of a national identity. Some prisoners from the concentration camps were allowed out to form front-line ‘punishment battalions’. In
Doctor Zhivago
, Boris Pasternak later gave a moving description of how the inmates welcomed the war.
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Stalin even indulged in a little participatory ‘democracy’, leaving his vaulted Kremlin study, where he sat with Lenin’s death-mask at his
elbow, and addressing the Soviet in the safety of the Moscow underground on 6 November. Characteristically he told them a lie, that Russia had ‘several times fewer tanks than the Germans’: in fact the Red Army had started with 13,000.
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The next day he spoke in Red Square, invoking the saints and warriors of imperial Russia: ‘Let the manly images of our great ancestors – Alexander Nevsky, Dimitry Donskoy, Kuzma Minin, Dimitry Pozharsky, Alexander Suvorov and Mikhail Kutozov – inspire you in this war!’
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All the same, the regime came close to destruction in November 1941. Most government departments were evacuated to Kuibyshev on the Volga. There was a general burning of archives which could not be carried away. Once the news spread there were riots. Mobs broke into the food shops. Party officials tore up their cards and prepared to go into hiding. Only the knowledge that Stalin himself was staying in Moscow prevented dissolution.
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Stalin stayed for exactly the same reason Hitler concentrated all power in his hands: he did not trust the generals, and he wished to maintain personal control of the terror. It was the only way he knew how to rule. Though he played the patriotic card for all it was worth, he never relaxed the dead weight of fear he imposed on everyone. The army was held together by bonds of dread as well as loyalty. His right-hand man was his former secretary, Colonel-General L.Z.Mekhlis, now head of the Army Political Directorate, who had carried out thousands of executions during the purges. Stalin had sent him to Finland during the débâcle there in the winter of 1939–40, where he had dismissed, arrested and shot failed commanders. Under Leninist military law it was a crime to be taken prisoner. Mekhlis had arranged a grisly scene in March 1940, when thousands of returning
POWS
were greeted in Leningrad with a banner, ‘The Fatherland Greets its Heroes’, and marched straight through to railway sidings where they were hustled into cattle-trucks for the camps.
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Under Stalin’s personal orders, Mekhlis and his assistant Army Commissar E.A.Shchadenko continued to arrest, imprison and shoot selected officers throughout 1940 and 1941. The Army Group Commander in the West, D.G.Pavlov, was murdered for ‘treachery’. There was another big batch of shootings in October 1941 and again in July 1942, the latter to forestall a
coup.
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Lesser fry were dealt with by a new and terrifying Field Security Force, Smersh, which co-operated with police blocking-battalions behind the front to prevent any retreat. Relatives of those known to have become
POWS
were made liable to long terms of imprisonment.
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With the prospect of death on all sides of him, the ordinary Russian soldier had no real alternative but to fight to the last.

Anyone whose loyalty was suspect in the slightest, even in theory,
was treated like an animal. Political prisoners in areas open to the German advance were massacred.
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Stalin engaged in defensive social engineering on a scale only marginally less ambitious than Hitler’s wild plans. The Germans of the Volga German Autonomous Republic, numbering 1,650,000, were hustled into Siberia. They were followed by other entire nations: the Chechens, the Ingushes, the Karachays, the Balkars of the Northern Caucasus, the Kalmyks from the north-west Caspian, the Crimean Tatars, the Meskhetians of the Soviet—Turkish border. Some of these genocidal-type crimes were enacted long after the danger from the Germans was past. The Chechens were moved as late as 23 February 1944, being carried off in American trucks supplied under Lend-Lease.
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Stalin’s ruthlessness, combined with Hitler’s folly, ensured Soviet survival. Yet as generalissimos, the two men were strangely alike, in their total indifference to casualties, however calamitous, in their refusal to visit the fronts (in both cases for security reasons) and in their personal direction of the campaigns. Stalin, like Hitler, sometimes deployed regiments himself. On 30 November 1941 Stalin received a report that the town of Dedovo-Dedovsk, twenty miles west of Moscow, had fallen. He ordered Zhukov, plus two army commanders, Rokossovsky and Govorov, to assemble a rifle company and two tanks, and retake it personally.
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But Stalin added an extra dimension of secrecy of which even the suspicious Hitler was incapable. From the point when he recovered his nerve, early in July 1941, Stalin began quietly to accumulate secret military reserves of his own, the
Stavka
, which he commanded personally and whose very existence was concealed from the army commanders, no matter how senior.
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The Leninist system of political control of the army, with its duplicated chains of command, made this possible. At any point in the war, therefore, Stalin had his own private army, which he directed personally, either to launch unexpected offensives, and thus retain control of the battle, or to overawe his generals, as Hitler did with the ss. He remembered Lenin’s dictum: ‘The unstable rear of Denikin, Kolchak, Wrangel and the imperialist agents predetermined their defeat.’ Stalin ‘stabilized’ his rear with his
Stavka
, party and
NKVD
troops, and with an organization termed
Tsentral’nyi Shtab
controlling the guerrillas, which he himself commanded.
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