At some point in the middle of November – Zhukov believed it was November 19 – Stalin rang to ask him what Moscow's prospects were. ‘Are you certain we can hold Moscow? I ask you with this pain in my heart. Speak the truth, like a Communist.’ Zhukov obliged by speaking Communist truth: ‘We'll hold Moscow without a doubt.’ He recalled years later that in fact he had anything but ‘total confidence’ about the fate of the capital.40 Stalin promised reinforcements but could offer none of the tanks that Zhukov wanted. By late November the power of the German assault was visibly wilting. Scouting parties approached the outskirts of the capital, but that was the limit. The last offensive demanded too much of the tired German soldiers, short of tanks and ammunition and poorly prepared for the fierce winter conditions. The number of dead and wounded increased spectacularly with stiffening Soviet resistance. Up to the end of July the German army had lost only 46,000 men in the conquest of the whole western area of the Soviet Union. The battles for Kiev, Leningrad and Moscow cost another 118,000 dead. By the end of November more than 25 per cent of the effective strength of German forces were casualties. This was nothing, of course, compared with the losses of their enemy. Between June and December the Red Army lost 2,663,000 killed in action, 3,350,000 taken prisoner. For every German soldier killed, twenty Soviet soldiers died.41
At the beginning of December, exhausted though the German units were, the German High Command believed that the Soviet Union had used up all its reserves of manpower, down to the last battalion. ‘No more new forces available,’ wrote the German army chief of staff in his diary. On December 1 the German army commander, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, reported that the Red Army had ‘no large reserve formations’; it was a spent force.42 Both were wrong, and by a wide margin. Early in the morning of November 30 Stalin telephoned Zhukov with orders to mount a Soviet counter-offensive to end the threat to Moscow. Zhukov protested that he had neither the men nor the weapons, but Stalin would not be moved. Later that day Zhukov arrived with General Belov at the Kremlin. Walking briskly past bomb craters, the two men entered the underground bunker, which crawled with security men. At the end of a long corridor they entered a brightly lit room. Stalin was waiting to receive them. Belov, who had last seen Stalin in 1933, was staggered by his changed appearance. The public image was of a political giant, tough, brilliant, decisive. In front of him he found a quite different Stalin: ‘a short man with a tired, haggard face. In eight years he seemed to have aged twenty. His eyes had lost their old steadiness; his voice lacked assurance.’43 He looked at Zhukov's plans but merely nodded approval. There were no angry interventions. Stalin was still Supreme Commander, but the balance between the leader and his generals was slowly tilting their way.
The counter-offensive was planned for the first week of December, before German units could dig in for the winter, as they had done around Leningrad. Entirely unknown to the enemy, the Stavka had been holding in reserve no less than twelve armies for just such a strike. Some had been deployed in November to hold the front line before Moscow. While these divisions were expected to fight to the very limit, fifty-eight new divisions were held behind the front, some of them withdrawn from eastern Russia, to strengthen the counter-stroke. When the Soviet spy Richard Sorge confirmed that Japan was preparing to move southward against Britain and the United States, further divisions were transferred from the eastern frontier. These were the tough, fresh-faced ‘Siberian boys’ that so many Muscovites recalled in the streets of the capital that December. The recruitment and training of whole new armies took the German command entirely by surprise. It was not the tough winter conditions that halted the German army but the remarkable revival of Soviet military manpower after the terrible maulings of the summer and autumn.44
Zhukov's plan was a limited one. The two pincers that reached out like a giant metal claw around Moscow were to be pushed back by heavy offensive blows to where they had started in November. Surprise was essential, but the movement of troops and forward armour was spotted by German planes. Fortunately for Zhukov the reports were dismissed by German commanders, who did not believe a Soviet offensive was possible. The force he assembled was no larger than the German force it faced and was much weaker in tanks and aircraft. What Soviet forces did have was winter equipment – the bulky white snowsuits, goggles, heaters, skis and sledges, and the hardy steppe ponies that hauled supplies and carried the cavalry from one encounter to another. The Soviet air force had heated hangars; Soviet vehicles had always been adapted to all-weather driving. These were small but important advantages.
German forces were poorly prepared for the cold. Winter clothing was in short supply, and vehicles in most cases were entirely unsuitable for arctic conditions. Trucks could be started only after small stoves placed beneath the engines had heated them. Aircraft stood on small, open grass airfields with little protection. Mechanics working on the planes froze to the machinery. Shortages of effective lubricants and the extra fuel needed for winter driving reduced the favourable odds in tanks enjoyed by the Panzer armies. Ordinary soldiers found the icy conditions utterly debilitating. Over 133,000 cases of frostbite weakened the German front line. Men lost feet and fingers; their skin was covered with sores. Numbed with cold and fatigue, poorly camouflaged, they were forced to fight a fast-moving enemy that they could not see. The day the Soviet offensive opened, 5 December 1941, the temperature in the morning hours was minus thirteen degrees Fahrenheit.45
At three o'clock in the morning of December 5, in deep snow, the Red Army moved forward. The attack began north of Moscow, against the armoured forces on the Moscow-Volga canal and in the small town of Klin. The use of concentrated ‘shock groups’ broke holes in the German defence. Klin was taken on December 15 after ten days of stubborn fighting. By the end of the month Kalinin was retaken. In the south the encirclement of Tula was broken, and German forces were driven back more than eighty miles to the city of Kaluga, which was taken in a week of ferocious house-by-house struggles, both sides now under orders to yield nothing and to fight to the death. As the German pincers snapped off, Soviet forces became more confident. Much of the fighting had been done in blizzards and freezing winds that took a toll of both sides. For all the hardiness of Red Army soldiers, fighting at the height of winter was easy for neither side. The Army Group Centre facing the Soviet onslaught was itself threatened with encirclement. German commanders began to petition Hitler for permission to withdraw to better defensive positions. Like Stalin, Hitler would permit no general retreat. He sacked his leading commanders and on December 19 took over the command of the army himself, with the promise that he would ‘educate it to be National Socialist’.46 Hitler and Stalin now faced each other directly, two amateur commanders in charge of the largest forces ever mobilized for war.
On December 13 the population of Moscow was told the news that the German threat to encircle the capital was over. In fact the battle raged well into January. Despite the bitter weather and shortages of reinforcements and vehicles, German troops and commanders fought with tenacity and skill. The situation at the front was far from being clear-cut. German units found themselves surrounded and had to be supplied by air. Soviet units infiltrated behind the German lines and found themselves in turn surrounded. Zhukov wanted to concentrate his remaining reserves for a second stage of the offensive, to push back the strong German formations still in front of Moscow and straighten the Soviet line. Stalin had other ideas. The sight of the enemy in flight was enough to foster fantasies of a larger victory. With both his cities saved, Stalin now wanted to drive the enemy back all along the front, before the spring rains and German reinforcements slowed down Soviet momentum.
It was a hopelessly unrealistic ambition. Stalin's thinking can only be guessed at. It was true that the wider strategic picture had altered in the Soviet Union's favour during December. On December 7 Japan attacked the United States and Britain in the Far East; four days later Hitler declared war on the United States, bringing Stalin a rich and powe
rful comrade-in-arms. On December 16 the British Foreign Minister, Anthony Eden, visited Moscow, the sounds of battle only fifty miles away. The draft of a British-Soviet military treaty was prepared, while Stalin, more relaxed after the success of Zhukov's offensive, got back to politics. He demanded a treaty agreeing to the restoration of the Soviet frontiers of 1941, in effect handing over Eastern Europe to Soviet domination. While he thought about the offer Eden was
Caption
Map 3 The Moscow Counter-offensive, December 1941–April 1942
taken out to see the recently liberated town of Klin. Nothing was agreed upon, but Stalin had thrown his hat in the ring. A pro-Soviet Eastern Europe remained Stalin's position throughout the years of negotiation with Britain and America. In the midst of the critical campaign raging outside the capital, Stalin found time to send Eden off with what Eden later described as an ‘embarrassingly sumptuous’ banquet staged in Catherine the Great's throne room in the Kremlin.47
Stalin was almost certainly eager to try to wrest the military initiative away from Zhukov and the rest of the military leadership. Stalin deliberately crossed out Zhukov's name on a list of those to be awarded honours for saving Moscow. When Zhukov was summoned to Stalin's study in the Kremlin on January 5, he argued against the idea of a general offensive, but everyone else present stayed reverently silent.48 The offensive stood. In February and March Stalin hounded his commanders to move faster and harder. Offensives were launched to relieve Leningrad, to encircle German Army Group Centre and to liberate the industrial heartlands of the Ukraine. All failed, and at a terrible cost. A further 444,000 Soviet soldiers perished, for the loss of 80,000 more Germans, an indication that the offensive was rich in manpower but poor in weaponry.49 The Soviet war machine was woefully deficient in the weapons and equipment needed to inflict decisive defeats. The battle for Moscow allowed Stalin to fight another day, but it was not the turning point of the war, as is so often asserted.50 In December 1941 the Red Army chief of staff, Marshal Shaposhnikov, observed that Russia still needed ‘to assimilate the experience of modern war… Neither here nor today will the outcome of the war be decided… the crisis is yet far off.’51 Not until 1943 did the Red Army succeed in inflicting a major defeat on the German army in summer campaigning weather, at a time when the invader was still as deep inside Soviet territory as in 1941. Even then the balance of material resources heavily favoured Germany. Moscow was a first, faltering step, a brief success almost squandered by Stalin's own military ineptitude.
The counter-offensive did have one enduring effect. The areas liberated from German occupation showed ordinary Soviet soldiers the nature of the war they were fighting. They found village after village torched or blown up and peasant women and children scrambling in the ruins to find scraps of food in sub-zero temperatures. Zhukov's own village, Strelovka, south of Moscow, was burned down during the German retreat, his mother's house with it. His family was fortunate to have so illustrious a member. Before the Germans arrived he had arranged for his mother and his sister and her children to be moved to the relative safety of Moscow. 52 Some, at least, of the damage had been inflicted by retreating Soviet forces earlier in the year, under instruction from Stalin himself to destroy everything in the path of the oncoming enemy (though the retreat was too disorganized and rapid for this to have been done systematically).
Wherever the Red Army came they found the grisly evidence of atrocities, none more poignant than the fate of the eighteen-year-old Zoya Kosmodemyanska. A member of a local partisan group with instructions to destroy what might be useful to the Germans, she was caught setting fire to some stables. Later rumours suggested that the villagers themselves betrayed her to the Germans. She was paraded through the village with a placard around her neck, then tortured, mutilated and hanged. Her frozen body, with the left breast cut off, was found still dangling when Soviet troops arrived. Her ordeal was recorded first in a poem, then in a play, in which the Zoya of the title is visited on the night of her execution by a vision of Stalin reassuring her that Moscow has been saved. The truth behind the Zoya legend was less uplifting. Her father and her grandfather were both shot during the purges, and the teenage Zoya, as if to redeem them, had become an obsessive young Communist. Her mother shared her desire to clear the father's name and encouraged Zoya to join the Communist youth partisans who were sent out on suicide missions in the region in front of Moscow, into the teeth of the oncoming German forces.53
The discovery of atrocities altered the mood of the troops. Ehrenburg, who witnessed the aftermath of the violence outside Moscow, detected at last ‘a real hatred for the enemy’. One German infantryman wrote that Soviet soldiers ‘bellow like bulls when they attack’.54 More grimly, he noted that Red Army soldiers were no longer taking prisoners at the front line. A war of extermination was being fought by both sides. Russian culture was a target as well. Museums and galleries were looted. The great Tsarist palaces, preserved for the people by the new republic, were pillaged. The monuments to the great figures of Russian music and literature were defiled. At Tolstoy's estate, Yasnaya Polyana, manuscripts were burned as fuel, and the Germans buried their dead around the great man's grave; Tchaikovsky's house was ransacked and used as a motorbike garage.55 What had once been merely Party slogans about the ‘fascist beasts’ now took on real meaning. In 1941 the poet Surkov captured some of that rage in his poem A Soldier's Oath: ‘The tears of women and children are boiling in my heart/ Hitler the murderer and his hordes shall pay for these tears with their wolfish blood/ for the avenger's hatred knows no mercy.’56
5
The Fight from Within: Collaboration,
Terror and Resistance
Friends and Brothers! Bolshevism is the enemy of the Russian people. It has brought countless disasters to our country. Enough blood has been spilled! There has been enough starvation, forced labour and suffering in the Bolshevik torture chambers! Arise and join in the struggle for freedom! Long may peace with honour with Germany prevail!
General Vlasov's appeal to the Russian nation,
27 December 1942
In August 1941 the commander of Einsatzgruppe B, Artur Nebe, called up experts from the Criminal Technical Institute to help him solve a problem. A short while before, Heinrich Himmler had visited the Belorussian capital of Minsk to witness the execution of a hundred ‘saboteurs’. It was the first time he had seen men killed, shot a dozen at a time face down in an open pit. He asked Nebe to test other methods that were less brutalizing to those who carried out the executions. The experts drove to Russia in trucks filled with explosives and gassing equipment. The morning after their arrival they drove out to a wood outside Minsk, where they packed two wooden bunkers with 250 kilograms of explosive and twenty mental patients seized from a Soviet asylum. The first attempt to blow them up failed, and the wounded and frightened victims were packed back into the bunkers with a further 100 kilograms of explosive. This time they were blown to smithereens, and Jewish prisoners were forced to scour the area picking up the human remains. The group then tried a different method at an asylum in Mogilev. Here they herded mental patients into a bricked-up laboratory, into which they inserted a pipe connected to a car exhaust. Fumes from the car took too long to kill the victims, and the car was swapped for a truck, which could generate a larger volume of fumes. The victims died in eight minutes. Gas killing became the preferred option. Altogether an estimated 10,000 died in asylums across German-occupied territory: men, women and children.1
These murderous experiments were part of a programme of ethnic cleansing and ‘counter-insurgency’ in the East that led to the deaths of millions of Jews, Soviet prisoners of war, captured Communists, partisans and ordinary people caught in the crossfire of ideological and racial war – a harvest of dead unparalleled in the history of modern war. Few of those who witnessed German tanks rolling past their villages in the early days of the invasion knew what to expect of the invader. In the Baltic states, Belorussia and the Ukraine there was strong h
ostility to Stalin and Stalinism, but alienation from Soviet rule did not necessarily mean that German rule would be any more welcome. Even collaboration with the invader, with the usual implication of betrayal and opportunism, should not always be taken at face value.
There is no doubt that some of those who found themselves under German control in the East did work with the invader. Some did so voluntarily, spurred on by a genuine loathing of Soviet Communism. Some did so in the mistaken belief that the Germans had enlightened views on the restoration of private land ownership and capitalist enterprise. (In Kiev a number of Jewish merchants even petitioned the German authorities for permission to restart their businesses.) 2 Some did so because they saw an opportunity to set up independent national states long denied them by Soviet repression. National committees were formed in the Baltic states, in the Ukraine and in the Caucasus area. The largest number of collaborators were to be found helping the German armed forces. The recruitment of Soviet military labour began not long after the invasion. Soviet prisoners or local labourers were used as auxiliary volunteers. They performed mainly menial jobs – building defences, hauling supplies or building airfields and camps. They were employed in secret at first, for Hitler had expressly forbidden the use of Soviet labour. Rather than use their labour power for the war effort, the Germans left millions of prisoners of war in huge open camps to die of malnutrition and disease.3 But German commanders in Russia soon found they had no choice but to recruit local labour. The vast area of the front and the speed of the advance made it impossible to supply enough German hands to run the whole military apparatus that backed up the front line. By the end of the summer of 1941 Soviet recruits were to be found in the ranks of the fighting force itself, mobilized for the crusade against Bolshevism.
Russia's War Page 16
