Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East (33 page)

Clearly, if the Soviet people were committed to fighting a serious war, it would be nothing less than that – a serious war, whatever the Germans might have planned.

Juxtaposing Guderian's insightful comprehension of Soviet potential with his subsequent participation in the hopelessly ill-conceived war plans
³⁰
provides a good example of the contradiction which characterised the whole General Staff. Even assuming a positive impression of Soviet
capabilities at the height of
Tukhachevsky's influence,
³¹
which was by no means shared among all German generals of the period, the Red Army's fall from grace in the intervening years was probably only surpassed in its magnitude by the Wehrmacht's swift ascendance to domination of Europe.
³²
By 1940–41 questioning the strategic wisdom of Hitler's all-knowing vision for Germany was tantamount to ‘defeatism’ within the General Staff and career-minded officers, emboldened by past triumphs and looking forward to a victorious conclusion to the war, were not about to risk professional estrangement.
³³
Thus, while purporting to offer a sound and objective review of all intelligence for the purpose of devising reasoned military responses, the General Staff had in fact become so corrupted in its core function as to fulfil Hitler's every whimsical desire unswervingly. The extent of these desires went as far as issuing War
Directive No. 32, signed by
Warlimont, projecting future military operations into the Middle East from
Transcaucasia and
Turkey, even before the invasion of the Soviet Union had begun.
³⁴
The chief of the Operations Department in the Army General Staff, Colonel Adolf
Heusinger, wrote after the war: ‘[E]stimations of the military, economic and internal political power of the Soviet Union were completely
false.’
³⁵

The
last major military conference before the start of operations was held on 14 June at the Reich Chancellery in
Berlin. The participants included a large number of the highest ranking officers from the army groups, armies and air fleets, as well as the usual representatives from the OKH including
Halder and
Brauchitsch. After a brief welcoming speech from Hitler, the formalities began with each army commander reporting his intentions for the first days of action, followed by an assessment of how operations should proceed. Through all of this Hitler listened attentively and hardly spoke. The picture portrayed of the Red Army was again one of great mass, but little qualitative substance.
³⁶

When
Hitler finally spoke after lunch, he revisited the long eulogised theme that defeating the Soviet Union would compel Britain to give in.
³⁷
The campaign itself, he anticipated, would be a hard fought affair in which the Soviets would put up tough resistance, but the worst of the fighting would be over after six weeks. Hitler also underlined the ideological nature of the coming war, insisting that every soldier must know what he was fighting for – not the acquisition of land, but rather the destruction of Bolshevism.
³⁸

According to Hitler's Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von
Below, who observed the proceedings, in the afternoon Hitler held further talks with the commanders of
Army Group South, in which he emphasised the immense size of the theatre in which they would be operating. Hitler then drew attention to the mass of Soviet troops stationed before
Army Group Centre and stated that, once these had been defeated, Army Group South would be reinforced from Army Group Centre. Hitler's address was watched by both
Halder and Brauchitsch, who must have viewed with some alarm the idea that Hitler was now proposing to send forces to the south as well as north towards
Leningrad. Still, as Below noted, neither raised a word of protest.
³⁹
In Halder's case, his silence on these occasions did not go entirely unnoticed and Below stated that shortly before the invasion he feared that the curious absence of discussion, to say nothing of debate, disguised a much deeper divergence between Hitler and his Army Chief of Staff. The friction which had characterised relations between Hitler and the OKH in the early months of the war had all but ceased, at least openly, yet nothing in Halder's behaviour indicated he had really changed his belief regarding where command and control of the army rested. The change on Halder's part was a tactical one, calculated not to engage Hitler directly, but to win Hitler's confidence and then use his position to supply Hitler with all the evidence that might lead him into supporting his own operational choices. Only after the failure of that more subtle approach would something more direct have to be contemplated. For the time being, however, Halder swallowed his pride and made no comment. As Below observed: ‘Hitler's concept of the war in the east was completely different from that of the army.’ Below then overstated the opposition within the army to Hitler's
Commissar Order, before continuing:

At the same time I realized that there could be other orders that might be systematically sabotaged. The reason for this was that I had observed on various occasions an oppositional stance by Halder to Hitler's judgements and instructions,
without the general voicing his differing views. I had the impression that Halder was forever eating something he didn't like, but swallowed anyway.

Thus we embarked upon a truly massive offensive with a disjointed leadership and with leaders pulling in different directions. I saw this as a great danger for the success of the
operation.
⁴⁰

Whether Below really foresaw events with such clarity in June 1941, or whether his account was somewhat coloured by the benefit of hindsight, he clearly spelled out the dangers lurking ahead for the German war
effort. With its grand operational objectives and the tremendous demands these would place on the ill-equipped Wehrmacht, the success of Operation Barbarossa was at best going to be a tenuous proposition. The fact that almost the entire German military leadership were so unsuspecting of the hazards awaiting them in the east is the first major fault of Halder's General Staff. The second concerns Halder's role in deliberately seeking to blur Army Group Centre's second operational objective in order to assert his own preference over that of Hitler. His subsequent complaints of Hitler's interference in the military sphere carry less weight when one considers that Hitler's intentions were clear from the beginning, and Halder's muted response was no doubt interpreted by Hitler as an endorsement. It was therefore Halder who was seeking to modify what Hitler saw as the accepted strategic arrangement. The merits of either preference are not in discussion here; rather it is the cardinal fault of Halder to have allowed such a fundamental disagreement to persist, even into the
campaign.

While
Hitler and Halder were certainly at odds over the strategic direction of the war in the east, it would not be correct to infer that there was any general opposition to Hitler or his aggressive war plans among the overwhelming majority of German generals. If one was to believe the fog of distortions generated by the numerous memoirs of senior members of the Wehrmacht, the general representation of the army's wartime role would be very misleading.
⁴¹
Less discerning studies, especially many of those produced up until the end of the 1970s, have consequently given too much weight to this point of view and disproportionately emphasised the activities of the relatively small opposition groups that existed within the German armed forces. The work of Admiral
Canaris's military intelligence group and the later efforts of Major-General Henning von
Tresckow and Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von
Stauffenberg, culminating in the July 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler, distracted attention from the wider, more representative view of the army, as an agency very much within the Nazi fold. It was only with the collaboration of the army that Hitler's European empire was possible, but even
worse, the systematic brutality of the regime and its organised extermination policies required both the backing and in many cases the direct involvement of the armed forces. All of this was forthcoming and it was only after the war was irretrievably lost that the most serious acts of resistance, by a minority of officers, were
attempted.

Given the close relationship between the army, Hitler and Nazi policies it is hardly surprising that Hitler's great undertaking to invade the Soviet Union, whether viewed for its ideological, geo-strategic or military rationale, was able to gain the common acceptance of the men charged with carrying it out.
From a military point of view, the likelihood of a German victory was also shared in Britain, with the Joint Intelligence Committee estimating that the Germans would require just six weeks to occupy the Ukraine and reach Moscow.
⁴²
A
similarly pessimistic assessment was reached by the US Secretary of War,
Henry Stimson, and his Chief of Staff, General
George Marshall, who predicted that the German armies would require a minimum of one month, and a possible maximum of three months, to defeat the Soviet Union.
⁴³
The Italians, as Germany's envious junior ally, were so convinced of another sweeping triumph that
Mussolini told his foreign minister: ‘I hope for only one thing, that in this war in the east the Germans will lose a lot of feathers.’
⁴⁴
In Japan the head of the army's military intelligence, General
Okamoto Kiyomoto, predicted a campaign would last only a few weeks, not longer.
⁴⁵
Within the Nazi leadership itself there was a buoyant optimism. Joseph
Goebbels, the German propaganda minister and one of Hitler's most fanatical supporters, wrote on 16 June 1941: ‘The Führer estimates that the operation will take four months, I reckon on fewer. Bolshevism will collapse like a house of cards.’
⁴⁶
The
Reichsmarschall
Hermann
Göring, Hitler's chosen successor and Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, had made a similar
assessment, declaring, ‘with the entry of German troops into Russia, the entire Bolshevist State will collapse’.
⁴⁷
The
SS chief, Heinrich
Himmler, was equally dismissive of Soviet strength and claimed it represented no threat.
⁴⁸

In the days before the launch of Barbarossa, Hitler showed signs of nervous anxiety and apprehension.
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As Goebbels's diary had indicated, for all of Hitler's protestations proclaiming the great success of Barbarossa, he was now the most guarded in his
optimism. In a letter to Mussolini announcing his decision to attack the Soviet Union, Hitler referred to ‘months of anxious deliberation’, ending in what he described as ‘the hardest decision of my
life’.
⁵⁰
Reflecting back in October 1941, Hitler revealed the true fear these days had held for him: ‘On the 22nd June, a door opened before us, and we didn't know what was behind it…The heavy uncertainty took me by the throat.’
⁵¹

The
German invasion of the Soviet Union was to begin the largest and most brutal war in history. Given the enormous numbers of men and material involved, the war in the Soviet Union was without question the most decisive battleground of World War II.
Even by conservative estimates the fighting in this theatre claimed between 27 and 28 million Soviet lives,
⁵²
which dwarf the 700,000 combined war dead of the United Kingdom and the United States.
⁵³
To put it another way, the total Soviet war dead alone equalled more than three times the total war dead of
all
the nations involved in the carnage of World War I.
⁵⁴
Four-fifths of all the fighting in World War II took place on Germany's eastern front and never less than two-thirds of the German army was engaged in the war against the Soviet Union, even after D-Day.
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The conflict would last almost four years, being fought on an enormous front extending 2,768 kilometres from the Barents Sea in the north to the Black Sea in
the south.
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To Hitler's mind the war could only result in another great triumph bringing unrivalled power or absolute defeat and ruin; there could be no compromise peace.
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In its sheer scale and ferocity, the eastern front bears no comparison with any of Germany's other theatres of warfare between 1939 and 1945. For this reason, nowhere else is the explanation for Germany's defeat more profoundly
rooted.

As a German soldier would later write of his entry onto the eastern front: ‘Mother Russia opened her arms wide in embrace. Welcome to the war…Welcome to hell on earth.’
⁵⁸
Operation Barbarossa had begun.

1
Trevor-Roper (ed.),
Hitler's War Directives 1939–1945
, p. 94.

2
For a detailed discussion of this little-known war see Gerhard Schreiber, ‘Mussolinis Überfall auf Griechenland oder der Anfang vom Ende der italienischen Großmachtstellung’ in Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (ed.),
Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg
, Band III:
Der Mittelmeerraum und Südosteuropa. Von der ‘non belligeranza’ Italiens bis zum Kriegseintritt der Vereinigten Staaten
(Stuttgart, 1984), pp. 368–414.