The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

by Andrew Roberts

  To have attacked the Soviet Union without having first defeated Great Britain was Hitler’s next major blunder of the war. Besides underestimating the ordinary Russian’s capacity for absorbing punishment, one of the reasons why Hitler acted as he did was from a deep consciousness of his own mortality. ‘I know I shall never reach the ripe old age of the ordinary citizen,’ he confided to his coterie one evening, explaining why he did not spend his life ‘smoking and drinking my time away’.6 On the night of 17 October 1941, speaking to Reich Minister Fritz Todt and Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel about the Europeanization of the steppes, he said: ‘I shall no longer be there to see all that, but in twenty years’ time the Ukraine will already be a home for twenty million inhabitants besides the natives.’7 He believed that no one else could achieve the task of delivering Lebensraum, but he had no trust in his own longevity, so the sooner it was undertaken the better. ‘It’s lucky I went into politics at 30,’ he told other cronies at the end of 1941,

  became Chancellor of the Reich at 43, and am only 52 today… With age, optimism gets weaker. The spring relaxes. When I suffered my [Beerhall Putsch and subsequent imprisonment at Landsberg] setback in 1923, I had only one idea, to get back into the saddle. Today I’d no longer be capable of the effort which that implies. The awareness that one is no longer capable of that has something demoralising about it.8

  It was partly this consciousness of his declining energy levels that impelled Hitler into world war so soon after his fiftieth birthday in April 1939, and the invasion of the USSR was similarly driven.

  Hitler was also impelled to invade Russia by each of the three major strands in his political credo. As Ian Kershaw points out, the Führer had ‘a small number of basic, unchanging ideas that provided his inner driving-force’.9 Hitler’s self-reinforcing Weltanschauung (world-view) was based on the need for Germany to dominate Europe, win Lebensraum for herself and come to a final reckoning with the Jews. These views never altered or moderated, and stayed central to his thinking from the 1920s to his death two decades later. All three could be achieved by an invasion of Russia, and none could be achieved without one.

  There were other reasons too. On 1 February 1941, Fedor von Bock – who had been raised to field marshal in the mass creation of 19 July 1940 – was ordered to report to the Führer, ‘who received me very warmly’. According to Bock’s extensive war diary, Hitler said, ‘The gentlemen in England are not stupid; they just act that way,’ adding that ‘they will come to realize that a continuation of the war will be pointless for them if Russia too is now beaten and humiliated.’ After Bock had raised the question of ‘whether it would be possible to force [the Russians] to make peace’, Hitler replied, ‘If the occupation of the Ukraine and the fall of Leningrad and Moscow did not bring about peace, then we would just have to carry on, at least with mobile forces, and advance to Yekaterinburg.’10 Since Yekaterinburg (which had in fact been called Sverdlovsk since the 1920s) is 880 miles east of Moscow in the Ural mountains, Hitler’s certainty in total victory was palpable. He then used a curious simile: ‘I am convinced that our attack will sweep over them like a hailstorm.’ In a sense he was right; it was hard and nasty but did not last, and once the worst was over its residue evaporated.

  Hitler believed that the huge labour shortage in Germany – the number of men in industry fell from 25.4 million to 13.5 million between 1939 and 1944 – could be ended by a combination of slave labour (7.5 million workers from conquered lands by September 1944) and demobilizing soldiers after victory over Russia.11 Control of the Baku oilfields would furthermore feed Germany’s insatiable need for fuel for her tanks, lorries, warplanes and ships, just as the Ukraine’s agriculture would help feed the Reich.

  In 1941 the USSR had more soldiers and more tanks than, and the same number of aircraft as, the whole of the rest of the world’s armed forces combined. Hitler knew this perfectly well, of course; when Halder remarked that the Russians boasted 10,000 tanks, the statement ‘unleashed a more than quarter-hour retort from Hitler, in which he cited from memory the Russians’ annual production for the last twenty years’.12 Inherent in Hitler’s concept of the Aryan master race, however, was the idea that Germans were so superior to Slavs as human beings that mere numerical inferiority meant nothing. This may also explain why when the Japanese Foreign Minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, visited Berlin in April 1941 Hitler threw away a perfect opportunity to force the USSR herself to fight a war on two fronts. Instead of confiding his plans to Tokyo, and offering the Japanese whatever they wanted territorially in the east in exchange for attacking Russia simultaneously with him, he made absolutely no mention of his plan, and made no attempt to recruit the Japanese into what he knew would be the greatest enterprise of his life. Yet drawing off scores of Russian divisions from the Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad fronts in order to protect Siberia and other eastern assets from a Japanese attack would have been invaluable to Germany in 1942 and 1943. If Japan had captured Siberia – which was by no means strategically unthinkable – Russia could have been denied her huge fuel deposits there. Japan was a member of the Axis, after all, and one for whom Hitler was willing to go to war with America eight months later. ‘His failure to secure the collaboration of the Japanese against the Soviet Union’, writes Roosevelt’s biographer Conrad Black, ‘must rank as one of Hitler’s most serious errors.’13

  Another major handicap was to have invaded as late as 22 June, by which time the days were already starting to shorten, in a campaign where time was going to be of the essence in covering the vast distances before Russia’s autumn mud and winter snow forced an end to movement. The invasion was originally scheduled to be ready for 15 May, although that was not settled upon as the date for the attack. Once Halder had assured him that transport would be ready, Hitler chose 22 June for the attack, since any date much earlier than that would have run up against weather problems in that unusually wet spring. The invasion of Greece had always been planned to take place in conjunction with that of Russia and did not therefore lead to the postponement of Barbarossa. Re-equipping tanks that had driven too fast down bad Balkan roads took time, so in a sense the very speed of the defeat of Greece led to the late date for Barbarossa. Although Hitler was to blame the pushing back of the 15 May date to 22 June as a reason for his defeat, claiming that he could have won before the onset of winter, his biographer Ian Kershaw has rightly described that as ‘simplistic in the extreme’.14 It was too wet to invade very much earlier, with heavy tanks and trucks going down rutted, basic roads. The weather of 1941 was not kind to Adolf Hitler. It is often assumed that he should not have indulged in his Balkan, Greek and Crete campaigns in April and May because they delayed his assault on Russia. In fact it was because he could not invade Russia before June that he was able to indulge himself in south-west Europe and the Mediterranean at all.

  At least Hitler cannot be accused of being alone in his desire to ‘settle scores with the Bolsheviks’. When he held his last major military conference before the invasion, at the Reich Chancellery on 14 June – with the generals arriving at different times to allay suspicions – not one of them complained that it would open up a potentially disastrous two-front war along the lines of the one they had all, without exception, fought in and lost less than a quarter of a century before. Perhaps they thought that by then it was too late to alter the Führer’s mind; maybe for career reasons they did not want to seem unenthusiastic; perhaps for each other’s morale they did not want to point out the giant pitfalls; but the fact remains that no doubts or criticisms were expressed, and the Wehrmacht leaders, Brauchitsch and Halder, said not a word.15 ‘All the men of the OKW and the OKH to whom I spoke’, recalled Heinz Guderian, ‘evinced an unshakeable optimism and were quite impervious to criticism or objections.’16 Guderian himself however, especially after the 14 June briefing, claimed to think that a potentially disastrous war on two fronts loomed, and ‘Adolf Hitler’s Germany was even less capable of fighting such a war than had been the Germany of 19
14.’17 General Günther Blumentritt, in a hitherto unpublished letter, wrote in 1965: ‘Militarily and politically the war was lost when Hitler attacked Russia in 1941, without having peace in the West.’18 He did not say so at the time, however, even if he thought it.

  ‘I tried to dissuade Hitler from a two-front war,’ claimed the Luftwaffe armaments chief Erhard Milch at Nuremberg. ‘I believe Göring did, too. But I failed.’19 In fact Göring believed, as he told his psychiatrist in May 1946, ‘The Führer himself was a genius. The plans against Poland and France were also his plans. The plan against Russia was also that of a genius. But its execution was poor. The Russian campaign could have ended in 1941 – successfully.’20 When Göring was told that Rundstedt had been calling the Russian invasion plans ‘stupid’, he frowned and said: ‘The army generals are all suddenly smarter than Hitler. But when he was running things they listened to what he said and were glad of his advice.’21 It was a valid criticism.

  The other person who ought to have brought Hitler to confront the realities of invading the world’s largest country – with 193 million inhabitants against Germany’s 79 million pre-war – was the OKW Chief of Staff Wilhelm Keitel, but there was never any danger of that. When asked at Nuremberg why he had gone along with the plans, Keitel explained that the Führer had feared that the USSR might cut off the 150,000 tons of oil that Germany received from Romania every month, almost half of the 350,000 tons that the Reich required for the war, 100,000 of which went to the Luftwaffe alone. ‘The attack on Russia was an act of recklessness,’ he accepted with hindsight, but ‘I believed in Hitler and knew little of the facts myself. I’m not a tactician, nor did I know Russian military and economic strength. How could I?’22 The answer might be that it was Keitel’s most important duty to have known the facts of Russian military and economic strength before invading, and as OKW chief of staff he was one of Germany’s three most senior strategists. He claimed to have told Hitler often that he should have a better tactician than him in that post, ‘but he said it was his responsibility as commander-in-chief’.23

  Hitler was perfectly content to have someone as chief of staff with so little belief in his own strategic skills. In stark contrast with Roosevelt, who appointed George Marshall as Army chief of staff, and Churchill, who appointed Sir Alan Brooke as chief of the Imperial General Staff, Hitler did not want an adviser who knew more about grand strategy than he, and might therefore oppose his ideas. ‘I always wanted to be a country gentleman, a forester,’ Keitel said after the war, ‘and look what a muddle I got into merely because I was weak and let myself be talked into things. I am not cut out for a field marshal.’ He also complained that when invited to take over from Blomberg, ‘I was not prepared for this position. I was suddenly called on to take over without having had time to think things over. Developments followed too quickly. That was the way things proceeded.’24

  Far from a ‘muddle’, Keitel faced the noose, which he deserved for the brutal orders he signed before the invasion of Russia. A human nullity, Keitel always obeyed his Führer unquestioningly. ‘I had been in many adjutant and junior staff positions,’ he explained, ‘but of course always with professional soldiers, whose education was also my own. Therefore all the things which Hitler told me were, to my viewpoint, the orders of an officer… One had a superior officer who was a politician and not an officer – a man who had quite different basic viewpoints from mine.’25 Yet instead of this encouraging Keitel to stand up for himself and the Army, his thirty-six years in the officer corps had bred an instinct for obedience, which Hitler’s successive coups in the Rhineland, Austria, Sudetenland, Prague, Poland and France turned into slavish devotion. The fact that Keitel was a pathetic excuse for a senior officer is important in establishing how Hitler established such dominance over an officer corps that was, despite the débâcle of 1918, still proud of its long-term heritage and pre-eminent place in German society. Another explanation for the lack of criticism of Operation Barbarossa from the German generals was that, as Liddell Hart wrote having interviewed several of them after the war, ‘like so many specialists, they were rather naive outside their own sphere, and Hitler was able to overcome their own doubts about his Russian adventure with the aid of political “information” designed to convince them of its necessity, and that Russia’s internal weaknesses would affect her military strength.’26 Hitler had long been a master of disinformation, and this time he used it against his own generals.

  Hitler needed someone – anyone – in his close circle to remind him of the perils of invading Russia. Yet he believed, as he told Rundstedt, ‘You have only to kick in the door, and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.’ The hubris was tangible; in the Armed Forces Museum in Moscow one can see the two tons of Iron Crosses that were struck to be awarded to those who captured that city. Hitler believed that, on the evidence of Stalin’s Army purges of the 1930s, the inherent inefficiencies and cruelties of Communism and the Red Army’s early defeats in Finland, the USSR would collapse. Yet he had not counted on the sheer bloody-mindedness of the ordinary Russian soldier – the frontovik – who, although ‘abominably led, inadequately trained, poorly equipped, changed the course of history by his courage and tenacity in the first year of fighting’.27 The Red Army soldier was fatalistic about the necessity of sacrifice for Mother Russia, and the political commissars attached to every unit were expert in exploiting the culture of subservience that was a traditionally distinctive feature of Russian life. Their forefathers had suffered horribly in the past for the Romanovs, now they would suffer no less horribly for their Bolshevik successors: ‘Stalinism was indeed Tsarism with a proletarian face.’28

  Yet even if Hitler had been surrounded by outspoken opponents, the plan to attack Russia was buried so deep within the Nazi DNA that it could not be stopped. The Führer invaded Russia because he believed that that was what he had been put on earth to do. ‘We National Socialists must hold unflinchingly to our aim in foreign policy,’ he had avowed in Mein Kampf, ‘namely, to secure for the German people the land and soil to which they are entitled on this earth.’29 It was clear where the lion’s share was to be found, when he wrote a few pages later of ‘an eastern policy in the sense of acquiring the necessary soil for our German people’. Nor did this mean just Poland. Elsewhere in the book he wrote of Germany ‘swimming in plenty’ if she controlled Ukrainian grain, the raw materials of the Urals and even Siberian timber. The fourteen countries that Germany occupied or controlled by 1941 would not be enough, for as he also wrote in his political credo: ‘Much as all of us today recognize the necessity of a reckoning with France… it can and will achieve meaning only if it offers the rear cover for an enlargement of our people’s living space in Europe.’30

  With France as the rear cover, Hitler believed Russia could be attacked – or ‘kicked in’ – with relative ease. At a Berghof conference on 22 August 1939, Hitler said: ‘We will crush the Soviet Union.’ On 29 July 1940 at Bad Reichenhall, OKW Staff were told by Jodl of the Führer’s ‘express wishes’ that they plan for the invasion forthwith. On 12 November 1940, Führer Directive No. 18 made it clear that the discussions then going on with Molotov in Berlin that same day were a mere smokescreen and that ‘Irrespective of the results of these discussions, all preparations for the East which have been verbally ordered will be continued.’ The objectives were laid out on 18 December in Führer Directive No. 21, the first sentence of which read: ‘The armed forces of Germany must be prepared, even before the conclusion of the war with England, to defeat Soviet Russia in one rapid campaign (“Operation Barbarossa”).’31

  One incident that might have discouraged Hitler from invading Russia, for fear that Operation Barbarossa had been compromised, was the bizarre flight of his Deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess, to the United Kingdom at 6.00 on the evening of Saturday, 10 May 1941. Hess, who had been Hitler’s closest confidant and lieutenant through much of the 1920s and 1930s, had been gradually overtaken by several rivals in the Nazi hierarchy
in recent years, especially since the start of the war. An ideological Nazi from the earliest days, he did not believe that Britain and Germany should be at war and so, unbeknown to Hitler, he conceived a daring – if unhinged – plan to make peace between the Anglo-Saxon races. The five-hour flight itself, in a Messerschmitt Me-110 with a detachable extra fuel tank, was a remarkable feat of flying and navigation, but once Hess had parachuted near the village of Eaglesham in Renfrewshire in Scotland, his plan started to unravel. His first problem was to find someone in authority with whom to conduct peace negotiations, and his choice of Scotland was actuated by the quaint if utterly misguided notion that the Duke of Hamilton – who he wrongly believed he had met at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 – held significant political power in Britain, owing to his title. Once captured (he had broken his ankle on landing), Hess was interviewed by Lord Beaverbrook and the Lord Chancellor, Lord Simon, among others, and it quickly became clear to him that the Churchill Government had no intention of listening to any kind of peace terms.