The Third Reich

by Thomas Childers

  On July 31 in a conference with senior military leaders, Hitler ordered planning to commence for an all-out assault on the Soviet Union. The opening portion of the conference dealt with Operation Sea Lion, but Hitler quickly moved on to the central theme he wished to emphasize. “In the event that the invasion of England does not take place,” he said, “our action must be directed to eliminate all factors that let England hope for a change in the situation.” After all, he said, “to all intents and purposes the war is won.” France was eliminated, and Italy was pinning down British forces in the Mediterranean. “Britain’s hope lies in Russia and the United States,” he declared. For the time being, the Americans were absorbed with the Japanese threat in the Pacific and would not be prepared to intervene in a major war in Europe until 1942 at the earliest. “With Russia smashed, Britain’s last hope would be shattered,” and Germany would “then be master of Europe and the Balkans.” Russia’s destruction “must therefore be made a part of this struggle. The sooner Russia is crushed the better.”

  The war against the Soviet Union, he stressed, would achieve its purpose only if the Russian state could “be shattered to its roots with one blow.” Speed was critical. He estimated that “if we start in May 1941, we would have five months to finish the job. . . . The destruction of Russian manpower” was the objective, and the campaign would be divided into three major axes of advance. The first thrust would be directed toward Kiev in Ukraine and would secure the southern flank on the Dnieper River. The second would be aimed at the Baltic region and Leningrad, and then a third drive from the center on Moscow. The northern and southern spearheads would link up. Ultimately Germany would seize the Baku oil fields, Ukraine, White Russia, and the Baltic States. It was a breathtaking, “world historical” vision, as Hitler was fond of saying, and was now formally embedded in Directive No. 21, the invasion of the Soviet Union.

  An undertaking of such epic magnitude demanded a fitting code name. Operation Fritz, the army’s working designation for the operation, was simply too banal and would not do. On January 18, 1941, Hitler renamed it Operation Barbarossa, for the medieval German emperor Friedrich I, known for his fiery red beard (Barbarossa) and his policy of Drang nach Osten (Drive to the East). According to legend, Friedrich, who drowned on the Third Crusade in the twelfth century, was not dead but was slumbering in the Kyffhäuser Mountains in Thuringia, waiting to emerge in Germany’s hour of need and restore it to its ancient glories. It was just the sort of mythic aura that so enchanted the Führer’s imagination.

  It is striking that the German generals, who almost to a man had grave reservations about operations against the Western powers in 1940, were equally unanimous in their low estimation of the Red Army. Still feeling the effects of the purges, it had sputtered ingloriously in Finland in 1939, confirming the low regard in which it was widely held. “The Russian is inferior,” Hitler assured his generals. The Red Army lacked leadership and had failed to learn the tactical lessons of the war against Poland and the West. Despite its efforts to reorganize, the Russian army would be no better in the spring. German intelligence estimated that the Red Army possessed two hundred effective divisions and was still organized around infantry formations. The move to create armored divisions on the German model had only just begun. The Russians were also inferior to the Wehrmacht in equipment. “They have a few modern artillery batteries,” Hitler confidently asserted, “but everything else is rebuilt old material. Our tank III . . . has a clear superiority. The majority of the Russian tanks are poorly armored.” Most important in Hitler’s estimation, the Red Army was hopelessly disorganized, its morale sapped by the purges and its ranks riddled with Communism. “You have only to kick in the door,” Hitler told Rundstedt, “and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.”

  During a series of conferences between December 1941 and February 1942, the army presented its evolving plan for the military campaign. All agreed that the first priority was the speedy destruction of the Red Army in the western Soviet Union. If it could be annihilated—not merely defeated—in the first weeks of the campaign, all options were open. No groups capable of recuperation must be allowed to escape. Beyond that lay uncertainty. The generals favored marshaling their forces for a push toward Moscow. It was, they argued, the obvious objective: Moscow was not only the political capital, it was also a major communications and transportation hub and an industrial center. An assault on the city would also draw the best of the remaining Red Army forces into the open where they could be destroyed. While not openly disagreeing, the Führer had other ideas.

  As early as December 5, Hitler signaled his priorities: the Baltic area “must be cut off”; combined air and ground operations would “destroy the sources of enemy war potential” (armaments industries, mines, oil fields) and “crush Russian manpower.” That, to Hitler, meant the Baltic, especially Leningrad, and Ukraine with its abundant raw materials. By striking with powerful spearheads north and south of the Pripet Marshes, the offensive would split the Russian front, allowing German forces to “encircle the enemy in separate pockets. . . . These two outer wings must be fast and strong!” For economic reasons, Leningrad and Kiev were to be the main focus of the offensive. Moscow, Hitler informed his High Command, was “of no great importance.”

  It was understood that the first objective was the utter annihilation of the Red Army in western Russia. Following that, the Germans could choose their next objective. Differences between Hitler and the High Command were not so much resolved as pushed to the side. Army leaders assumed that events in the field would ultimately dictate objectives for the second phase of the offensive and that Moscow would inevitably become the top priority. By early spring, the focus of the discussions shifted from strategic objectives to the conduct of the war. In a secret meeting on March 17 Hitler revealed to army leaders the full ideological dimensions of the conflict. The Soviet intelligentsia, they were told, had to be “exterminated” and the machinery of the Stalinist regime “smashed.” To achieve this end, “force must be used in its most brutal form.” Although Hitler did not extend this kill order to broader elements of the Soviet population at this time, a secret army order of March 26 clearly revealed how the military had understood the thrust of his remarks.

  Several days later, on March 30, Hitler addressed some two hundred commanders of what was now being referred to as the Eastern Army (Ostheer). Speaking in the Reich Chancellery he reiterated the basics of his strategic thinking—the army’s mission was to crush the Red Army and destroy the Soviet state, which he clearly assumed could be accomplished in a matter of weeks. But the real thrust of Hitler’s remarks that day dealt more directly with the underlying ideological nature of the coming battle. This campaign would be a conflict not bound by the international rules of war established in the Hague and Geneva Conventions. While Germany was a signatory to those agreements, the Soviets had allowed their commitment to lapse. Therefore, the army could expect the most savage, barbaric conduct from the Russians, and the troops must be prepared to respond in kind.

  “This,” Hitler emphasized, “is a war of extermination. If we do not grasp this, we shall still beat the enemy, but thirty years later we shall again have to fight the Communist foe. We do not wage war to preserve the enemy.” He called explicitly for the “extermination of the Bolshevist commissars and the Communist intelligentsia. . . . The individual troop commanders must understand the issues at stake. They must be leaders in this fight. The troops must fight back with the methods with which they are attacked.” The commissars and other party functionaries, he concluded, were “criminals and must be dealt with as such.”

  On May 13, Hitler issued the so-called Barbarossa Decree, which, in effect, gave the troops a virtual carte blanche in dealing with the Russian enemy, both civilian and military. Commanders were free to carry out summary executions and to take reprisals against whole villages or groups when individual culprits could not be identified. The decree granted unequivocal immunity to the mil
itary and SS units engaged in such activities, guaranteeing that they “would not be subject to the constraint of prosecution even if the action is also a military crime or misdemeanor.” Hitler also pledged that there would be none of the disruptive conflicts between the army and the SS that had plagued the Polish campaign; in the Soviet Union, both were now to operate from the same script.

  The generals voiced no qualms about the prospect of an invasion of the Soviet Union. Although the Red Army’s equipment was bountiful—it possessed more tanks and as many aircraft as the rest of the world combined, and its manpower reserves were virtually inexhaustible—the Wehrmacht command agreed with the Führer that the Soviet Union was highly vulnerable. In making that judgment, they chose to ignore the Red Army’s smashing success in a series of major clashes with the Japanese on the Manchurian-Mongolian border in 1939, which would have told a very different story. As usual, the Führer was convincing. According to General Guderian’s later assessment, “Hitler succeeded in infecting his immediate military entourage with his own baseless optimism.” The army’s High Command (OKH) as well as the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces (OKW) were so serenely confident of victory before winter set in that winter clothing had been prepared for only every fifth man in the army.

  The geographic dimensions of the operation were staggering and yet did not unduly worry Germany’s military planners. Given the vastness of the terrain, they understood that the Wehrmacht could not afford to become bogged down in positional warfare. Yet, according to the plan, German troops were ultimately to establish a line from Archangel on the Arctic Ocean to Astrakhan on the shores of the Caspian Sea, a front of some 1,600 miles. It would be the most ambitious military operation in human history. “The world,” Hitler said, “will hold its breath.”

  Three army groups would carry the offensive: Army Group North would advance through the Baltic countries in the direction of Leningrad, while Army Group Center would drive north of the vast Pripet Marshes toward Minsk and beyond that to Smolensk. Army Group South, operating below the Marshes, would spearhead the push toward Kiev and into Ukraine. In all, 3.2 million German ground troops would be committed to the offensive, augmented by approximately 500,000 Romanian, Hungarian, Slovakian, Croatian, and Italian troops. In all, 145 divisions would be mobilized, 102 infantry, 19 armored, and 14 motorized. The offensive would employ 3,600 tanks, 27,000 aircraft, and 17,000 artillery pieces. With its tanks and aircraft, it would be the most technologically advanced military machine in history. It is nonetheless telling that Barbarossa also required the requisitioning of 750,000 horses. Horse-drawn wagons would carry much of the army’s heavy equipment, and most of the Wehrmacht’s invading troops would enter Russia in the same way as Napoleon’s Grande Armée in 1812—on foot or on horse-drawn wagons.

  As planning progressed a number of generals, including the commanders of the three Army Groups, expressed misgivings of one sort or another. Hitler dismissed their concerns, assuring them that the loss of Leningrad, Moscow, and Ukraine would deprive the Red Army of its economic lifeblood and compel the Kremlin to surrender. But again, speed was of the essence. A quick, decisive victory in the East was imperative not only for strategic military considerations but for economic reasons as well. The German economy was not geared for a protracted war of attrition, and Hitler wished to avoid the privations on the home front that he believed had undermined the old Reich in the Great War. The German war economy, Hitler tried to assure his military commanders, could meet the demands of the Eastern Campaign, but in February, General Georg Thomas, head of the Wehrmacht’s Office of the War Economy, submitted a cautionary report that cast a gloomy light over the whole of Barbarossa. It was the first of several bleak assessments of the military’s economic preparedness Thomas submitted to the High Command over the following months.

  The army’s fuel supply, he warned, would last only for two months; the Luftwaffe might survive on its supply through the summer but no longer; essential rubber production might hold until spring 1942. He also warned that the food supply for the troops was a serious concern, especially if the war dragged on into the fall. Thomas presented his findings to Wilhelm Keitel, chief of Armed Forces High Command (OKW), with the assumption that they would be forwarded to Hitler, but Keitel dismissed them out of hand. The Führer would not allow himself to be influenced by such economic considerations, he told Thomas. It is unlikely that Keitel even bothered to pass along Thomas’s reports to Hitler. Göring, head of the Four Year Plan and hence Germany’s war economy, was equally unfazed by Thomas’s dire warnings. There was little reason to be overly concerned about these putative shortages, he assured a skeptical Thomas. The army would simply seize what it needed as it moved along.

  Göring had ideas of his own about the economic exploitation of the conquered land that were as sinister if not as ferocious as Heydrich’s SS operations. From the outset of the war German planners had been concerned about the food supply, not only for the advancing troops but also the civilians of the Reich. Göring adopted a strategy, monstrous in its cold-blooded callousness, of “planned famines” to deal with the situation. It called for Russian cities in the west to be systematically starved. The agricultural goods that would have gone to the urban population would now feed the soldiers of the Wehrmacht and the population of the Reich. If this “hunger plan” were effectively implemented, Göring calmly estimated that as many as thirty million Russians, many of them Jews, would starve. Hitler shared this barbaric view, commenting in July that it was his “firm decision to level Moscow and Leningrad [Russia’s two largest cities] and make them uninhabitable, so as to relieve us of the necessity of having to feed the populations through the winter.” The cities would be razed by the air force, producing a “national catastrophe which will deprive not only Bolshevism, but also Muscovite nationalism, of their centers.”

  The invasion was set to be launched on May 15, after the spring rains had subsided, giving the invading forces ample time to smash the Red Army before the onset of the Russian winter. But the spring of 1941 was especially wet; rivers across Eastern Europe were swollen and roads had turned into quagmires of glutinous mud. The invasion would have to be postponed until the panzers had firm terrain. Also contributing to the delay was Mussolini’s ill-conceived invasion of Greece in April, which quickly turned into a fiasco. Like Hitler on numerous occasions, Mussolini chose not to inform his ally of his plans, and a furious Hitler was caught by surprise. Mussolini’s strike prompted Britain to rush troops into the Peloponnese in response, and the Wehrmacht could not afford to have its southeastern flank exposed as it plunged into Russia, so in April German forces came to Mussolini’s rescue. On April 6, Wehrmacht troops invaded both Yugoslavia and Greece and within a short time stabilized the situation in the Balkans. An armistice was signed with Yugoslavia on April 14, while the fighting in Greece dragged on until May 27. The Wehrmacht fought British troops on the Greek mainland and on Crete, where it sustained serious casualties (two thousand killed) before British forces could be evicted. It was the second time that the Reich had been forced to come to the imprudent Duce’s aid, having sent German troops to North Africa to bail him out of his desert war with the British.

  In the spring of 1941, facing an imminent campaign of colossal proportions in the Soviet Union, German forces were now spread thinly over the Balkans, North Africa, and Western Europe, a very different situation from that which Hitler confronted in the summer of 1940. It was estimated that at least a quarter of the Reich’s troops would be stationed in these far-flung theaters of war, which meant that the size of the German army that invaded the Soviet Union was not appreciably larger than the one that had attacked Western Europe in the summer of 1940. Given these complications, the launch date for Barbarossa was pushed back to June 22—the exact date of Napoleon’s fateful invasion of Russia 129 years earlier.

  As preparations for Barbarossa entered their final stage, Hitler was jolted by another unhappy surprise. Rudolf Hess, his slavishly devoted de
puty and since 1939 second in succession to the Führer after Göring, decided to make a dramatic move. Despite his high official rank, Hess’s influence had declined precipitously in the last years of peace, and, despite his unquestioning dedication to Hitler, he had become virtually irrelevant in the Nazi hierarchy. Worst of all for the faithful Hess, he had slipped to the periphery of the Führer’s inner circle. But in the spring of 1941 he concocted a clandestine plan that he hoped would restore him to Hitler’s good graces. He was not briefed on the details of Barbarossa, but he did know how much Hitler desired an agreement with Britain. In secret, he hatched a bizarre scheme for his personal intervention with the British that would secure the peace—and on German terms. It would be direct diplomacy. He consulted no one.

  On the evening of May 10, he took off in a twin-engine Me 110 from a military aerodrome near Augsburg. He had served as a pilot in the final stages of the Great War and had secretly familiarized himself with the aircraft. His destination was Scotland. He had a message for the Duke of Hamilton, who was a wing commander in the RAF, and whom Hess had met briefly at the 1936 Olympics. He hoped to play the role of intermediary between the British government and the Reich, and Hamilton would open the necessary doors. Hess parachuted out of his plane near the duke’s castle not far from Glasgow and was taken captive by a startled Scottish farmhand who took him to his cottage and gave him a cup of tea. Hess explained that he had a message of vital importance for the duke. Men from the local Home Guard soon arrived and transported Hess to their headquarters. Calls were placed, but a skeptical duke was in no rush. He did not arrive until the following day.