The Third Reich at War (28 page)

IV

The half-hearted nature of Hitler’s preparations for the seaborne invasion of Britain reflected not least the fact that already before the end of July 1940 his mind was turning to a plan far closer to his heart: the conquest of Russia. This had been at the very centre of Hitler’s thinking since the early 1920s. Already in his autobiographical political tract
My Struggle
he had declared in uncompromising terms the necessity of acquiring ‘living-space’ for the Germans in Eastern Europe. He had repeated this in numerous addresses to his military staff, most notably on 3 February 1933, when he had explicitly promised the army chiefs that he would launch a war to Germanize Eastern Europe some time in the future.
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Meeting the chiefs of the armed forces towards the end of July 1940, Hitler said that it was time to begin planning for this event. Eighty to 100 divisions would be needed to crush the Red Army. It would be child’s play in comparison to the invasion of France.
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In fact, the army had already carried out feasibility studies and concluded that an invasion was not practicable before the following spring. Further studies were prepared with a view to launching an attack in May 1941.

The prospect of a war on two fronts did not alarm Hitler. France had been eliminated, Britain seemed close to collapse. As for the Red Army, it had been decimated by Stalin’s purges, and it had proved hopelessly incompetent in the war with Finland. Slavs in any case were subhumans incapable of putting up serious resistance to a superior race. Bolshevism only made them weaker. Hitler regarded it as a tool of the world Jewish conspiracy, which had succeeded in enslaving the Slavs and bending them to its will. There were, of course, many reasons why this view was little more than a fantasy, not the least of them being the fact that Stalin was himself antisemitic and had dismissed his Foreign Minister, Litvinov, in 1939, among other things because he was a Jew. Still, thought Hitler, if the racially superior Western European nations had been crushed so easily, then what chance did the Slavs stand? ‘The Russians are inferior,’ Hitler told Brauchitsch and Halder on 5 December 1940. ‘The army is leaderless.’ The German armed forces would require no more than four or five months to crush the Soviet Union.
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Aside from the ideological primacy of ‘living-space’ there were also pragmatic reasons for attacking the Soviet Union. Throughout 1940 and the first half of 1941, the Third Reich depended heavily on supplies from Eastern Europe. The non-aggression pact signed between Ribbentrop and the Soviet Foreign Minister, Molotov, on 24 August 1939 was still in force at this time, of course.
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Indeed, on 12 November 1940 Molotov himself arrived in Berlin at Hitler’s invitation to discuss future co-operation. On 10 January 1941 the Soviet Union signed a new trade agreement which doubled the quantity of grain exports from the Ukraine to the Third Reich, thus ironically convincing Hitler, if he needed convincing, that the Soviet Union possessed almost limitless supplies of foodstuffs, which would be essential for the further conduct of the war and the general future of the Third Reich. Stalin’s concessions to German trade demands thus did little or nothing to affect the timing of the German invasion.
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Whatever the Soviets might offer, Hitler had no intention of abandoning his plans. On 18 December 1940 he ordered the armed forces to be ready to crush the Soviet Union in a rapid campaign to begin the following spring. His comparative haste was not least a consequence of his failure to defeat Britain. By 1942, he thought, the USA might well have entered the war on the Allied side. Defeating the Soviets would put Germany in a strong position to deal with the Americans. It would encourage Japan to come into the war against America by eliminating a major threat to Japan’s west. And it would isolate the British still further and perhaps finally force them to the negotiating table. This was indeed the primary initial reason for launching the invasion in 1941. ‘But if Russia is smashed,’ Hitler told his generals on 31 July 1940, ‘it is the end of any hopes that might move England still to hope for a change in the situation.’
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‘The gentlemen in England aren’t stupid, you know,’ he told Field Marshal Fedor von Bock in early January 1941. ‘They’ll realize there’s no purpose for them carrying on the war when Russia has been beaten and eliminated from it.’
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Moreover, he added some weeks later, it was necessary to launch the invasion before Britain was defeated; if it came afterwards, the German people would not support it. The code name for the invasion, supplied by Hitler himself, was ‘Operation Barbarossa’, named after Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor and German crusader in the twelfth century.
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As plans became more detailed, the number of divisions to be used in the invasion fluctuated but was eventually set at around 200. The Red Army forces arrayed against the invaders were of a roughly comparable size, but in the minds of Hitler and his military leaders they were far inferior in quality. To be sure, in terms of equipment, the Red Army in the combat zone far outgunned its opponents, with nearly three times as many artillery pieces and the same advantage in tanks. Even in the air, Soviet forces had a strong numerical superiority, with twice as many combat aircraft as the Germans and their allies. But many of these machines were obsolescent, new tank models and new artillery pieces were not yet being produced in any numbers, and Stalin’s purges of the 1930s had seriously affected aircraft and munitions production managers and designers, military commanders and senior air force officers.
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Moreover, German preparations were thorough. Elated by the success of the armoured divisions in the invasion of France, Hitler ordered arms production to focus on tanks. The number of panzer divisions in the German army doubled between the summer of 1940 and the summer of 1941, backed by a corresponding increase in the number of half-track vehicles with which to move the divisions of highly mobile infantry swiftly in behind the tanks to press home the advantage. German arms production in the year before the invasion of the Soviet Union really did concentrate on providing the means to fight a classic war of lightning movement, as it had not done before the invasion of France. To back this up, production was switched from ammunition, of which there were now plentiful supplies, to machine-guns and field artillery. Despite continued bureaucratic infighting between different procurement and economic management agencies under the control of Fritz Todt, Georg Thomas and Hermann G̈ring, the arms industry of the Third Reich did therefore operate with some effectiveness in the run-up to Operation Barbarossa.
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Over the first half of 1941, railway and other communications in German-occupied Poland were improved, and supplies stockpiled in the border area. Strategic plans finally envisaged cutting off and destroying Soviet forces on the border and advancing rapidly to a line from Archangel to Astrakhan. In the north, Finland, bitterly resentful at the loss of territory to the Soviet Union at the end of the ‘Winter War’ in 1940, agreed to mobilize its sixteen-division army, newly organized and provided with the latest German equipment, though its objectives went no further than the recovery of the lost territory.
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In the south, Romania supplied eighteen divisions to the invading forces.
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Romanian troops were joined by a small force of Hungarians, but the two forces had to be kept apart because of the poor relations between the two countries. Most of the Hungarian forces’ equipment was obsolete, the rifles used by the infantry frequently jammed, they had only 190 tanks, which were also out of date, and six of the ten ‘Alpine’ battalions that joined in the invasion of Russia were mounted on bicycles. Far more important was the fact that Hungary was rapidly becoming an important source of petroleum oil for the Germans, until by the middle of the war it was the second-most important supplier after Romania.
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The participation of the Hungarians was not least the consequence of the anxiety of the Hungarian ruler Admiral Mikl’s H’rthy that the Romanians would steal a march on him and get back some of the territory they had lost to Hungary in 1940. In similar fashion, the participation of the German client state of Slovakia, which sent two divisions intended mainly to provide security behind the front, was intended to gain German goodwill in the face of further Hungarian demands on its territory. By contrast, Mussolini’s contribution of 60,000 Italian troops did not take part in the invasion itself, and was made in the vague hope that the Germans would look favourably on Italian aspirations in the postwar peace settlement. 45,000 anti-Communist Spanish volunteers went to join the fray on the Leningrad front, inspired by ideological commitment and sanctioned by Franco as a gesture of gratitude to Hitler for his help in the fighting that had brought him to power. The volunteers cannot have been amused when they were greeted on their arrival by a German air force band mistakenly playing the national anthem of the Republicans, their defeated opponents in the Civil War.
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Germany’s Balkan ally Bulgaria took a more cautious line than the Hungarians and Romanians. King Boris III, who ran the country’s military and foreign policy and much else besides, was realistic enough to recognize that his army of peasant conscripts was not suited for modern warfare and had no interest in fighting far from home. Boris had to perform a delicate balancing act. He once remarked: ‘My army is pro-German, my wife is Italian, my people are pro-Russian. I’m the only pro-Bulgarian in this country.’
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He had eagerly joined in the dismemberment of Greece and Yugoslavia, and begun the Bulgarization of the education system and other aspects of public life in the areas occupied by his forces. But the Bulgarian annexation of Thrace sparked serious resistance, leading to a major uprising at the end of September 1941. Boris claimed with some justification that the army was needed there to put it down, which it did in the following months, killing between 45,000 and 60,000 Greeks and ordering the expulsion or resettlement of many more. Just as important from the king’s point of view, however, was the threat of internal revolt by fascist republicans. Partly to ward this off, but also yielding to German pressure, he had introduced antisemitic legislation in October 1940, banning sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews and ousting Jews from a variety of professions and industries. But the Bulgarian legislature had been careful to define Jews in religious terms, and many Jews were able to escape the effects of the legislation by converting, often merely on paper, to Christianity. In addition, the legislation was not very rigorously enforced. Jews were required by law to wear the ‘Jewish star’ on their clothes, for example, but the government factory commissioned to make them produced so few that the small number of Jews who had started wearing them soon took them off because nobody else was wearing them. The King was also obliged to dissolve the country’s Masonic lodges, a favourite target of Nazi and fascist conspiracy theorists, much to the irritation of his ministers, many of whom were Freemasons themselves. But, mindful of the looming power of the Russian colossus on his doorstep, he adamantly refused to provide any troops for the Soviet front, and indeed, although Bulgaria declared war on the Western Allies, it never declared war on the Soviet Union.
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Half-exasperated, half-admiring, Hitler called him ‘a very intelligent, even cunning man’, while Goebbels, more bluntly, called him ‘a sly, crafty fellow’.
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For all its multinational trimmings, therefore, ‘Operation Barbarossa’ was thus in essence to be a German operation. As the winter snows of East-Central Europe melted and the ground thawed, the German armed forces began moving vast masses of men and equipment up to the Soviet border. Throughout May and early June 1941, Zygmunt Klukowski recorded endless columns of German troops and vehicles passing through his region of Poland, noting the passage of between 500 and 600 vehicles on 14 June alone, for example.
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Stalin hurriedly launched a futile policy of trying to appease the Germans by stepping up Soviet deliveries of Asian rubber and other supplies under the trade agreement signed in January 1941. As a dogmatic Marxist-Leninist, Stalin was convinced that Hitler’s regime was the tool of German monopoly capitalism, so that if he made available everything German business wanted, there would be no immediate reason to invade. Already, under trade provisions agreed under the Nazi-Soviet Pact early the previous year, the Soviet Union was supplying nearly three-quarters of Germany’s requirement of phosphates, over two-thirds of its imported asbestos, only a little less of its chrome ore, over half its manganese, over a third of its imported nickel, and, even more crucially, more than a third of its imported oil.
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Stalin personally vetoed proposals to disrupt the German military build-up by attacking across the Polish demarcation line. Reports from Soviet agents and even from members of the German embassy in Moscow that an invasion was imminent only convinced him that the Germans were playing hard-ball in their drive to extract economic concessions from him.
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At the same time, Stalin realized that, as he told graduating military cadets in Moscow on 5 May 1941, ‘War with Germany is inevitable.’ Molotov might be able to postpone it for two or three months, but in the meantime it was vital to ‘re-teach our army and our commanders. Educate them in the spirit of attack.’
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Delivered to young officers as a rhetorical message for the future, this was not a statement of intent. Stalin did not believe that the Red Army would be ready to deal with the Germans until 1942 or perhaps even 1943. Not only had the General Staff not drawn up any plans for an attack on the German forces, it had no plans for a defence against them either.
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Although the Germans mounted a large and sophisticated deception plan to conceal the true nature of their intentions, Soviet intelligence began to send in accurate reports that the invasion was planned for around 22 June 1941. But Stalin would not listen. Earlier reports that the invasion plans were to become operational on 15 May 1941, though correct at the time, proved wrong when the Germans delayed Barbarossa in order to mount the invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia. Hitler later blamed Mussolini for the consequences, but in fact the weather in East-Central Europe in these weeks would have made an invasion of the Soviet Union inadvisable even had the German Leader not been obliged to step in to rescue his Italian ally from the imbroglio in Southern Europe. The Soviet agents who had made the prediction lost all credibility as a result.
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The capitalist forces in Britain, including the exiled Polish government, seemed to Stalin’s narrow and suspicious mind to be feeding false information to him about German intentions in order to lure him into a battle. Surely in any case the German Leader would not invade while the conflict with Britain was still unresolved. When an ex-Communist soldier deserted the German forces on 21 June 1941 and swam across a river to tell the Russians on the other side that his unit had been given orders to invade the following morning, Stalin had him shot for spreading ‘disinformation’.
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