Russian. Yet Stalin’s tyranny was less adequately organised to defend itself against foreign enemies than against its own people. The Red Army’s formations in the west were poorly deployed, in a thin forward line. Many of its best commanders had been killed in the 1937–38 purges, and replaced by incompetent lackeys. Communications were crippled by lack of radios and technical skills; most units lacked modern arms and equipment. No defensive positions had been created, and Soviet doctrine addressed only offensive operations. The dead hand of the Party crippled efficiency, initiative and tactical prudence.
Stalin dismissed many warnings from his own generals as well as from London about the impending invasion. The 10 May parachute descent on Britain of Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, in pursuit of a lone peace mission, increased Soviet fears of British duplicity, and suspicion that Churchill intended a bilateral deal with Hitler. Stalin also rejected explicit intelligence about Barbarossa from Soviet agents in Berlin and Tokyo, scrawling across one such report from Beria: ‘You can tell your “source” from the German Air Headquarters that he can go and fuck his mother. This is not a source, but a disinformant. I.St.’ The Luftwaffe played its part in Berlin’s deception operations by dispatching five hundred bombers against London on 10 May, inflicting 3,000 casualties, days before most of its squadrons redeployed eastwards.
The huge troop movements preceding Barbarossa became the stuff of café gossip on the streets of Europe: writer Mihail Sebastian was telephoned by a friend in Bucharest on 19 June who said, ‘The war will begin tomorrow morning if it stops raining.’ Yet Stalin forbade every movement that might provoke Berlin, overruling repeated pleas from his commanders to alert the front. He ordered anti-aircraft defences not to fire on Luftwaffe overflights of Soviet territory, of which ninety-one were reported in May and early June. Himself a warlord of icy purpose, Stalin was confounded by the apparent perversity of Hitler’s behaviour. Under the terms of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, Germany was receiving enormous material aid from Russia: supply trains continued to roll west until the very moment of the invasion; the Luftwaffe’s aircraft were largely fuelled by Soviet oil; the Kriegsmarine’s U-boats had access to Russian port facilities. Britain remained undefeated. Stalin thus refused to believe that Hitler would precipitate a cataclysmic breach with him, and was personally responsible for the fact that the German onslaught, no surprise to his senior commanders, caught the defences unprepared. Georgy Zhukov, chief of the general staff, dispatched an alert order to all commands late on 21 June, but this reached them only an hour before the Germans attacked.
On the Western Front, some 2.5 million of Stalin’s 4.7 million active soldiers were deployed – 140 divisions and forty brigades with more than 10,000 tanks and 8,000 aircraft. Hitler launched against them 3.6 million Axis troops, the largest invasion force in European history, with 3,600 tanks and 2,700 aircraft of superior quality to those of the Russians. Under the overall command of Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, the Germans struck in three army groups. Hitler rejected the urgings of his best generals to make a single thrust towards Moscow, insisting upon a simultaneous drive into Ukraine, to secure its vast natural and industrial resources. This is sometimes described as a decisive strategic error. It seems more plausible, however, to question whether Germany had the economic strength to fulfil Hitler’s eastern ambitions, in whichever way these were addressed.
Many German people were shocked, indeed appalled, by news of the invasion. Goebbels wrote: ‘We must win and win quickly. The public mood is one of slight depression. The nation wants peace, though not at the price of defeat, but every new theatre of operations brings worry and concern.’ A young translator at the Soviet Embassy in Berlin, Valentin Berezhkov, recorded a notable experience during his confinement with the rest of his delegation after the outbreak of war. He was befriended by a middle-aged SS officer named Heinemann, who took him out to a café for a drink, where they were embarrassed to be joined by six other SS men. Heinemann hastily covered himself by saying that his guest was a relation of his wife’s, engaged in secret work that he could not discuss.
They talked about the war for a while, until the SS officers declared a toast to ‘Our victory.’ Berezhkov raised his glass ‘To our victory’ without attracting unwelcome attention. Heinemann was desperately anxious that his son, who had just joined the SS, should not perish in Russia, and was also short of cash to fund medical treatment for his wife. Berezhkov gave him a thousand marks from the Embassy safe, knowing that the Russians would not be allowed to take large sums with them when they were repatriated. At their parting Heinemann, who helped to organise the mission’s eventual evacuation in the exchange of Moscow and Berlin diplomats, gave the Russian a signed photo of himself, saying, ‘It may so happen that some time or other I’ll have to refer to the service I rendered to the Soviet Embassy. I hope it won’t be forgotten.’ The two never heard of each other again, but Berezhkov always wondered if the German, even though an SS officer, secretly apprehended his nation’s defeat in Russia.
Such misgivings did not extend to most of Hitler’s young soldiers, still flushed with the triumphs of 1940. ‘We were uncritically enthusiastic, proud to be alive in times we regarded as heroic,’ wrote twenty-one-year-old paratrooper Martin Poppel. He thrilled to the prospect of fighting in the east: ‘Our destination is Russia, our objective is war and victory…We’re desperate to be involved in the great struggle…There’s no country on earth that exerts such magnetic attraction on me as Bolshevist Russia.’ The Germans struck from East Prussia into Lithuania, from Poland towards Minsk and Kiev, from Hungary into Ukraine. Almost everywhere, they smashed contemptuously through Soviet formations, destroying planes wholesale on the ground – 1,200 in the first twenty-four hours.
In the Baltic republics, the invaders were bewildered to be greeted as liberators, with offerings of flowers and food. During the preceding weeks, Beria’s NKVD had made tens of thousands of arrests and consequently millions of enemies among Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians. Retreating Russian troops faced harassment and sniper fire from local inhabitants. Many civilians fled into the wilds until Stalin’s forces were expelled. ‘These days bogs and forests are more populated than farms and fields,’ wrote Estonian Juhan Jaik. ‘The forests and bogs are our territory while the fields and farms are occupied by the enemy.’ He meant the Russians, and they were soon gone.
Latvians seized three towns from their Soviet occupiers before the Germans arrived; by the end of 1941 Estonian partisans claimed to have captured 26,000 Soviet troops. In Ukraine likewise, the Red Army suffered at the hands of local guerrillas as well as the Germans. Ukrainian Polish teenager Stefan Kurylak was among a host of his countrymen who welcomed the expulsion of the Russians. One of their last acts in his village beside the Dniester was casually to hack down his best friend Stasha, fifteen years old, who had incurred their suspicion. The Germans’ arrival prompted widespread celebration among Ukrainians on both sides of the Soviet border. ‘As there seemed no doubt as to who the victors would be,’ wrote Kurylak, ‘our people…began to cooperate in every possible way with the German “liberators”…Some…even raised right arms to them smartly in the Nazi salute.’
In the first weeks of Barbarossa, the Wehrmacht achieved some of the greatest victories in the annals of war. Entire armies were enveloped and destroyed, notably at Białystok, Minsk and Smolensk. Stalin’s soldiers surrendered in tens and hundreds of thousands. Russian aircraft losses mounted daily. Twenty-year-old pilot Heinz Knoke, a dedicated Nazi, described the exhilaration of strafing: ‘I never shot as well as this before. My Ivans lie flat on the ground. One of them leaps to his feet and dashes into the trees. The remainder forget to get up again…Smiling faces all around when the pilots report. We have dreamed for a long time of doing something like this to the Bolshevists. Our feeling is not exactly one of hatred, so much as utter contempt. It is a genuine satisfaction for us to be able to trample the Bolshevists in the mud where they belong.’
Ivan Konovalov, one of thousands of Stalin’s pilots surprised by dive-bombers on his airfield, wrote: ‘All of a sudden there was an incredible roaring sound. Someone yelled “Take cover!” and I dived under a wing of my plane. Everything was burning – a terrible, raging fire.’ Alexander Andrievich, a supply officer, came upon the remains of a Soviet unit shattered
