World War II Behind Closed Doors (14 page)

Stalin's nervous state had only been heightened by the news that on 10 May, Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy, had flown to Scotland. As Stalin saw it, this was obvious evidence that a secret peace treaty was in prospect between the Germans and the British. It was actually nothing of the kind and it transpired that Hess was deranged. But that was not how it appeared to the Soviet leader at the time. The British had, unwittingly, fuelled Stalin's paranoia three weeks before Hess's flight to Britain. On 18 April the British ambassador to Moscow, Sir Stafford Cripps, had written to Stalin and Molotov that ‘it was not outside the bounds of possibility, if the war were protracted for a long period, that there might be a temptation for Great Britain (and especially for certain circles in Great Britain) to come to some arrangement to end the war on the sort of basis which has recently been suggested in some German quarters’.
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Cripps had meant his letter to alert the Soviet leadership to the dangers of not forming an alliance with Great Britain against the Germans. But it had precisely the reverse effect, making Stalin
believe that the British were conducting some secret deal with the Germans behind his back – a fear that Hess's arrival in Scotland only served to intensify.

Stalin now clung almost irrationally to the belief that he was not witnessing evidence of an imminent German invasion. Less than a week before the Germans launched their attack against the Soviet Union, Stalin examined a report from Merkulov, People's Commissar for State Defence, which could not have been more explicit: ‘A source working in the German Aviation Headquarters reports: 1. Germany has concluded all necessary measures for war in preparation for an armed assault against the USSR and an attack can be expected at any moment’. Stalin scribbled these words across the document: ‘Comrade Merkulov, you can send your “source” from his position on the staff of the German Air Force to fuck his mother. He is not a “source” but a disinformant’.
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There has been a recent tendency to ‘relativize’ Stalin's behaviour around this time – in other words, not to blame him as much as before; certainly not as much as Winston Churchill, who described Stalin and his advisers as ‘the most completely outwitted bunglers of the Second World War’.
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And, yes, it is true that events were not straightforward at the time, and, as Marshal Zhukov subsequently put it: ‘There is nothing simpler than providing a new interpretation of events when the past and its consequences are already known’.
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Nonetheless, Stalin's judgement during this period still seems exceptionally bad. The build-up of German forces was obvious, yet he remained too frightened to move the Red Army on to a sufficiently advanced state of readiness – a fundamental mistake that Marshal Vasilevsky later described as ‘dangerous’.
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As a direct result of Stalin's mishandling of the crisis, most Soviet front-line planes and much other military equipment were destroyed in the first moments of the war. If Stalin wasn't an ‘outwitted bungler’, then it's hard to know who in history ever was.

Shortly after four o'clock in the morning of 22 June 1941 the German ambassador to Moscow, Count Schulenburg, arrived in Molotov's office in the Kremlin to announce the news that the Soviet leadership had been dreading. German troops had crossed
into the Soviet Union, Schulenburg said, because of Soviet troop concentrations at the border. It was an obvious pretext. ‘After the ambassador delivered the message’,
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recalled Gustav Hilger, who was present in the room with Schulenburg, ‘there were several seconds of deep silence. Molotov was visibly struggling with deep inner excitement…. He called the German action a breach of confidence unprecedented in history. Germany without any reason had attacked a country with which it had concluded a pact of non-aggression’. (Molotov had clearly forgotten that there was indeed a historical precedent for the German action – less than two years before, in September 1939, the Soviet Union had invaded Poland, a country with whom it had signed a pact of non-aggression in July 1932.)

Finally, Molotov could think of nothing more to say to Schulenburg than the plaintive words: ‘Surely we haven't deserved this?’

2
DECISIVE
MOMENTS

THE FIRST DAYS OF THE INVASION

The Germans launched the largest land invasion in the history of the world at just before dawn on Sunday, 22 June 1941. More than 3 million soldiers moved forward in three massive thrusts: Army Group North under Field Marshal von Leeb aiming for the Baltic states and Leningrad; Army Group Centre led by Field Marshal von Bock heading due east, aiming for the Minsk, Smolensk, Vyazma, Moscow axis; and Army Group South commanded by Field Marshal von Rundstedt targeting the rich agricultural land of the Ukraine.

The Soviet forces were little match for the Germans. And although there were isolated pockets of determined resistance, the overall picture was one of despair: ‘I fought on the border for three days and three nights’, says Georgy Semenyak,
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a soldier in the Soviet 204th Division. ‘The bombings, shootings…explosions of artillery gunfire continued non-stop’. By the fourth day his unit was in disarray and falling back: ‘It was a dismal picture. During the day aeroplanes continuously dropped bombs on the retreating soldiers’. In the face of the German attack, most of his commanders simply deserted their men: ‘The lieutenants, captains, second lieutenants took rides on passing vehicles…mostly trucks travelling eastwards…. The fact that they used their rank to save their own lives, we felt this to be wrong. But every man has his weaknesses’.

The deadly chaos of those first moments of the invasion was also experienced by Ivan Kulish,
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one of the Soviet soldiers who had invaded eastern Poland back in 1939: ‘I never thought we would retreat from Lvov’,
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he says, ‘but instead we were retreating
embarrassingly. We started running away from Lvov and there was complete chaos in the troops…. No communications; commanders of divisions, commanders of the army didn't know where their troops were or where they were… Panic. Everyone was retreating in panic’. Red Army losses were catastrophic. The Soviet air force had been all but destroyed on the ground in the first hours of the German offensive, and in less than a month Army Group Centre had captured more than three hundred thousand prisoners. And whilst German reports spoke of the ‘strength and savagery’ of the Soviet resistance in places like Brest-Litovsk,
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the Red Army was clearly inferior to the Wehrmacht.

Amidst the panic, orders were issued by the NKVD to shoot the most ‘dangerous’ prisoners (almost certainly those detained for political offences) held near the front line. In Lwów, an estimated 4,000 people were killed by the NKVD.
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Olga Popadyn
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was in hospital in Lwów's Brigidki prison and remembers that in the last week of June ‘there was a strong smell of dead bodies’. It clearly meant that ‘they [the NKVD] were killing prisoners. With every day that passed, because it was so hot, the smell of the corpses got worse and worse…’. Stalin's regime remained true to itself. The Soviets had entered Polish territory committing atrocities, and they were leaving Polish territory while still committing atrocities.

In those early moments of the war the Soviet leader showed every sign of straightforward denial. When Stalin had first been awoken in the small hours of 22 June at his dacha at Kuntsevo, just outside Moscow, he had called a meeting at the Kremlin, only to announce that this so-called attack might still just be a ‘provocation’, or that perhaps Hitler's generals were acting without their Führer's orders. Once it was blatantly clear that what the Germans were doing was no ‘provocation’, Stalin started issuing orders that bore little relationship with reality. His ‘Directive Number 3’, for example, called for the Red Army to push forward into enemy territory towards Lublin in implementation of the now defunct plan to conduct a defensive battle on the enemy's territory.

But Stalin's lieutenants, sent out from Moscow to learn what was happening on the front line, soon discovered the appalling truth.
Nikita Khrushchev, as a chief political officer, witnessed first hand the collapse of the officer corps when he met the desperate commissar of the South-Western Front, Major General Nikolai Vashugin. ‘I've decided to shoot myself’, Vashugin told Khrushchev. ‘I'm guilty of giving incorrect orders to the commanders of the mechanized corps. I don't want to live any longer’.

‘Excuse me? What is this?’ demanded Khrushchev.

Vashugin began to try to explain but Khrushchev cut him short, not wanting to get into an argument, and said: ‘Why are you talking such foolishness? If you've decided to shoot yourself, what are you waiting for?’

At which point Vashugin pulled out his pistol, put it to his head and pulled the trigger. He fell down dead at Khrushchev's feet.
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Vashugin's suicide symbolized the brittleness of the Stalinist system at this vital moment in the war. The purges of the 1930s, when Stalin had ordered the elimination of opposition – often imaginary – inside the Soviet armed forces, had grievously weakened the Red Army. Not only had some of the most talented military commanders been removed, and relatively young and inexperienced officers promoted in their place (the commander of the Soviet air force at this time, for example, was just twenty-nine years old), but the pervasive atmosphere of fear had destroyed the commanders' ability to cope under pressure.

The problem wasn't just that the Stalinist system was based on terror, it was that punishment was administered on seemingly arbitrary criteria. One of Beria's and Stalin's favourite charges against the supposed opponents of the state was ‘enemy of the people’. But how was it possible to defend yourself against that charge? Many officers felt that the only way to survive was to avoid taking not only risks but any decisions at all – a damaging aspect of the Soviet system that the German liaison officer at Base North had so complained about the previous year.

Not only was the Red Army supposed to take on the Germans with inferior equipment, they were supposed to cope with a sclerotic chain of command as well. Moreover, they faced a German army that was structured in the opposite way entirely. By this point in
the war the Germans had honed their Blitzkrieg tactics to a level of excellence, something that made their armoured thrusts almost impossible to defend, and their leadership theory
of Auftragstaktik
(mission command) made their entire system of leadership flexible and effective.

Unlike the Soviet battlefield commanders who feared taking responsibility for their actions, the German High Command delegated detailed decision-making down even to non-commissioned officers. The High Command set the objectives, but it was up to the actual officers and NCOs on the battlefield to decide the best way of carrying out these objectives. It was the freedom of
Auftragstaktik
that was a necessary precondition, for example, of the immense success of Heinz Guderian's Panzer army in the early days of the war. Guderian's tanks managed to push forward and capture Smolensk, deep inside the Soviet Union, less than four weeks after the start of the invasion. (It was no wonder Guderian had the nickname ‘Schneller Heinz’ – fast Heinz – amongst his men.)

‘You thought it was a doddle’, says Albert Schneider, a member of the 201st German assault gun battalion. He and his comrades ‘thought the war will be over in six months – a year at most – we will have reached the Ural mountains and that will be that…. At that time we also thought, goodness, what can happen to us? Nothing can happen to us. We were, after all, the victorious troops. And it went well and there were soldiers who advanced singing! It is hard to believe, but it's a fact’.

In the face of the dramatic German advance, Stalin was in despair. He was rendered so angry by a military briefing on 29 June, during which he was told that the Germans were about to take Minsk, capital of Belarus, that he walked out saying: ‘Lenin founded our state and now we've fucked it up!’
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He then left for his dacha. If there was ever a moment when the rest of the Politburo would have been justified in removing Stalin, it was now. After all, it had been chiefly Stalin's incompetence that had led to the Red Army's woeful lack of preparedness to face the Germans, first by denying Soviet forces some of their best commanders
through the purges of the 1930s, and then by refusing to act on the myriad pieces of intelligence that made it clear that the Germans were going to invade. In addition, his behaviour during the first week of the invasion had been uncharacteristically weak. He had, for example, ordered Molotov to make the radio announcement to the Soviet people that the Germans had invaded – a moment when clear leadership from the very top had been required. The rest of the Politburo were nonplussed by Stalin's behaviour. There was even a vague suggestion by Vosnesensky that Molotov should take over as leader (‘Vyacheslav [Molotov], go first, we'll go behind you!’ said Voznesensky.)
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But it was studiously ignored by the other members of the Politburo.