from the Baltic to the Black Sea, smashing into the defences with devastating effect. A Russian, the poet David Samoilov, said later, ‘We were all expecting war. But we were not expecting that war.’ Divisions and soon whole armies dissolved in the Germans’ path, so that collapses and surrenders characterised the first weeks of the Red Army’s campaign. A Soviet officer wrote of an exchange with a comrade: ‘Kuznetsov informed me, with a tremble in his throat, that the only thing left of the 56th Rifle Div was its number.’ This was merely one among a thousand such disasters.
Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union was the defining event of the war, just as the Holocaust was the defining act of Nazism. Germany embarked upon an attempt to fulfil the most ambitious objectives in its history, to push back the frontiers of Slavdom and create a new empire in the east. The Nazis argued that they were merely following the historic example set by other European nations in pursuing Lebensraum, living space, by seizing an empire in the territories of savages. The British historian Michael Howard has written: ‘Many, perhaps most Germans, and certainly most German intellectuals, saw the First World War as a battle for cultural survival against the converging forces of Russian barbarism and, far more subversive, the decadent civilisation of the West, embodied no longer by French aristocrats but by the materialist societies of the Anglo-Saxon world. This belief was taken over in its entirety by the Nazis and provided the bedrock of their own philosophy.’
Millions of young Germans had been conditioned since childhood to believe that their nation faced an existential threat from the Soviet Union. ‘The situation is ideal for the Bolshevists to launch their attack on Europe in furtherance of their general plan for world domination,’ wrote an ardent Nazi Luftwaffe pilot, Heinz Knoke, in 1941. ‘Will Western capitalism, with its democratic institutions, enter into an alliance with Russian Bolshevism? If only we had a free hand in the west, we could inflict a shattering defeat on the Bolshevist hordes despite the Red Army. That would save Western civilisation.’ Imbued with such logic, Knoke was thrilled to find himself participating in the invasion of Russia. So were some more senior officers. Hans Jeschonnek, the Luftwaffe’s chief of staff, was chastened by the 1940 failure against Britain, a campaign which he thought ill-suited to his force’s capabilities. Now, he exulted, ‘At last, a proper war again!’
Eighteen-year-old Henry Metelmann, a Hamburg locksmith turned tank driver, wrote later: ‘I accepted as natural that it was a German duty for the good of humanity to impose our way of life on lower races and nations who, probably because of their limited intelligence, would not quite understand what we were on about.’ Like many young Germans at that stage of the war, he viewed his deployment to the east without trepidation. ‘Few of us realised the serious situation we were in. We looked on this journey, if not the whole war, as one great adventure, an opportunity to escape the boredom of Civvy Street, a lesser object being to fulfil a sacred duty to our Führer and Fatherland.’
Much of Hitler’s strategy, insofar as it was planned rather than the product of opportunism, derived from the knowledge that time favoured his enemies, empowering them to arm and coalesce against him. As part of Stalin’s deterrent strategy, before Barbarossa the German military attaché in Moscow was allowed to visit some of the vast new weapons factories under construction in Siberia. His reports, however, had the opposite effect to that which was intended. Hitler said to his generals: ‘Now you see how far these people have already got. We must strike at once.’ The destruction of Bolshevism and the enslavement of the Soviet Union’s vast population were core objectives of Nazism, flagged in Hitler’s speeches and writings since the 1920s. Overlaid on them was the desire to appropriate Russia’s enormous natural resources.
Stalin probably intended to fight his menacing neighbour at some moment of his choosing. If Germany had become engaged in a protracted attritional struggle against the French and British on the Western Front in 1940, as Moscow hoped, the Russians might have fallen upon Hitler’s rear, in return for major territorial concessions from the Allies. Stalin’s generals prepared plans for an offensive against Germany – as they did also for many other contingencies – which could conceivably have been launched in 1942. As it was, however, in 1941 his armies were unfit to meet the almost undivided attentions of the Wehrmacht. Though progressively mobilising – Russia’s active forces doubled in size between 1939 and the German invasion – they had scarcely begun the re-equipment programme that would later provide them with some of the best weapons systems in the world.
In Hitler’s terms, this made Operation Barbarossa a rational act, enabling Germany to engage the Soviet Union while its own relative advantage was greatest. Hubris lay in its underestimate of the military and industrial capability Stalin had already achieved; reckless insouciance about Russia’s almost limitless expanses; and grossly inadequate logistical support for a protracted campaign. Despite the expansion of the Wehrmacht since the previous year and the delivery of several hundred new tanks, many formations were dependent on weapons and vehicles taken from the Czechs in 1938–39 or captured from the French in 1940; only the armoured divisions were adequately provided with transport and equipment. It did not occur to Hitler, after his victories in the west, that it might be more difficult to overcome a brutalised society, inured to suffering, than democracies such as France and Britain, in which moderation and respect for human life were deemed virtues.
The senior officers of the Wehrmacht flattered themselves that they represented a cultured nation, yet they readily acquiesced in the barbarities designed into the Barbarossa plan. These included the starvation of at least thirty million Russians, in order that their food supplies might be diverted to Germany, originally a conception of Nazi agriculture chief Herbert Backe. At a meeting held on 2 May 1941 to discuss the occupation of the Soviet Union, the army’s armament planning secretariat recorded its commitment to a policy noteworthy even in the context of the Third Reich:
1 The war can only be continued if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year.
2 If we take what we need out of the country, there can be no doubt that many millions of people will die of starvation.
Barbarossa was therefore not merely a military operation, but also an economic programme expected to encompass the deaths of tens of millions of people, an objective which it partially attained. Some generals protested against orders requiring their men to participate in the systematic murder of Soviet commissars, and rather more questioned Hitler’s invasion strategy. Maj. Gen. Erich Marcks, the brilliant officer responsible for early planning, proposed that the decisive thrust should be delivered north of the Pripyet marshes, because Russian deployments anticipated an assault further south. Several commanders argued that a conquered population which was treated mercifully would be more manageable than one which gained nothing by accepting subjection. Such objections were framed in pragmatic rather than moral terms; when Berlin rejected them, the critics lapsed into acquiescence and faithfully executed Hitler’s orders.
Industrialised savagery was inherent in Barbarossa. Goering told those charged with administering the occupied territories: ‘God knows, you are not sent out there to work for the welfare of the people in your charge, but to get the utmost out of them, so that the German people can live.’ Col. Gen. Erich Hoepner, the fifty-five-year-old cavalryman commanding Fourth Panzer Group, said: ‘The war with Russia is a vital part of the German people’s fight for existence. It is the old fight of German against Slav, the defence of European culture against the Muscovite-Asiatic flood, and the repulse of Jewish Bolshevism. This war must have as its goal the destruction of today’s Russia – and for this reason it must be conducted with unprecedented harshness. Every clash, from conception to execution, must be guided by an iron determination to annihilate the enemy completely and utterly.’ From June 1941 onwards, few German senior officers could credibly deny complicity in the crimes of Nazism.
The Soviet Union on the eve of Hitler’s invasion was the most rigorously regulated and policed society in the world. Its machinery of domestic repression was much more elaborate, and in 1941 had killed far more people, than that of Nazism: six million peasants perished in the course of Stalin’s programme of enforced industrialisation,
