various reasons the Soviet Union had always been at the centre of Nazi plans, and Nazi philosophy. It was, first of all, a great danger militarily; it was heavily armed, and still arming; it was the largest state in the world, and its potential, which was still in the process of being realised, was enormous.
The Soviet Union had also begun advancing westwards, after a twenty-year lull. Since the Nazi – Soviet pact, she had absorbed eastern Poland, occupied the Baltic States – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – had seized Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia from Rumania, and after a short, inglorious war, had annexed Finnish territory in order to secure strategic bases and to push the Finnish frontier further from Leningrad (St. Petersburg).18 The Soviet Union had crept too close to vital German interests in Scandinavia and the Ploesti oilfields in Rumania for Germany’s comfort.
But whatever the cold validity of these reasons for attacking the Soviet Union, ambition, prejudice and hatred seem to have always directed Hitler’s glare eastward. Adolf Hitler felt himself to be a genius, guided by fate, an avenger of the two million German soldiers who fell in the Great War. It was from the east that the poison of Bolshevism had spread, and it was in the east that the Jews still sat in triumph. The fall of France would be nothing in revenge compared to the destruction of the November criminals in their own nest, and the supplanting of the inferior Slavs by the Germans. Germany would then be unassailable by America, and Britain would be overwhelmed. If he did not accomplish these things before he grew too old, no one would.19
But first Mussolini, his great ally, was in trouble. Driven helter skelter across north Africa by the British, and thrown ignominiously out of Greece and back into Albania by the Greeks, he had made the Greeks an ally of Britain, who might soon bomb the Ploesti oilfields from Greek bases. During April 1941 arrangements were made for German forces to pass through Yugoslavia, Hungary and Bulgaria and to conquer Greece. The satellites (including Italy) received their instructions. At the last moment Serb officers toppled King Peter of Yugoslavia, who had been a reluctant satellite anyway, and severed the country’s connection with the Axis powers, as Germany, her satellites and Japan termed themselves. Hitler decreed that they should be suppressed with ‘merciless harshness’ for this insult to himself and the Third Reich. Yugoslavia, her Serb, Croat and Slovene population deeply divided, was occupied in 10 days; Greece followed rapidly. The British were bundled out of Greece. An airborne invasion of Crete followed, which was successful, but suffered heavy losses in very severe fighting. Hitler was appalled by the casualties, and drew the lesson that airborne assaults were too expensive. But it was not the method of their arrival on the battlefield that was at fault; due to the ‘Ultra’ codebreakers at Bletchley Park, the paratroopers had been expected by the British; and they had landed on New Zealand troops, always formidable in battle.
Hitler’s plans to tear the Soviet Union apart had been delayed from May to June 1941; they were now set for June 22nd. The Soviet forces were to be prevented from retreating into the vast depths of Russia by encirclement on the borders; they would be seized by the pincers of his armoured divisions, and devoured by the following infantry. The Soviet army, which the German High Command believed had been emasculated by Stalin’s purges of its officers, would be ruined; they had shown, by their initial defeat in Finland in 1940, that they were surely no match for the German war machine, the Wehrmacht. Yet the Finnish operation had merely shown that Stalin had not prepared properly; when, after the initial failure, the assault was renewed, the finns, despite fighting bravely and skilfully, were hopelessly defeated.
Hitler might have noted an operation on the other side of the vast Soviet Union, in 1939. There, a border clash between satellites had drawn in Russian and Japanese forces and had escalated into a full scale battle, in which the elite Japanese Kwantung army had been heavily defeated. But the Japanese army, before its sweeping victories over western forces in 1941 and 1942, had been much underrated. The Soviet commander in that affair had been Georgi Zhukov (1896-1974), later deputy supreme commander of the Soviet forces under Stalin.
On June 22nd German forces drove headlong into Russia. After a campaign that appeared to have largely gone according to plan, Hitler announced, on October 2nd, that Russia had been defeated. Vast encirclements had been made, netting some 2.5 million prisoners. The Soviet air force had been smashed, with some 14,500 aeroplanes lost, and 18,000 tanks and 22,000 guns had been destroyed or captured. Moscow, indeed, was in a panic.20
Hitler was in a state of euphoria.21 Who could now fail to see the hand of fate in his existence? His politics had been formed in the slums of Vienna; during the Great War, fear and fervour, the exhilaration of patriotism and danger had created an almost religious rapture, and the 1918 offensive had made the ‘most tremendous impression’ of his life,22 which October and November 1918, and his own gassing and temporary blindness, had blackened into a frenzy of hatred and revenge. He had been re-born, to lead a party and a nation. He had re-occupied the Rhineland, had seized the Sudetenland, had ‘reunited’ Austria with the Reich, had absorbed Czechoslovakia, smashed Poland, humiliated France, chased Britain from Europe, and reversed Versailles. Now he had Russia under his heel, and the Jews and communists who ruled the sub-human Slavs were in his power. He was the greatest German of all time, feared from the British Isles to the Pacific Ocean. He had all Europe in his power. He numbered Italy, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Finland, Spain and the mighty and warlike military empire of Japan as his allies. The shiftless artist, who had read of Caesar in his dingy Viennese lodgings, had now become greater than Caesar. Surely some destiny had appointed him? He was finally justified in his world outlook by his tremendous success, and the adulation of millions. The Fuehrer, never noted for his openness to suggestion and argument, was now beyond all earthly advice.
Now, in the East, terrible events unfolded. The motive was neither a simple brutality nor a greed for profit, but a mixture of pseudo-science and all embracing revenge. The Russian steppes were lit ‘by the lights of perverted science’;23 millions of men and women were massacred; some were simply butchered or shot, while others were killed in a less ‘brutalising’ manner.24 The commissar was shot for what he had become; the Slav because his village resisted, or out of sheer disgust at his being a Slav. But the Jew and Jewess, (the descendant perhaps of the converted Khazars), was shot because his or her whole race was proscribed. Neither beauty nor age, nor past deeds, neither a blameless or a shameful life, neither tallness nor shortness, yellow or black hair, blue or dark eyes, could save a Jew. They had been doomed in 1918; now, after 23 years, came vengeance.
But in the dark fabric of Hitler’s and Himmler’s dreams, a tiny rent appeared, and grew in size and importance with each passing day; the Russians were still fighting. Despite huge casualties, they fought on in a bitter and savage war. They supported the communist regime which had appeared, only months before, to be a cruel slavery. They might have supported a liberator. They might have risen in revolt if the Ukraine had been promised liberty. But all were involved in the slaughter or oppression, being either communists or Jews or Slavs. All were antagonised; they were now enemies, dedicated to revenge upon vengeance. And winter approached.
Had Hitler now sought to uncover a human purpose in natural events, he might have been struck with fear. The Russian winter of 1941–2, which he had not expected his troops to have to endure, and for which they were therefore ill prepared, was at times the worst for 250 years. Not only did tanks have to have fires lit under them for two hours before they would start, but the firing pins of rifles shattered. From the beginning of December came an average of 60 degrees Fahrenheit of frost.25
Having stalled within sight of the Kremlin, Hitler’s armies were now forced
