By Eric Vandenbroeck and
co-workers
Russia, Germany, and Poland 1917-1945
Part Fifteen
On December 18, 1940,
Hitler issued OKW Directive No. 21. It began: “The German Armed Forces must be
prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign (Operation Barbarossa) even
before the conclusion of the war against England.”1 He ordered
preparations to start immediately, with the campaign to commence by May 15,
1941. The previous summer, he had asked the OKH to consider the question of
attacking the USSR, but their efforts were “desultory and halfhearted.”2
By December, growing
tensions in the Balkans, frustrations over trade, and the continued resistance
of Great Britain brought about a change of course.3 Molotov’s visit further
convinced Hitler of the unwillingness of the USSR to join a crusade against the
British Empire on German terms, as a German vassal. Now Hitler was in earnest.
He had decided upon war with the Soviet Union.
In mid-January, the
Wehrmacht began arranging logistics to prepare for the invasion of the Soviet
Union.4 Chief of the OKH Franz Halder crafted the initial plan for Barbarossa,
which centered on a limited program of conquest with decisive battles to be fought
close to the borders. The accompanying political program, where it appeared,
would entail forming independent states in Ukraine and the Baltics to be
dominated by Germany. But Hitler rejected this “soft war” approach. He would
lecture that while the region would be “dissolved into separate states with
their own governments,” the real reason for war was eliminating “the
Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia, the previous ‘oppressor’ of the people.” “The
former bourgeois-aristocratic intelligentsia, which continues to exist,” he
added, “particularly among emigrants, must also be discarded.”5 Germany would
acquire its Lebensraum in the east.
In Moscow, it was not
immediately apparent German intentions had changed. Schnurre spent much of
December and early January with Mikoyan and Molotov, now familiar with each
other as negotiators. The results were positive for the Soviets. The Germans
agreed to sell Benz 601 aviation engines, Messerschmitt fighters (108, 109,
110s), and Heinkel and Junkers bombers to the Soviet Air Force. This was not
quite Germany’s most modern equipment but represented better aircraft than most
Soviet designs in mass-production. The Reichsmarine
agreed to dispatch engineers and officers to help Soviet shipbuilders finish
the cruiser Lützow, sold to the USSR as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.6
Machine tools and other weapons, like anti-aircraft cannons, also joined the
list of German exports headed east. In exchange, the USSR agreed to increase
grain shipments and other key raw materials. In general, Schnurre recorded, the
trade talks were “considerably exceeding our expectations.”7 A final series of
economic agreements, signed on January 10, solved ongoing issues in the Baltics
and Bessarabia while laying out a pattern that would normalize long-term
trade.8 But even as these developments signaled a normalization in
Soviet-German relations, there were warning signs of the course change in
Berlin.
On January 17,
Ambassador Dekanozov stopped by the German Foreign
Ministry to state Soviet concern about the movement of large numbers of German
troops in the Balkans, only to be brushed off by his German counterpart.9 But
six weeks later, the German Foreign Ministry informed the Soviet government
that Bulgaria would be joining the Tripartite Pact and that German troops would
be entering that country in large numbers, as British actions had forced German
preparations against neighboring Greece. Molotov received this news from
Schulenberg with “obvious concern.”10 Two weeks later, the Wehrmacht began
hustling a Soviet commission “repatriating” political refugees from Lithuania
out of German territory. Officially, the Germans claimed the Soviets had stayed
beyond an appointed deadline. Still, in actuality, German intelligence feared
the Soviets would observe the growing concentration of German troops along the
border.11
Stalin was concerned
by these warning signs but also convinced that Hitler would not betray the
terms of the treaty, not with his ongoing war against the British Empire. His
response was to increase deliveries of raw materials to Germany somewhat.12 If
the Germans were satiated until June or July, it would be too late in the
season to launch an invasion of the USSR, he concluded, thus buying another
year for defensive preparations to be made.13
At the same time,
Stalin moved to block the Germans elsewhere. Following Yugoslav acceptance of
membership in the tripartite pact, there was a coup in Belgrade. It brought to
power a pro-British, anti-German government that promptly resumed negotiations on
a military pact with Moscow. To deter potential German intervention, the
Soviets immediately finalized a nonaggression pact with the new regime on April
5. Molotov informed Schulenberg that “the Soviet government had been actuated
solely by the desire to preserve peace” and pointedly urged that Germany needed
to do its part to preserve peace in the Balkans.14 The Germans, who had already
massed troops on the border, responded by launching an invasion of Yugoslavia
the next day. Stalin’s signal of Soviet interests in the Balkans had been
ignored.15
Stalin also attempted
to block a possible Japanese-German alignment against him. In March, Japanese
foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka began a trip to Europe that included a visit
to Berlin and another to Moscow. In Berlin, Ribbentrop did not tell Matsuoka of
the ongoing preparations for the invasion of the Soviet Union, but encouraged
him to avoid any commitments with Stalin, saying that “Russia had made
conditions that were unacceptable” for joining the Tripartite Pact, and that
relations were “not very friendly.”16
During his return
through Moscow on April 9, Matsuoka met with Stalin and Molotov to discuss a
possible non-aggression pact.17 Given ongoing Japanese preparations for an
expansion of the war in East Asia, Matsuoka sought Soviet neutrality, at the
very least. Ignoring the German request, he concluded the Soviet-Japanese
Neutrality Pact on April 13, 1941.18
After the conclusion
of this pact, there was a great deal of drinking. Stalin took the unusual
measure of escorting a barely vertical Matsuoka to his train that evening. On
the platform, they encountered Ambassador Schulenberg and acting Military
Attaché Hans Krebs. Stalin approached, tapped Krebs on the chest, and said,
“German?”19 Krebs replied yes. Stalin slapped his back, shook his hands, then
said, “We have been friends with you, and we shall remain friends with you.”
Krebs replied, taken aback, “I am sure of that.” He had already been recalled
to Berlin at that juncture to discuss invasion plans for the Soviet Union. A
tipsy Molotov kept yelling the Soviet pioneers’ motto (“I am a pioneer, I am
ready!”) in the background.20
The warning signs
continued to multiply. That same month, the British ambassador in Moscow and
Prime Minister Churchill relayed intelligence about a potential German
invasion. Stalin interpreted these messages to mean that the British Empire
hoped to entangle Germany and the Soviet Union in war to save itself.21 On May
5, Ambassador Schulenberg, desperate to avoid war, took the unusual step of
privately hinting to Soviet diplomats his own government’s intentions for
war.22 Stalin may have believed this message was part of a German bluff to
drive a better economic deal. Two weeks later, Rudolf Hess, the second-ranking
member of the Nazi Party, flew to Scotland on his own initiative to negotiate a
peace deal. Stalin again interpreted the information conspiratorially as an
indication of a possible British-German peace arrangement directed against the
Soviet Union.23 Messages from Richard Sorge in Tokyo, relaying precise
information on German military plans, were also read as part of a plan to force
the USSR into accepting economic concessions.24 In sum, Stalin interpreted the
growing mountain of intelligence as either a provocation or a trap. Stalin had
prioritized the expansion of the Red Army above all else over the preceding two
years. Between 1939 and June 1941, the Red Army more than tripled in size, but
this expansion was “rapid and incoherent.”25 Oversight was so poor that
Voroshilov had to report to Stalin in 1940 that the reorganized Soviet Ministry
of Defense could not even say definitively how many soldiers were in the Red
Army.26 To fill out the huge numbers of empty positions created by expansion
and the simultaneous purges, officers were created post-haste through direct
commissioning of enlisted personnel and rushed reservist training programs.27 The
consequences were predictable: in 1941, one in six officer positions were
unfilled (one in three in the Soviet Air Force), 85 percent of Red Army
officers were under the age of thirty-five, and only half had completed any
formal military education program.28
In the words of
historian Roger Reese, when the war began, the Soviet officer corps were
“mostly amateurs in skill and civilians in attitude.”29
The Soviet rearmament
program and trade with Germany had done much to remedy the country’s
military-industrial weaknesses. Still, weapons production had not kept up with
the gigantic increase in the army's size, meaning that many units were poorly
armed or had not received much of their equipment by the start of the summer.
For instance, front-line tank units on average had received only 35 percent of
their armored equipment.30 Nevertheless, on paper, the Red Army was the largest
military in the world by mid-June, mustering some 5.37 million men, 25,000
tanks, and 18,000 aircraft, roughly half of which stood directly along the
Soviet Union’s western border.31
As these dispositions
suggested, Stalin was not blind to the mounting evidence of Hitler’s
intentions. But he remained confident Hitler would not fight a war on two
fronts, telling his inner circle that “as long as Germany does not settle her
account with Britain . . . Germany would not fight on two fronts and would keep
to the letter of the obligations undertaken in the non-aggression pact.”32 And
he was certain that an ultimatum would immediately precede an attack, a demand
for the territory or the raw materials Hitler coveted. Stalin angrily rejected
calls for national mobilization, telling Commissar of Defense Timoshenko that
mobilization along the frontier would provoke Hitler into war.33
Nevertheless, Stalin
began to feel that “danger was imminent,” in the words of Khrushchev.34 He
grudgingly permitted Marshal Timoshenko to begin additional preparations as the
growth of German military forces along the border became apparent. On June 1, Stalin
issued partial secret mobilization orders.35
On June 2, an order
to increase preparedness was dispatched to frontline forces.36 On June 14, the
Soviet press publicly signaled its awareness of a German military build-up in
Eastern Europe, hoping to change German behavior.37 On June 18 and 19, the Red
Army was put on alert. Additional forces began moving toward the border. On the
night of June 21, 1941, Stalin paced endlessly, working into the late hours. At
10:20 p.m., following reports of broad border violations and interrogation
reports of a German defector suggesting an imminent attack, Stalin allowed his
General Staff to issue orders for a national mobilization, just in case. He
then went to bed, still unconvinced that Hitler would violate their agreement
so soon.38
As Stalin slept, the
storm broke. By the early hours of June 22, Germany had concentrated along with
the border 3 million soldiers and 690,000 soldiers from the allied armies of
Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and Italy, 600,000 trucks, 3,350 tanks, 7,146 artillery
pieces, and 2,770 aircraft.39 Operation Barbarossa began at 3 a.m. local time
as 1,280 German aircraft crossed the frontier on their way to bomb cities and
airfields throughout Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states.40 Parked in neat
rows, more than 1,200 Soviet aircraft would be destroyed on the first day of
the war.41
On the ground, three
massive Heeresgruppen (Army Groups) of around a
million men each began their offensives with orders to drive on Leningrad,
Moscow, and Ukraine, respectively.
Heinz Guderian,
promoted to command of Panzer Group 2, was once again tasked with taking
Brest-Litovsk, now on the Soviet side of the frontier. He recalled that “on the
fateful day of June 22nd, 1941, I went at 02.10 hours to my group command post
. . . it was still dark when I arrived there.” He watched as German artillery
began pounding Soviet positions at 3:15 a.m. Half an hour later, the sound of
airplane engines became clear, followed by the shriek and explosion of Ju-87
Stuka dive-bombers launching their attacks. Half an hour after that, German
tanks began to rumble across the Bug River, encircling the massive fortress of
Brest-Litovsk. When Guderian followed his men across the river and into Soviet
territory a few hours later, he “found nobody except some Russian pickets.” The
shocked Russian guards took off running at the sight of German armored
vehicles. Leonid Rosenberg, a Red Army lieutenant in an artillery battalion,
recalled the Soviet experience years later. He woke up to the sound of hundreds
of planes flying overhead. “Everyone at first thought it was some huge
thunderstorm and then realized it was war. It was sheer horror when the Germans
started shelling us. Huge artillery explosions next to us, horses screaming,
people screaming for help.”42 Among the officers responding to the attack was
the recently pardoned General Gorbatov, still
recovering from his time in the Gulag at Kolyma. Upon news of the German
attack, he immediately headed for the front. As his forces drew closer to the
sounds of battle, he saw huge masses of Red Army soldiers on the roads heading
east, away from the German onslaught.43 Inexperienced, poorly led, and often,
in the case of reservists, not even familiar with their weapons, they were
running away. Gorbatov hardly knew where to start. He
went to stop the rout of one regiment, screaming “Halt! Halt! Halt!” than
ordering them to “about-face” and lay down with their weapons toward the enemy.
As he shouted orders, one confused soldier told the general, “We saw everyone
else retreating, and so we began to retreat as well.”44 When he had a moment to
pause, Gorbatov later recalled, “My earlier fears
still made my hair stand on end: how were we going to be able to fight when we
had lost so many experienced commanders even before the war? had started?”45
The result was chaos and carnage: during the first eighteen days of the
invasion, the Soviets averaged 44,000 casualties a day.46
Rarely in the annals
of history have two opponents spent so much time preparing each other for war.
Invading German forces marched on rubber boots made with materiel shipped over
the Trans-Siberian railroad. 47 Their rations included Soviet grain, which had
continued to arrive until the very day of the invasion. Their ammunition
contained chrome, nickel, steel, and manganese from the USSR. German vehicles
and aircraft drew heavily from the legacy of engineering work conducted in
Russia and were fueled by oil pumped in the Caucasus.
Many senior German
commanders had trained in the USSR, quite a few even spoke good Russian from
their time there. And when they issued orders, they drew at least in part from
lessons learned alongside the Red Army between 1922 and 1933.
Across the lines, the
story was much the same. Although few living Soviet officers had trained
alongside the Germans, most had been trained in facilities reorganized along
German lines, and in some instances, staffed by German officers. Their
operations were managed by a Soviet General Staff modeled on its German
counterpart and reporting to Marshal Timoshenko, who had studied in Germany in
1931. The tanks, aircraft, and artillery the Red Army used to resist the German
invasion drew heavily from German designs, in some instances, copies of German
designs produced under license or equipment acquired as part of the various
Soviet-German economic agreements. Many of their vehicles were powered by
German-designed engines. And much of their equipment had been built in
factories constructed with German help, equipped with German machine tools, and
powered by coal mining in the Ruhr and Saar.48
As the news of German
attacks began to filter in from the west, Stalin reacted with disbelief; surely
Hitler would not just attack “like some brigand.”49 He told Foreign Minister
Molotov to find German ambassador Schulenberg. As dawn broke over Moscow, Schulenberg
arrived at Molotov’s office, accompanied by the long-serving German diplomat
Gustav Hilger.50 As Molotov sat quietly, Schulenberg began reading a memorandum
accusing the Soviet Union of breaking the German-Soviet Pact.51 Schulenberg
concluded his remarks, and a pregnant silence hung in the air. Molotov asked,
“Is this supposed to be a declaration of war?” Schulenberg merely shrugged.
Molotov replied heatedly that it could be nothing else, as “German troops have
already crossed the Soviet border, and Soviet cities, like Odesa, Kyiv, and
Minsk, have been bombed by German aircraft for an hour and a half.”52
Schulenberg said nothing. At the end of the interview, “all Molotov could
stutter was, ‘What have we done to deserve this?’ ”53
Part One: Russia, Germany, and Poland Part One
Part Two: Russia, Germany, and Poland Part Two
Part Three: Russia, Germany, and Poland Part Three
Part Four: Russia, Germany, and Poland Part Four
Part Five: Russia, Germany, and Poland Part Five
Part Six: Russia,
Germany, and Poland Part Six
Part Seven: Russia, Germany, and Poland Part Seven
Part Eight: Russia, Germany, and Poland Part Eight
Part Nine: Russia,
Germany, and Poland Part Nine
Part Ten: Russia,
Germany, and Poland Part Ten
Part Eleven: Russia, Germany, and Poland Part Eleven
Part Twelve: Russia, Germany, and Poland
Part Twelve
Part Thirteen: Russia, Germany, and Poland Part Thirteen
Part Fourteen: Russia, Germany, and Poland Part Fourteen
1. Adolf Hitler,
“Directive No. 21,” 18 December 1940, NSR, 260–264.
2. Moorhouse, The
Devils’ Alliance, 211, citing Warlimont Diary. OKH
head General Franz Halder’s War Diary also contains no mention of serious
planning for the invasion of the Soviet Union until January 1941. Clearly,
no final decision had yet been made. See Halder, Halder War Diary, IV.
3. See Gorodetsky,
Grand Delusion for the Balkan case; Ericson, Feeding the German Eagle and
Rolf-Dieter Müller, Enemy in the East, 233–238 for the economic case; and
Andreas Hillgruber’s Hitlers Strategie.
Politik und Kriegführung,
1940–1941 (Munich: Bernard und Graefe, 1965/1982) for first articulating the
primacy of ideology in Hitler’s war plans.
4. Halder, War Diary,
V, 90–94.
5. Rolf-Dieter
Müller, Enemy in the East, 240.
6. Philbin, The Lure
of Neptune, 127.
7. Ericson, Feeding
the German Eagle, 149.
8. Ibid., 152.
9. “The State
Secretary in the German Foreign Office (Weizsacker)
to the Reich Foreign Minister,” 17 January 1941, NSR, 268.
10. “The German
Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Schulenberg) to the German Foreign Office,” 1
March 1941, NSR, 278.
11. “Foreign Office
Memorandum (Ritter),” 13 March 1941, NSR, 279.
12. “Memorandum on
the Present Status of Soviet Deliveries of Raw Materials to Germany,” 5 April
1941, NSR, 318.
13. Ericson, Feeding
the German Eagle, 164, 169–171.
14. “The German
Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Schulenberg) to the German Foreign Office,” 4
April 1941, NSR, 316–318.
15. “The German
Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Schulenberg) to the German Foreign Office,” 6
April 1941, NSR, 320.
16. “Memorandum of
the Conversation between the Reich Foreign Minister and Japanese Foreign
Minister Matsuoka in the Presence of Ambassadors Ott and Oshima at Berlin on
March 27, 1941,” 27 March 1941, NSR, 284.
17. “The German
Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Schulenberg) to the German Foreign Office), 10
April 1941, NSR, 321–322.
18. “The German
Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Schulenberg) to the German Foreign Office,” 13
April 1941, NSR, 322–323.
19. Gorodetsky, Grand
Delusion, 198.
20. Ibid., 198;
Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 852.
21. Gorodetsky,
“Stalin and Hitler’s Attack on the Soviet Union,” 348.
22. Ingeborg Fleischhauer, Diplomatischer Widerstand gegen
“Unternehmen Barbarossa”: Die Friedensbemühungen der Deutschen Botschaft Moskau
1939–1941 [Diplomatic Resistance against
“Operation Barbarossa: The Peace Efforts of the German Embassy in Moscow,
1939–1941] (Berlin: Ullstein, 1991), 318–320.
23. Gorodetsky,
“Stalin and Hitler’s Attack on the Soviet Union,” 351.
24. Ibid., 350–351.
25. Roger Reese,
Stalin’s Reluctant Soldiers, 202.
26. David Glantz,
Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War (Lawrence: University
Press of Kansas, 1998), 54.
27. Reese, Stalin’s
Reluctant Soldiers, 130–131.
28. Kotkin, Stalin:
Waiting for Hitler, 893; Yuri Y. Kirshin, “The Soviet
Armed Forces on the Eve of the Great Patriotic War,” in From Peace to War, ed.
Bernd Wegner, 382.
29. Reese, Stalin’s
Reluctant Soldiers.
30. Kirshin, “The Soviet Armed Forces on the Eve of the Great
Patriotic War,” 385. For similar figures on the lack of preparation in Soviet
air units, see Glantz, Stumbling Colossus, 202.
31. Kotkin, Stalin:
Waiting for Hitler, 892; Glantz, Stumbling Colossus, 204.
32. Gorodetsky,
“Stalin and Hitler’s Attack on the Soviet Union,” 347.
33. Ibid., 356.
34. Kotkin, Stalin:
Waiting for Hitler, 892–894.
35. Glantz, Stumbling
Colossus, 104.
36. David M. Glantz
and Jonathan M. House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015), 50; Glantz, Stumbling Colossus,
10, 206.
37. Gorodetsky,
“Stalin and Hitler’s Attack on the Soviet Union,” 352.
38. Kotkin, Stalin:
Waiting for Hitler, 898–899.
39. Glantz and House,
When Titans Clashed, 34. Italian forces did not actually reach the front until
July.
40. Read and Fisher,
The Deadly Embrace, 635–636; Glantz and House, When Titans Clashed, 57.
41. Glantz and House,
When Titans Clashed, 57.
42. “Interview with
Leonid Rosenberg, Witness: Operation Barbarossa,” Witness History Podcast
Series, BBC News, 2011, accessed 2015,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00h9rx0.
43. Gorbatov, Years Off My Life, 157.
44. Ibid., 160.
45. Ibid., 157.
46. Craig W. H.
Luther, The First Day on the Eastern Front (Guilford, CT: Stackpole Books,
2019), 339.
47. Ericson, Feeding
the German Eagle, 179.
48. Ibid.
49. Read and Fisher,
The Deadly Embrace, 637.
50. Some twenty years
earlier, the latter had been responsible for the early POW exchanges as the
unofficial representative of Weimar Germany in Russia.
51. “The German
Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Schulenburg) to the German Foreign Office,” 22
June 1941, NSR, 355.
52. Read and Fisher,
The Deadly Embrace, 640.
53. Richard Overy,
Russia’s War (London: Penguin Books, 1997), 74.
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