Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East (22 page)

Hitler's announcement at the end of March that a war of annihilation was to be conducted in the east was received by the 250 assembled army commanders with attitudes ranging from inactive ambivalence to fervent enthusiasm. Embracing a position more in line with the latter,
Halder observed after Hitler's speech: ‘commanders must make the sacrifice of overcoming their personal scruples’.
¹¹¹
His diary records none of the shock or moral revulsion that he later claimed to have felt and there was no
rush of complaints or criticism from his fellow officers.
¹¹²
However, even if one accepts Omer Bartov's well argued contention that the Wehrmacht was a deeply integrated and willing component of the National Socialist state,
¹¹³
this offers only part of the explanation of their complete failure to recognise the military implications of such a radicalised war. Without question, the severe measures of a ‘total war’ were bound to engender strong anti-German sentiment provoking popular resistance and legitimising Soviet propaganda attempts to provide a unifying cause for the struggle. Although difficult to assess accurately, a ‘total war’ would also preclude whatever opportunity existed for broad collaboration among the occupied populations. In addition, the exploitation of strong nationalist yearnings, particularly within the Ukraine and Baltic states, was largely squandered by the ardent imperative of racial supremacy and insistence on absolute German domination. Even considerations for the welfare of German prisoners of war, who could expect reprisals, failed to move the army commanders, who remained defiantly oblivious to the substantial military implications of a radicalised war on the scale being discussed. The only way to account for this staggering oversight or illogical acceptance by army commanders is the charged intensity of the inferior ‘foe image’ and associated self-assurance in the primacy of the Wehrmacht's training, technical capacity and even racial superiority. Indeed, as Gerhard Weinberg has argued, it was precisely their coloured ideological and racial world-view that provided Hitler and his generals with an added measure of confidence in casting their gaze to the east. Germany's most important and dangerous enemies were judged to have been in the west and the ease of their defeat only made the conquest of the Soviet Union appear all the more certain.
¹¹⁴
These factors left no doubt that a war would be won quickly without any regard for the prospect of a long and bitterly contested struggle.

In spite of the disadvantageous military implications, the army commanders did more than just accept Hitler's notion of the new ‘total war’. Like many elements in the genocidal process undertaken within the Third Reich, its advancement was sustained not in spite of the army, but largely in accordance with its wishes and fervent desires.
¹¹⁵
This
curiously detrimental effort on the part of the army, which was always in competition for resources, suggests the dominance of political allegiance above strictly practical considerations. In the same way high-ranking party officials operated with unquestioning obedience to Hitler first, before adequately addressing the confused and disjointed administrative structures that typified the Third Reich's organisations. The
army was therefore the victim of its own ideological bias and political subservience, proving, to its detriment, only too willing to embrace the next chapter in the purest application of National Socialist doctrine as determined by Hitler.

Field Marshal von
Brauchitsch, as the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, led this new call to arms, rousing his officers to carry out the upcoming campaign as ‘a struggle between two different races, requiring…troops to act with all necessary harshness’.
¹¹⁶
His subordinate commanders followed suit with even more explicit and harshly worded orders. Colonel-General Erich
Hoepner, commander of Panzer Group 4, proclaimed on 2 May 1941:

The objective of this battle must be the destruction of present day Russia and it must therefore be conducted with unprecedented severity. Every military action must be guided in planning and execution by an iron will to exterminate the enemy mercilessly and totally. In particular no adherents of the present Russian-Bolshevik system are to be spared.
¹¹⁷

Hoepner's reference to eliminating Bolshevik elements, notably political commissars within the Red Army, was soon translated into army policy with the drafting of the
Commissar Order formally issued on 6 June 1941.
¹¹⁸
This charged the army with responsibility for widespread executions to be administered immediately without recourse to any form of legal procedure. Equally severe was the
Barbarossa Directive issued 13 May 1941
¹¹⁹
which decreed the execution of all civilians who ‘attacked’ German soldiers, with the formal interpretation of ‘attacked’ extended to
include such innocuous acts as the distribution of leaflets or the failure to follow German orders.
¹²⁰
The Barbarossa Directive also exempted German soldiers from prosecution for all offences against the Soviet population deemed ‘ideologically
motivated’.
¹²¹

As Christian Streit has ably demonstrated, despite the emphatic post-war denials of Halder and many of his fellow generals, the so-called ‘criminal orders’ were dutifully prepared by the army, with Halder playing a central part. Indeed it was through his insistence that a clause was introduced to the Barbarossa Directive which permitted officers to order the razing of villages and the outright execution of inhabitants if it was suspected that villages were supporting partisans.
¹²²
At Army Group Centre,
Bock made no attempt to protest against these orders and maintained this stance even in August 1941 when the mass killing of innocent Jewish civilians was reported to him.
¹²³
As Michael Geyer has accurately observed, it was through such policies that German strategy reached its zenith: ‘where racist domination, and the reforging of German society into a master race were brought together, linking in a grand concentric movement all the previously disconnected and nascent dynamics of the state against a single target. The Russo-German war encompassed not just the battlefronts, but also the battle zones and the rear
areas.’
¹²⁴
Casting a deserved moral judgement on the leadership of the army, while retaining his perspective on the political liability, von
Hassell recorded in his diary:

[I]t makes one's hair stand on end to learn about and receive proof of orders signed by Halder and distributed to the troops as to measures to be taken in Russia, and about the systematic transformation of military law concerning the conquered population into uncontrolled despotism – indeed a caricature of all law. This kind of thing turns the German into a ‘Boche’; it develops a type of being which had existed only in enemy propaganda. Brauchitsch has sacrificed the honour of the German Army in submitting to these orders of
Hitler.
¹²⁵

The close relationship between the German army's preparations in the lead up to Barbarossa and what Omer Bartov has dubbed ‘the barbarisation of warfare’
¹²⁶
cannot be called into
question.
¹²⁷
As a result, the conflict inadvertently incorporated a latent point of no return; failure to achieve a decisive military victory in the early phase of the war would ensure political solidification of the Soviet Union's war effort, allowing it to exploit fully the immense potential of its natural, industrial and manpower
resources.
¹²⁸

Clearly, ideology was a driving force in the conceptualisation of the coming campaign, offering
Hitler his long-desired showdown with Bolshevism and justifying the genocide about to be undertaken. Hitler, however, was also greatly influenced by what he saw as the direct practical benefits of Barbarossa. Hitler gave great weight to economic requirements, having always preferred conquest to meet his requirements over a more cautious or drawn-out strategy. His abiding economic advisors
had fed this ambition with baseless optimism, not unlike that which had biased General
Thomas's recent study. The state secretary in the ministry of food and agriculture,
Herbert Backe, assured Hitler in January that ‘the occupation of the Ukraine would liberate us from every economic worry’.
¹²⁹
By the spring of 1941 such emphatic guarantees were assuming an acute importance given dwindling food stocks and the worrying forecast that, after July, Germany would be reliant, for better or worse, on the summer's harvest yield. Hitler was also heavily influenced by the collapse of the German home front in 1918, which resulted in large measure from the British naval blockade and the consequent food shortages.
¹³⁰
Ever sensitive to public opinion, the experience of Germany's defeat in World War I was uppermost in Hitler's mind and he prioritised a high standard of living for the home front. Not only did these factors direct Hitler's attention to the economic solution that Barbarossa proposed to offer, but they also account, in large measure, for his fixation with grand strategic objectives of a war-economic kind, over the purely military and operational considerations which attracted Halder.
¹³¹

Along with the grain shortage, Germany's limited access to basic raw materials essential to the war economy formed a growing component of the economic quandary consuming Germany by the spring of 1941, and driving Hitler's conception of the forthcoming campaign. Foremost among these was the supply of Romanian oil which proved insufficient to the demands of occupied Europe and the German war economy, prompting Hitler in May to slash domestic consumption and foreign exports to Axis allies. The rationing became so severe that
Walther Funk, minister for economic affairs, complained to
Jodl in June 1941 that the economy was receiving ‘even less than 18 per cent of peacetime consumption’ and that in consequence the economy had been ‘threshed to the limit’.
¹³²
The crippling shortages convinced Hitler to seek his remedy through direct control over the Caucasian oil fields, reinforcing further the role of economic considerations in Hitler's strategic deliberations, ultimately designed to alleviate industry bottlenecks and fulfil his long-desired goal of economic autarky.

Beyond the alluring economic benefits, Hitler was drawn to Barbarossa for its sweeping geo-strategic advantages, crucial to the continental empire he sought to build. Whatever dubious credence one may extend to Hitler's earlier justifications that
Britain was only holding out in the hope of support from the Soviet Union, it cannot be denied that the elimination of such a large power would have dire consequences for the British war effort. Hitler's timing for Barbarossa was tied to the continuing war against Britain, not just for its obvious strategic value, but because it would realise his much-cherished expansionist goals before peace could intervene. Far from fearing the opening of a second front, Hitler's self-assurance meant he was more concerned about domestic rather than military considerations. ‘A conflict is inevitable’, Halder recorded him as saying in February 1941. ‘Once England is finished, he would not be able to rouse the German people to a fight against Russia; consequently Russia would have to be disposed of first.’
¹³³
Clearly Hitler foresaw absolute domination of the continent as integral not just to his immediate war plans against Britain, but to forging an empire capable of uninhibited potential.

Barbarossa therefore represented to Hitler the culmination of his life-long struggle against alleged Jewish Bolshevik interests, achieving the destruction of what he perceived to be his natural enemies while ensuring the security and prosperity of the German people through
Lebensraum
. On at least equal par, the campaign incorporated more immediate strategic and economic objectives vital to the pressing needs of the
day. The contrast this makes with Halder's divergent strategic concept, chiefly centred around Moscow, and the absence of an open dialogue between the two, which Halder purposefully avoided and Hitler was largely incapable of having, paves with certainty the road towards confrontation. Yet if there was one thing the two men did agree upon it was that Barbarossa would represent another stirring triumph of German arms. They foresaw the achievement of everything that was hoped for, without regard to the striking materiel and manpower shortages that would have to be overcome in order to meet the hefty demands of the operational plan.

1
Franz Halder, KTB II, pp. 240–242 (23 and 24 December 1940).

2
Frieser,
Blitzkrieg-Legende
, p. 24. English translation:
The Blitzkrieg Legend
, p. 20.

3
Franz Halder, KTB I, p. 86 (27 September 1939).

4
Adam Tooze,
The Wages of Destruction. The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy
(London, 2007), Chapters 12 and 13.

5
Moritz (ed.),
Fall Barbarossa
, p. 80. Document 14, ‘Aus der Einschätzung der politisch-moralischen Stabilität der Sowjetunion und der Kampfkraft der Roten Armee durch die Abteilung Fremde Heere Ost des Generalstabes des Heeres, 1. Januar 1941’.