Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East (3 page)

Attempting any manageable re-examination of the Barbarossa campaign requires both a clear sense of purpose and a certain limitation of scope. Confronting the immense scale of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union has been made somewhat easier by the relatively small number of motorised divisions which made up the German Army in 1941. These were concentrated into four ‘panzer groups’ upon which the success of the Barbarossa blitzkrieg was made dependent. This study focuses mainly on the two largest panzer groups (Panzer Groups 2 and 3) assigned to Army Group Centre in the middle of the German front. The study seeks to use these vital formations as a test case through which one can understand the overall success of German offensive operations in the earliest period of the war.

The bulk of the research was conducted in Germany at the German Military Archive (Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv) in Freiburg im Breisgau, with additional resources provided by the Military History Research Institute (Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt) in Potsdam
and the Humboldt University in Berlin. The study is divided into two parts. In the first, there is a broad assessment of the conceptual planning for the campaign, as a basis for what would need to be achieved in the war itself. The second part, and the main body of the work, deals with the first two months of the war and follows the progress of the panzer groups towards their respective goals.

Research was concentrated on the four highest tiers of the army's field commands; Army Group Centre, the subordinate two panzer groups, the five corps making up the panzer groups and their constituent sixteen divisions. The wartime records for these various commands are not always complete with valuable elements sometimes unavailable. This either means the documents were destroyed in the war, have simply not been found and remain ‘missing’, or that they were captured and remain in Russian custody (where access for scholars has sometimes been limited or withheld). Nevertheless, the period covering Barbarossa is well served for detailed primary research on the motorised elements of Army Group Centre.

Once located the files reveal themselves to be something of a mixed bag. From the army group down to individual divisions all command structures were required to keep a daily war diary, but oddly there appears to have been little standardisation in content or style. Most of the war diaries were typed, but in some cases, as for example with XXIV Panzer Corps, the whole diary was recorded in a barely legible handwritten script. In many diaries entries were made continually throughout the day with the exact time of each entry recorded in the margin; in some cases, however, a single entry was recorded summarising the whole day. The content of the diaries also varied greatly. Some diarists limited themselves to recording strictly factual details (often only an updated positioning of the various units) without any other commentary. Others offered a more general coverage of the situation and even on occasion gave tactical details on the battles themselves. The diversity between the various war diaries suggests that there was no standard format for record keeping beyond what the diarist saw fit to include. A guideline was reported in the war diary of the 3rd Panzer Division, but more than likely it applied only to this division (perhaps because more than one man was charged with making entries or to ensure conformity with the express wishes of the commanding officer). At the top of specially printed pages for the war diary was the heading: ‘Descriptions of the events (Important: Assessment of the situation (enemy and own) times of incoming and outgoing reports and orders)’.
⁴
Even so, and atypically of the normal rigidity of
German military bureaucracy, widespread discrepancies remain between the war diaries, making a large sampling essential to an accurate overview.

Beyond the war diaries themselves, there was also much to be gained from files containing numerous appendices, often only discussed in brief in the war diaries. Yielding further value were the files filled with incoming and outgoing daily orders (
Tagesmeldungen
).

Supplementing the archival research, there are a number of published primary materials that proved invaluable to this study. Among the most useful were the assembled collection of documents edited by Erhard Moritz in
Fall Barbarossa
, and Hugh Trevor-Roper's edited English translation of
Hitler's War Directives 1939–1945
. The OKW war diaries and the three volumes of Halder's own war dairy are standard works, but indispensable to any comprehensive study. The published version of Bock's diary is a trustworthy translation and another vital primary reference.

A selection of post-war memoirs have also been used, but it is important to add that a distinction was made between those sources produced at the time of the war (i.e. diaries, military reports/orders, speeches etc.) and those published after the war, usually by former German generals. These men generally sought to cast themselves in a more favourable light, either with full prescience of political and military events or as innocent functionaries subject to the baneful effects of Hitler's military interference. Accordingly, these post-war accounts are in many cases tainted, distorting their historical objectivity. Nevertheless, as problematic as they are, World War II memoirs cannot be entirely excluded as source material because the authors sometimes provide the only existing record of certain historical events. When used, they have been considered critically and backed, whenever possible, with collaborating evidence.
⁵

Although this study is essentially a ‘top-down’ history focusing on events at the highest level, the ‘bottom-up’ perspective of individual soldiers has also been included. Using a wide selection of letters, war diaries and memoirs, the soldier's view is interspersed throughout the discussion of the military campaign.

As a matter of orientation for the reader it should be noted that some place names in the Soviet Union appear throughout the documents and
published literature with certain variations in spelling. To avoid confusion and assist readability these have been standardised in my text, even sometimes in direct quotations. As a matter of principle I have rejected the all too common inaccuracy of referring to ‘the Russians’ as if the Soviet Union consisted of a generic, singular national group. Exceptions have only been made when the point in discussion does refer to an individual national group. Direct quotations from German documents, which almost always refer to all members of the Soviet Union as ‘the Russians’, have not been changed.

It is sometimes suggested that histories written solely from the German perspective, or vice versa, are somehow one-sided and thereby unable to render as accurate a judgement as those studies which claim a duality of source material. This could be the case depending on the exact subject under examination but, on the whole, the mistrust of studies focusing exclusively on one aspect or participant is unwarranted. To argue otherwise shows no understanding of the fact that almost all good studies are built on the back of countless specialised works which illuminate specific aspects of the conflict from one side or the other. Furthermore, one must appreciate the enormity of the war in the east, which makes mastery of the mammoth stock of Soviet or German archival material, on any subject or period, an ambitious claim. It is certainly possible to combine the two successfully, but this should not be mistaken for the benchmark of good research. Specialised studies not only have a legitimate place in the discourse; they tell us a great deal that more general accounts cannot. Nor is it always necessary, or advantageous, to make comparisons between Soviet and Nazi views or methods, which often differed radically. In the English language the eastern front of World War II is already under-represented given its overall importance to the war, and asserting that researchers can only make a useful contribution if they possess a working knowledge of Russian and German is ridiculous. If the counter-claim is that it is only possible to understand the war by looking at it from the point of view of all participants then we will need to look far beyond just German and Russian sources. In many ways the eastern front is a smaller-scale world war in itself. A glance at a contemporary map of Europe, to identify where the many battles took place, reveals that more than a dozen countries hosted this war at various points between 1941 and 1945. Their people and their soldiers, who often worked and fought for one side or the other – or both – have their own stories to tell. Moreover, when one looks at the constituent countries which made up the Soviet Union one can count fifteen successor states whose people fought in the Red Army. Yet not all the conscripts plucked
from Central Asia, the Trans Caucasus, the Baltic region or the Far East spoke Russian, nor did the countless ethnic minorities such as Tatars, Bashkirs, Chechens, Chukchis and many others who were drafted into army service. Germany's war was also shared by significant forces from Finland, Romania, Hungary, Italy, Slovakia and even a division from Spain. Additionally, thousands of volunteers from Norway, Denmark, France, Holland, Belgium, Croatia and Bosnia served in Hitler's Waffen SS. Although the war was dominated by forces using the Russian or German language, it was not exclusively so. Thus, charting the complexities of the war will require specialised studies on all participants and only through these can we gain a comprehensive overview of the war in the east.

Given the overall importance of Operation Barbarossa to the development of World War II it is surprising how limited the research has been. The planning phase of this enormous operation is a good example. Only a handful of specialised works exist and none is recent. The most comprehensive are those by Ernst Klink
⁶
and Barry Leach,
⁷
appearing in 1983 and 1973 respectively. Leach's work takes in more than simple military planning and therefore does not have the detail of Klink's study, but, building on the work of Andreas Hillgruber,
⁸
Leach clearly sets out the startling over-confidence of the Army High Command in 1940–41. Robert Cecil's 1975 study
⁹
backed this conclusion, but discussed the military planning in even less detail, which left Ernst Klink fertile ground to produce a definitive work and his endeavours remain until now unsurpassed. Klink was the first to identify the army's own independent planning for the invasion of the Soviet Union even before Hitler's order. He also explored in detail the emergent split between Hitler and the OKH over the strategic direction of the campaign, as well as detailing the concerns Hitler held in the region of the Pripet marshes. As groundbreaking as Klink's research was, Operation Barbarossa remains the largest military operation in history, and accordingly, more attention needs to be devoted to its origins.

Beyond simple military considerations, attempting any analysis of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union inevitably brings one into contact with some of the most fervently contested debates of World War II.
Central among these is Hitler's rationale for turning against his Soviet ‘ally’ and the struggle between those who see the decision on purely pragmatic grounds and those who see it as the fruition of a long-espoused ‘programme’ for eastern expansion. This debate opens a wide-ranging discussion that is beyond the current scope of this study. However, the underlying assumptions and prejudices through which Hitler and his army commanders viewed their war against the Soviet Union up until the end of August 1941 are important for my purposes. For this reason, some discussion of the debate and its historical context is required.

With deserved moral authority and for the benefits of political necessity, the immediate post-war period encompassing the Nuremberg trials was largely devoid of serious debate surrounding the origins of the German–Soviet war. Instead, Germany's lone responsibility and guilt for having waged an aggressive war was judged both deliberate and absolute. The harmony did not last long, however, as Cold War rivalry, mixed with some honest quests for historical truth, prompted the US State Department to publish a volume of captured German documents
¹⁰
dealing with the Nazi–Soviet pre-war relationship, and indicating a degree of blame for Stalin's commitment to the secret protocols contained within the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop pact. The Soviets responded with their own publication entitled
The Falsifiers of History
¹¹
contesting the authenticity of the American evidence and asserting their own Marxist-Leninist interpretation which emphasised the role of monopoly capitalists in rearming Germany and later channelling German aggression eastward.

The first concerted scholarly study into the period immediately preceding the outbreak of war came from Swiss historian Walter Hofer and demonstrated an intentional, premeditated policy on the part of Germany for further expansion through war.
¹²
This was contested in the 1961 thesis by A. J. P Taylor,
The Origins of The Second World War
,
¹³
which caused considerable controversy and began years of debate over whether there was an established, planned programme for eastern expansion, as outlined in
Mein Kampf
, or whether, as Taylor argued, Hitler was a simple opportunist seizing his chances as they arose. Notwithstanding some of the more radical arguments forwarded by Taylor, his main
line of reasoning found its supporters,
¹⁴
as well as a significant body of detractors.
¹⁵
The debate extended to Germany where Taylor's ‘revisionist’ argument was largely rejected.