The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  All of this Stalin ignored. Typically, he scrawled on the bottom of one Prague report: ‘English provocation! Investigate!’ On seeing yet more evidence of German intentions from a source inside the German Air Ministry, Stalin exploded: ‘The “source” in the Staff of the German Air Force should be sent to his fucking mother! This is no source but a disinformer!’ Sorge he dismissed as ‘a little shit’. Even Marshal Semyon Timoshenko’s warnings of the impending débâcle were crudely brushed aside: ‘Timoshenko is a fine man, with a big head, but apparently a small brain… If you’re going to provoke the Germans on the frontier by moving troops there without our permission, then heads will roll, mark my words.’ A German soldier who ventured across the frontier on June 21 to warn the Soviets what the next day would bring was shot on Stalin’s orders. The problem was compounded by the fact that the entire Soviet intelligence service had, like the senior echelons of the Red Army itself, fallen victim to the purges, and was now largely staffed at the centre by inexperienced stooges whose sole concern was self-preservation. Receiving reports from agents in the field that did not fit in with Stalin’s preconceived notions, the analysts doctored their contents before presenting them to him. Warnings of a German invasion plan thus mutated into evidence of Anglo-American efforts ‘to worsen the relations between the USSR and Germany’.

  The result was that far too little was done to prepare for the German assault. To be sure, some work had been done to modernize Russia’s western defences, but the new fortifications were far from complete, while the old Stalin Line had been allowed to decay. Soviet armies in occupied Lithuania and eastern Poland were in highly exposed locations, with the exception of the garrison at Brest. Soviet planes were not camouflaged. Troops were not in defensive positions; indeed, they were ordered not to occupy such positions, for fear of provoking the Germans. Worse, Stalin responded to the gathering storm with yet another purge of suspected threats to his own authority. In June 1941 around 300 senior service personnel were arrested, among them no fewer than twenty-two bearers of the highest Soviet military decoration. On the very eve of destruction, Stalin still refused to issue a full-scale invasion warning to his border troops, telling his generals: ‘It’s too soon for such a directive. Perhaps the questions can still be settled peacefully.’ It is hard to think what more he could have done to help Hitler, short of handing him the keys to the Kremlin on a silver salver.

  BARBAROSSA

  Neatly bisecting the little town of Przemyśl, the River San marked the border between Nazi-occupied Poland and the Soviet sector. On the Soviet side, it seemed like just another quiet summer night. After all, the work of transporting suspect Poles to Siberia was all but complete. It was the same all along the frontier. The senior Russian officers at the frontier town of Novgorod-Volynsk were attending a concert. The commander of the Western Military District was at the theatre in Kiev. At Siemiatycze a dance was in full swing to which the local German officers had even been invited. They had politely declined, pleading a prior engagement.

  The Russian troops in Brest had spent the day drilling to the sound of a military band. That night they got drunk. At midnight the regular Moscow–Berlin train rolled into the station. It was laden down with grain for Germany – part of the continuing boom in Nazi-Soviet trade. As dawn broke, the early morning coal train arrived from the other direction. Suddenly, as it drew to a halt, German machine-gunners leapt out. Immediately the Brest fortress was bombarded with a lethal rain of 5,000 shells per minute. Heinz Guderian – whose panzers had already fought their way to Brest two years before – was soon back at the fortress walls. But this time he had no intention of stopping there.

  Operation Barbarossa was in many ways the supreme achievement of the art of blitzkrieg. The vast German invasion force comprised 153 divisions, 600,000 vehicles, 3,580 tanks, 7,184 artillery pieces and 2,740 planes – not forgetting 600,000 horses, since the operation far exceeded the Wehrmacht’s motorized capabilities.* In the first phase, the Luftwaffe swept over all the Soviet airfields within flying range, destroying 890 aircraft by the late morning, almost as many aircraft as the British had lost to enemy action in the whole of the Battle of Britain. Most of them never even got off the ground. Along a front stretching for 930 miles, the German forces poured eastwards in three huge army groups led, as always, by their armoured divisions. The first and second groups were to strike through the Baltic states and the Ukraine and to converge on Leningrad and Moscow; the third was to head in the direction of Kiev. In a series of huge encircling manoeuvres, the Germans captured hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops who appeared to the invaders to be ill-prepared, ill-trained, ill-equipped and above all ill-led. By July 9, Army Group Centre, now well past Minsk, had captured 287,704 prisoners. It was a similar story at Białystok and Smolensk, though resistance at the latter was notably stiffer. By the end of August, the total number of Soviet captives stood at 872,000. The fall of Kiev in September added 665,000 more. The pincer movement that encircled Vyazma and Briansk added another 673,000. By the autumn more than three million men were captives. From the Russian point of view, it was the biggest military disaster in all history. German radio sets blared out Liszt’s Préludes to the point of monotony.

  When the first reports of the German invasion reached Stalin, he was at his dacha at Kuntsevo, twelve miles from the centre of Moscow, a building as modest as Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest was grandiose, even if it was significantly larger and more luxurious than the typical Muscovite’s rural retreat. He was stunned. As his recently appointed Chief of Staff, Marshal Georgi Zhukov, recalled, when he phoned the news through Stalin was ‘speechless… only his heavy breathing could be heard’. ‘Did you understand what I said?’ Zhukov asked. More silence. Finally, Stalin responded. ‘Where’s the Commissar?’ he asked, meaning Molotov, the Commissar for Foreign Affairs and architect of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. When Zhukov came to the Kremlin a couple of hours later, Stalin was ‘very pale… sitting at the table clutching a loaded unlit pipe in both hands’. ‘Bewildered’, he could only suggest that the attack was ‘a provocation of the German officers’. ‘Hitler surely does not know about it,’ he insisted. When the news of the invasion was confirmed, ‘Stalin sank back in his chair and fell into deep thought. A long heavy silence ensued.’

  How could it be? How could Hitler, the one man he had trusted, the man with whom he had carved up Poland, have betrayed him? Though, in his usual paranoid way, Stalin had been toying with the idea of a pre-emptive strike against Germany, preparations for such a move had barely got off the drawing board – contrary to the myth that Stalin was himself on the brink of attacking Hitler.* Why had he got it so catastrophically wrong? Was he simply ‘the most completely out-witted bungler of the Second World War’, as Churchill later put it?

  Stalin may, of course, have calculated that Hitler would never risk a two-front war (Germany’s undoing in the First World War), particularly without a significant numerical advantage in manpower. He may also have ruled out invasion so late in the year as June 22, given the limited time that would remain before autumn rains turned the Russian roads into impassable bogs. If these were Stalin’s rationales for complacency they at least had the merit of being right – in the end. Yet other, less intelligible considerations also seem to have influenced him. One possible interpretation is that his sincerely held Marxist beliefs inclined him to regard the British imperialists as his true enemies. Thus Churchill’s attempt to warn Stalin of Hitler’s intentions simply convinced Stalin that the British wanted to dupe him into war with Hitler, so that they could change sides and resume their anti-Communist policy. In just the same way, Stalin was certain that the Nazi Party Deputy Leader Rudolf Hess’s madcap flight to Scotland on May 10, 1941,* was the prelude to an anti-Soviet Anglo-German peace. Evidence that has come to light more recently suggests that it was history rather than ideology that blinded Stalin to the danger he faced. Stalin was a man obsessed with the traditions of Russian diplomacy and strategy, as well as being fat
ally Machiavellian in his interpretations of other powers’ policies. In the months before June 22 he constantly harked back to the Crimean War, convinced that Russia had as much to fear from a British strike against the Black Sea Straits as from Germany. ‘Historically the danger has always come from there,’ he explained to the Bulgarian General Secretary of the Communist International, Georgi Dimitrov, citing as examples ‘the Crimean War [and] the capture of Sebastopol’ as well as British support for the Whites during the civil war. Incredibly, when Barbarossa was launched, one of Stalin’s first thoughts was to expect a simultaneous attack on Leningrad by the Royal Navy. All of these preconceptions meant that Stalin swallowed whole the real disinformation that was fed to him by the Germans. Thus did Hitler’s psychopathic mendacity trump Stalin’s pathological mistrust.

  Stalin’s policy of trusting Hitler was a calamitous blunder without equal in the history of the twentieth century. Eight days after the German invasion, on the afternoon of June 30, 1941, Molotov led a deputation from the Politburo to Stalin’s dacha, where ‘the boss’ had been skulking for nearly two days. Stalin seems to have feared that this was his comeuppance: ‘Why have you come?’ he muttered, as if expecting to be arrested. Instead, these inveterate underlings – who had survived the Great Terror only by their abject subservience to his will – cravenly invited him to return to the Kremlin to lead the Soviet war effort.

  We can only speculate how the war might have turned out if they had dared to give the ultimate Nazi collaborator his just deserts.*

  13

  Killers and Collaborators

  Most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when there are 500 or when there are 1000. And to have seen this through, and… to have remained decent… is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned.

  Heinrich Himmler to SS Generals, 1943

  I kept thinking, ‘You people know who we are – we are not foreigners; not so long ago we were your neighbours… I lived my whole life next to you, I went to school here and had the same education you did, and now you look at this as punishment I deserved.’

  Boris Kacel, Holocaust survivor

  It is an odd state of affairs that the ‘Beasts’ we have been fighting against are now living with us in closest harmony.

  Col. Helmuth Groscurth, Chief of Staff, XI Corps

  GENERAL PLAN EAST

  It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that the attack on the Soviet Union was Hitler’s fatal mistake. It was, to be sure, a huge military gamble. ‘I feel’, Hitler himself was heard to say, ‘as if I am pushing open the door to a dark room never seen before, without knowing what lies behind the door.’ Yet in many respects attacking Stalin strengthened the Third Reich. It had not been easy for Goebbels and his propaganda machine to reconcile the strongly anti-Communist strain in National Socialism with the realpolitik of the Ribbentrop– Molotov pact. Now that constraint was gone.

  Albert Speer was not the only person Hitler sought to enthuse about the invasion he had launched. In the middle of the night, Mussolini was woken to receive a message from his German counterpart. ‘Since I have won through to this decision, I again feel inwardly free,’ it read. ‘At night I don’t even disturb my servants,’ grumbled Mussolini, ‘but the Germans make me jump out of bed without the slightest consideration.’ Hitler himself did not go to bed until 2.30 a.m., declaring: ‘Before three months have passed, we shall witness a collapse in Russia, the like of which has never been seen in history.’ In Germany itself, as Victor Klemperer noted in his diary, there was popular enthusiasm for this new war, much more than there had been in 1939. In a crowded Dresden restaurant, a tipsy commercial traveller told him: ‘Now we know where we stand, we’ll get it over with more quickly – we’re ready and armed.’ Their waiter, a First World War veteran, agreed: ‘The war will come to an end more quickly now.’ Returning home past a ballroom full of ‘cheerful faces’, Klemperer was forced to conclude: ‘The Russian war is a source of pride for people.’

  The occupation of Europe could now be reconfigured. Invasion of the Soviet Union was represented as a ‘crusade for Europe’; the entire continent could unite in a ‘European United Front against Bolshevism’. Just as the invasion of the European empires in Asia would allow the Japanese to recast their own imperialism in terms of East Asian ‘Co-Prosperity’, so now the Germans could portray the European Grossraumwirtschaft (literally, ‘great space economy’) as a German-led bulwark against Bolshevism. Collaborators in occupied Europe latched on to this new theme of propaganda with alacrity. On October 30, 1941, Marshal Pétain, the doddering figurehead of the Vichy regime, vowed that France would flourish ‘within the framework of the constructive activity of a New European order’. Similar sentiments were expressed in Belgium, Finland and elsewhere. The Nazis’ European rhetoric struck a chord with all those conservatives for whom German dominance seemed a lesser evil than Soviet Communism. Only as the war in the East turned from blitzkrieg to attrition, and the need supervened to wring every last penny out of the occupied West, did the emptiness of this rhetoric gradually manifest itself.

  For the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union – some sixty million of whose citizens at some time or other came under Nazi occupation – a different but equally resonant note could now be struck. As an Estonian, Alfred Rosenberg well understood the visceral hostility felt by many East European peoples towards Stalin’s Soviet Union, which had inflicted immense cruelties on them behind a facade of national self-determination. It was not only the (relatively few) ethnic Germans who welcomed the advancing Wehrmacht. German troops were féted when they marched into Lwów and Riga. Ukrainian peasants saw the black crosses on the invaders’ panzers as the insignia of a holy crusade against the Antichrist of Moscow. At Hrubieszów the people greeted the Germans with bread and salt. Rosenberg now envisaged not only a German protectorate over Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Byelorussia (‘Baltica’), but also an expanded Ukraine, a Caucasian federation – perhaps even a Crimean Muftiate and a ‘Pan-Turanic’ bloc in Soviet Central Asia. Appeals were directed at ethnic minorities, notably the Chechens, Karachai and Balkars, in the hope of stripping away all Russia’s imperial possessions, to leave nothing more than a rump Muscovy. In truth, neither Hitler nor Goebbels had ever sincerely believed in harnessing the power of East European nationalism.* A far truer indication of Nazi intentions were the various versions of the ‘General Plan East’ (Generalplan Ost) devised to extend German settlement as far as Archangel in the north and Astrakhan in the south (the so-called A-A Line). One draft, by SS Oberführer Professor Konrad Meyer, proposed establishing three vast ‘marcher settlements’ (‘Ingermanland’, ‘Memel-Narew’ and ‘Gothengau’) with around five million German settlers. A rival scheme drawn up by the Reich Main Security Office envisaged twice as many settlers and the expulsion of an estimated forty-five million of the existing inhabitants. In fact, as was punctiliously pointed out by Erhard Wet-zel, the racial expert in Rosenberg’s Ministry, this estimate included between five and six million Jews and failed to take into account high Slavic birth rates, so that the total unwanted population would be closer to fifty or even fifty-seven million, assuming that 15 per cent of Poles, 25 per cent of Ruthenians and 35 per cent of Ukrainians would need to be retained as agricultural labourers, the rest being deported to Siberia. The Russian population would wither away through the use of contraception, abortion and sterilization. The Jews would be exterminated.

  WAR OF EXTERMINATION

  To achieve an ethnographic transformation on this scale, a new kind of war had to be waged. From the outset Hitler had determined that his campaign against the Soviet Union would be fought according to new rules – or rather, without rules at all. It was to be, as he had told his generals on March 30, ‘a war of extermination’ in which the idea of ‘soldierly comradeship’ would have no place. This meant the ‘destruction of the Bolshevik commissars and the Communist intelligentsia’. The decision systematically to shoot
certain Red Army prisoners, foreshadowed by the brutal way the war in Poland had been fought, was taken on the eve of Operation Barbarossa and subsequently elaborated on during the campaign. The ‘Guidelines for the Conduct of Troops in Russia’ issued on May 19, 1941 called for ‘ruthless and vigorous measures against the Bolshevik inciters, guerrillas, saboteurs [and] Jews’. The ‘Commissar Order’ of June 6 required any captured political commissars to be shot out of hand. The justification for this was that

  hate-inspired, cruel, and inhumane treatment of prisoners can be expected on the part of all grades of political commissars… To act in accordance with international rules of war is wrong and endangers both our own security and the rapid pacification of conquered territory… Political commissars have initiated barbaric, Asiatic methods of warfare. Consequently they will be dealt with immediately and with maximum severity. As a matter of principle, they will be shot at once.

  The Wehrmacht High Command reiterated this by decreeing that the army was to ‘get rid of all those elements among the prisoners of war considered Bolshevik driving forces’; this meant handing them over to the SS Einsatzgruppen for execution. ‘Politically intolerable and suspicious elements, commissars and agitators’ were to be treated in the same way, according to an order issued by the Army Quartermaster-General Eduard Wagner. In September 1941 the High Command issued a further order that any Soviet troops who had been overrun but then reorganized themselves should be regarded as partisans and shot on the spot. Such orders were passed on by front-line commanders in less euphemistic terms. Troops were ‘totally to eliminate any active or passive resistance’ among prisoners by making ‘immediate use of weapons’. General Erich Hoepner, the commander of Panzer Group 4, took his orders to mean that ‘every military action must be guided in planning and execution by an iron will to exterminate the enemy mercilessly and totally… no adherents of the present Russian-Bolshevik system are to be spared.’ The commander of the 12th Infantry Division told subordinate officers: ‘Prisoners behind the front-line… Shoot as a general principle! Every soldier shoots any Russian found behind the front-line who has not been taken prisoner in battle.’ In the confusion that reigned after the huge German advances into Soviet territory, this could be interpreted as a licence to kill almost anyone.