Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East (84 page)

As Army Group Centre sought to attack in the south, hold hundreds of kilometres of front and now shed some of its mobile forces in the north, Bock's fears for his offensive capabilities were well justified. On top of this, the enduring supply difficulties and the disappointing results of the refitting process made for an even bleaker outlook. This undermined any prospect of eradicating major Soviet resistance in the little time remaining before the onset of adverse seasonal conditions.

Embracing world war and apocalypse – Hitler reaches resolution

Although
Directive 34a raised the prospect of a direct thrust on Moscow by Army Group Centre, it fell well short of ordering it and
Hitler was careful to attach his own conditions before pledging any authorisation. Jodl, Brauchitsch and Halder were gambling on convincing Hitler that the conquest of Leningrad and the Ukraine could be achieved by the respective northern and southern army groups in the hope of freeing Bock to undertake operations against Moscow. Three days after issuing War Directive 34a, at a conference with
Brauchitsch and
Jodl on 15 August, Hitler again insisted that attacking Moscow could not be considered until after the success of Army Group North's operations. In the meantime Bock was forbidden to make any attacks in the direction of the Soviet capital.
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Evidently Hitler was not so easily taken in by the assurances of his commanders, which is probably as much a commentary on his distrust of the generals as his own reading of the difficulties confronting the campaign. For the army commanders, Hitler's steadfast refusal to budge on Moscow, while at the same time giving no firm indication of where Bock's embattled motorised divisions would next be employed, was an unending source of frustration and anxiety. The inordinate amount of time which had now elapsed while awaiting a decision and the corresponding daily depletion of resources had the inevitable effect of radicalising the strategic crisis to the point where all hopes of ultimately winning the war increasingly seemed to rest on Hitler's final decision. Yet while Hitler fussed about the success of Leeb's drive on Leningrad and the army commanders impatiently eyed Moscow, none was able to see how irrelevant their whole debate was becoming and that defeating the Soviet Union in 1941 was simply beyond the Wehrmacht's available strength.

The
chain of events that ended the strategic impasse in the German High Command was well beyond the comprehension of Hitler's generals, but it struck at the very root of Hitler's obsessive world-view. The result would sweep away Hitler's indecision about strategy in the east and at the same time proceed rapidly towards the unfolding Jewish
Holocaust. Understanding the symbiosis between the future progress of the war and Hitler's Jewish policy, it is important to recognise that in Hitler's view there existed two forms of war, the conventional kind fought between nation states, and the second, a racial war in which
the two principal groups, Arians and Jews, were now competing for supremacy.
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Since his earliest days of public life Hitler had consistently cast history and his contemporary world in terms of an inter-racial struggle for survival. Indeed the Nazi regime's search for a solution to its ‘Jewish problem’ in the early part of World War II was not seen as a distraction from the war; on the contrary, it was an integral element of the war itself. While it was deemed that the Jews under German control had to be increasingly repressed, the still outstanding problem was the Jews outside of German control, whom Hitler referred to as ‘international Jewry’ and blamed for undermining Germany's position with increasingly belligerent anti-German policies, particularly from the United States. To Hitler's mind, this global Jewish conspiracy sought the destruction of Germany by arraying against it the powers of the world in a new world war. It was this eventuality that provoked Hitler to the most extreme form of racial warfare. Addressing the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, Hitler publicly prophesied: ‘Should the international Jewry of finance succeed, both within and beyond Europe, in plunging mankind into yet another world war, then the result will not be a Bolshevisation of the earth and the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.’
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After the defeat of France, Hitler had resolved to crush the Soviet Union in the hope of forcing Britain to make terms and at the same time eliminating what Hitler saw as the antithesis of Nazi ideology – Jewish Bolshevism. Not only was this intended to be a decisive move to win the war, but the conquest of Soviet lands would yield immeasurable wealth for contemplating global warfare and, above all, forestall the prospect of foreign encirclement by hostile
powers.

Assessing the situation in mid-August 1941 it was clear that the Soviet Union had not yet crumbled under the weight of German arms and that the war in the east was still far from over. By implication, instead of discouraging the British will to fight, Germany's failure to achieve a rapid and convincing conquest would spur British resolve to fight on. Added to this was the news, which had just reached Hitler, of the first
face-to-face meeting between
Churchill and
Roosevelt, at which the two leaders agreed on eight points that came to be known as the
Atlantic Charter. Ulrich von Hassell's diary alluded to the importance of the Atlantic Charter and its significance for Hitler.

The chief political event is the publication of the joint declaration of Churchill and Roosevelt…The points, whose effects Hitler evidently fears, cannot be mentioned, but they are nevertheless disputed and crudely picked to pieces [in the press].
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Below, Hitler's Luftwaffe adjutant, was more specific. He said that upon hearing of the Charter's content, especially point six, Hitler ‘flew into a passionate rage’.
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Point six of the Charter began with the opening phrase, ‘after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny’, confirming for Hitler that a new world war to include the United States was becoming inevitable and that his prophecy surrounding the conspiracy of international Jewry had indeed come true. In this same period Hitler was overcome with what was referred to as a severe case of dysentery, but the momentous nature of events has led to speculation by at least one historian that Hitler, in fact, suffered a nervous breakdown.
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When
Goebbels flew to Hitler's headquarters on 18 August, he was informed that Hitler's health was not good and, upon seeing the Führer in person, noted that Hitler ‘looked somewhat assailed and sickly’.
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Goebbels then joined Hitler for a lengthy meeting in which the dictator astonishingly portrayed serious doubts about the war in the east and even suggested that a peace initiative from Stalin would be accepted. Bolshevism without the Red Army, Hitler told Goebbels, would be no danger to Germany.
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In the frightful reality of his strategic position, Hitler was clutching at straws. At another point he told Goebbels of his certainty that
Japan would soon invade the Soviet Union.
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Phantom peace deals and imaginary allies were no doubt soothing remedies to Hitler's troubled state of mind, but in concrete terms Hitler knew he was facing the sum of all his strategic fears – a global anti-German coalition. This was a decisive point for Hitler, which would help determine future strategy in both his conventional and his racial war.

Contemplating racial warfare Goebbels wrote after his meeting with Hitler:

We talked about the Jewish problem. The Führer is convinced that his earlier prophecy in the Reichstag is proving correct, that if the Jews succeed again in provoking another world war it would end with the annihilation of the Jews. This is being proved in these weeks and months with an apparently eerie certainty. In the east the Jews must pay for
this …
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August
and September saw a dramatic increase in the killing of Jews, but Hitler's path to unrestrained genocide in the Soviet Union cannot be pinpointed so precisely. The Holocaust proceeded, for the most part, with verbal instructions and meetings without written records. The absence of a paper trail makes it difficult for historians to agree on the exact timing of decisions, while the available testimonies, together with surviving evidence, are sometimes contradictory or open to several interpretations.
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Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that, by mid-August, the progress of the war had further radicalised Hitler's conception of a racial war, and drove him to authorise more extreme measures in the mass extermination of the Soviet Union's Jewish population. To implement this
Himmler's mobile death squads, known as the
Einsatzgruppen
, which had been operating since the first days of the war under a more limited mandate, now undertook the systematic mass murder of whole Jewish communities. Mass shootings throughout the occupied territories were soon killing thousands of Jews every day. If there were any doubts about the nature of German occupation in the east, the mass graves of Jewish men, women and children proved there was no limit to the excesses of Nazi rule. Nor was the genocide restricted to the activities of the SS. The army assisted the
Einsatzgruppen
by marking and registering Jews, providing the killing units with supplies and transport, and sometimes assembling, guarding and even shooting the victims.
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Even the scattered reports that were reaching the outside world were enough to hint at the horrific scale of
the killing in the Soviet Union, which in fact was only just beginning. As
Churchill broadcast on 24 August, ‘whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands – literally scores of thousands – of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German police-troops…We are in the presence of a crime without a name.’
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Just
as the anticipation of a world war brought Hitler's racial policy to its horrifying conclusion, so too did it finally bring resolution in his direction of the war in the east. The clear signal from the western allies that they would not accept limited war aims, and the phenomenal demands of the fighting in the east, led Hitler to urgently reassess the course of the military campaign in the east. Even before the war, Hitler had eyed the Soviet Union's economic wealth with special interest, but this was in context of an ongoing war against Britain and possibly later the United States. There was no thought given to a continuing, high-intensity war in the east. Yet now that this prospect was an emerging reality, Hitler's interest in economic objectives assumed greatly increased importance, both as a method of weakening the Soviet state and sustaining Germany through a long conflict. Accordingly, Hitler was no longer concerned with the submissions of his generals;
Moscow had never been more than a secondary objective and Hitler was now acutely aware that Germany's lack of resources could be ruinous in a world war. Thus, the mineral-rich Donets Basin in the eastern
Ukraine and the oil fields of southern Russia were now unambiguously the focus of Hitler's strategic thinking. On the night of 19–20 August, Hitler was steadfastly preoccupied with visions of his economic autarky to be won in the next phase of the campaign:

It is not tolerable that the life of the peoples of the continent should depend upon England. The Ukraine, and then the Volga basin, will one day be the granaries of Europe. We shall reap much more than what actually grows from the soil…If one day Sweden declines to supply any more iron, that's alright. We'll get it from Russia.
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Although the declaration of the
Atlantic Charter may well have instigated the changes in Hitler's war policy, these were not immediately apparent to Hitler's military commanders in either the OKW or OKH. Accordingly, although the Moscow operation was now a forlorn hope,
Halder was still under the impression that the recently issued
War Directive 34a represented grounds for encouragement that Hitler was finally being won over. Believing his approach was working, Halder sought to capitalise on his erroneous assurance that the three army groups could simultaneously
achieve everything Hitler and the army wanted. Halder now sought to present his plan in written form and to give it maximum weight by again enlisting Jodl's support to produce a similar proposal from the OKW
. Thus
Heusinger set to work on one plan for the OKH, while
Warlimont prepared another for the OKW, with both essentially arguing for the same strategic solution.

Warlimont's ‘Assessment of the Eastern Situation’ concluded that: ‘The eastern army is strong enough for Army Groups North and South to accomplish their tasks with their own strengths, and Army Group Centre to undertake the decisive thrust on Moscow.’ It was believed that a line from the Donets Basin, through
Kharkov and Moscow to
Leningrad could be reached by the end of the next phase of operations.
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Heusinger's plan began by reasserting that the enemy's main strength was concentrated opposite Bock's army group and that it was here that a decisive blow could be struck against the Red Army. Moscow's industrial potential was also highlighted, while the attainment of economic objectives in the north and south were suggested to be within the strengths of the two flanking army groups. Interestingly, the OKH plan sounded a note of urgency over the time remaining for operations and, at the same time, warned that the motorised divisions, even after their refitting, could be employed ‘only over limited distances and with reduced combat strength. As a result,’ the OKH plan made clear, ‘their employment must be on the
one deciding operation
so that the offensive remains limited to absolutely necessary actions.’
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Clearly, the OKH was envisioning the coming offensive as the last chance to end the war in 1941 and for this everything depended on Bock driving towards Moscow.