The Third Reich at War (32 page)

V

At 3.30 a.m. on 22 June 1941 the Chief of the Red Army General Staff, Georgi Zhukov, telephoned Stalin’s dacha to rouse the Soviet leader from his sleep. The Germans, he told him, had begun shelling Red Army positions along the frontier. Stalin refused to believe that a full-scale invasion was under way. Surely, he told a small gathering of civilian and military leaders in Moscow later in the morning, Hitler did not know about it. There must be a conspiracy among the leaders of the German armed forces. It was only when the German Ambassador, Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, met Foreign Minister Molotov in the Kremlin to hand over the German declaration of war that Stalin recognized he had been duped by Hitler. Initially shocked, embarrassed and disoriented, Stalin soon pulled himself together. On 23 June 1941 he worked at his desk in the Kremlin from 3.20 in the morning to 6.25 in the evening, gathering information and making the necessary arrangements for the creation of a Supreme Command to take charge of operations. As the days went by, he became increasingly dispirited by the scale and speed of the German advance. At the end of June, he left for his dacha, saying, in his inimitably coarse way, ‘Everything’s lost. I give up. Lenin founded our state and we’ve fucked it up.’ He made no address to the Soviet people, he did not talk to his subordinates, he did not even answer the phone. German planes, indeed, dropped leaflets over the Red Army lines claiming that he was dead. When a delegation from the Politburo arrived at the dacha, they found Stalin slumped in an armchair. ‘Why have you come?’ he asked. With a thrill of terror, two members of the delegation, Mikoyan and Beria, realized he thought they had come to arrest him.
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Convinced that the Soviet system was in such bad shape that it needed only one decisive push for it to fall to pieces, Hitler and the leading generals had staked everything on the swift defeat of the Red Army. Like their predecessors in 1914, they expected the campaign to be over well before Christmas. They did not hold major formations in reserve or make any provisions for the replacement of men and equipment lost on the front. Many of the pilots who fought in the campaign expected to be transferred back to the west to fight the British by the beginning of September. The stunning military victories of the first weeks convinced them that they were right. The Soviet armies had surely been completely destroyed. Hitler shared in the general euphoria. On 23 June 1941 he travelled from Berlin to his new field headquarters behind the front, at Rastenburg, in East Prussia. A large compound located deep in the woods, with its own railway spur, along which, from time to time, G̈ring would trundle in on his luxurious personal train, the headquarters had been under construction since the previous autumn. The compound contained a number of bunkers and huts, hidden from their surroundings and camouflaged from the air. There were barracks for the guards, dining facilities and conference rooms. An airstrip allowed light aircraft to ferry people to and from the headquarters when haste was needed. Two other fenced-off complexes not far away were used by the armed forces chiefs and planning staffs. Hitler called the headquarters the ‘Wolf’s Lair’, a reference to his nickname in the 1920s. It was here that he received briefings from the leaders of the armed forces, and engaged in the lengthy lunch- and dinner-time monologues that Bormann had ordered to be noted down for the benefit of posterity. Hitler did not intend to stay there for more than a few weeks. ‘The war in the east was in the main already won,’ he told Goebbels on 8 July 1941.
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He was doing no more than echoing the opinion of the military.

On 3 July 1941, Chief of the Army General Staff Franz Halder, noting that the Red Army appeared to have no more reserves to throw into battle, had already given vent to his euphoria. ‘So it’s really not saying too much,’ he noted in his diary, ‘if I claim that the campaign against Russia has been won in 14 days.’
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On 16 July 1941, therefore, Hitler held a meeting to make arrangements for the governance of the conquered territories. In nominal overall charge was the Nazi Party’s chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, named Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. His Baltic German origins made him seem the appropriate man for the job. Rosenberg’s office had been planning to co-opt some of the Soviet Union’s subject nationalities in the area, and in particular the Ukrainians, as a counterweight to the Russians. But these plans were futile. Hitler explicitly removed not only the army but also Himmler’s SS and G̈ring’s Four-Year Plan organization from Rosenberg’s area of competence. And not only Himmler and G̈ring but also Hitler himself envisaged the ruthless subjugation, deportation or murder of millions of inhabitants in the occupied areas rather than their co-optation into a Nazi New Order. In pursuit of this goal Hitler appointed Erich Koch, the Regional Leader of East Prussia, to lead the Reich Commissariat of the Ukraine, with a brief to be as hard and brutal as possible. He fulfilled it with gusto. His counterparts in the Reich Commissariat of the Eastern Land, which included the former Baltic states, and the General Commissariat of Belarus, Hinrich Lohse and Wilhelm Kube, proved respectively weak and corrupt, and were in the end as widely disregarded as Rosenberg himself. Even more than in Poland, therefore, the SS was allowed to do more or less what it wanted in the newly occupied territories.
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Hitler was aware of the possibility that his plans for the racial subjugation and extermination of the indigenous populations of the occupied areas were so radical that they might alienate world opinion. Propaganda, therefore, he said on 16 July 1941, had to emphasize that the German forces had occupied the area in order to restore order and security and liberate it from Soviet control.
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The invasion was sold to the German people not only as the decisive phase in the war against ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, but also as a preventive measure designed to forestall a Soviet assault on Germany. Indeed, on 17 September 1941 Hitler told his dinner companions that he had been obliged ‘to foresee that Stalin might pass over to the attack in the course of 1941’, while Goebbels already recorded him on 9 July fulminating ‘about the Bolshevik leadership clique which had intended to invade Germany’. How far these statements reflected the two men’s real beliefs is a moot point: both of them knew their words would be recorded for posterity - Hitler’s by Bormann’s stenographers, and Goebbels’s by his secretaries, for by this time he had gone over to dictating his diaries rather than writing them himself, and had signed a contract for their publication after his death.
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But this was certainly the line that was fed to the mass of ordinary Germans.

The announcement of the invasion took most German people almost completely by surprise. On many previous occasions, the imminence of war had been obvious in a massive escalation of hostile propaganda pumped out against the prospective enemy by Goebbels’s media machine. But because Hitler had wanted to deceive Stalin into thinking there would be no attack, such propaganda had been entirely absent on this occasion, and indeed in mid-June there were even rumours that Stalin was about to pay a formal visit to the German Reich. Most people’s attention was still focused on the conflict with Britain and the hope of reaching a settlement. Not surprisingly, therefore, people’s initial responses to the announcement of the launching of Barbarossa were mixed. The student Lore Walb captured the public reaction perfectly in her diary. People felt, she wrote, ‘great apprehension and depression at the same time, but also, somehow, they breathed a sigh of relief’. At least, she felt, the air had been cleared by the ending of the tactically necessary but politically false alliance between Germany and Soviet Bolshevism.
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The local authorities in the rural Bavarian district of Ebermannstadt reported that the people were making ‘anxious faces’ and were concerned ‘that the war was once more dragging itself on long into the future’.
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Luise Solmitz too thought that the invasion of the Soviet Union heralded war without end.
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‘The first thought we all have is about the length of the war,’ wrote the journalist Jochen Klepper, who had been enlisted as a reserve officer with German units in Bulgaria and Romania, ‘but then the conviction that a reckoning with Russia was necessary sooner or later.’
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Some were worried that Hitler was biting off more than he could chew. Melita Maschmann was walking past a beer-garden by Lake Constance on 22 June 1941, on a visit to her parents, when she heard Hitler on the radio announcing the invasion of the Soviet Union. She later remembered that her initial reaction had been one of fear and apprehension. A war on two fronts had never been a good idea, and not even Napoleon had been able to defeat the Russians.

The people round me had troubled faces. We avoided one another’s eyes and looked out across the lake. Its farther shore was shrouded in mist under a grey sky. There was something cheerless in the mood of that cloudy summer’s morning. Before the broadcast was over it had started to rain. I had a sleepless night behind me and I was cold. I walked along the shore in a fit of depression. The water lapped, grey and indifferent, against the quayside. There was one thing the invasion of Russia would certainly mean. The war would be prolonged for many years, and there would perhaps be immeasurably greater sacrifices.
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The stunning victories of the German armies, trumpeted over the media from 29 June 1941 onwards, raised some people’s spirits and convinced many of them that the war might not last so long after all; yet enthusiasm continued to be outweighed by apprehension amongst the great majority.
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An official in Ebermannstadt summarized reactions with remarkable honesty some weeks later, on 29 August 1941. The number of people who ‘are passionately following the progress of events, from fanatical enthusiasm’, he wrote, ‘is infinitesimally small. The great mass of people waits for the end of the war with the same longing as the sick person looks for his recovery.’
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IN THE TRACKS OF NAPOLEON

I

Within a few days of retreating to his dacha in despair, Stalin recovered his nerve, if indeed he had really lost it. Some thought he had retreated into temporary isolation like Ivan the Terrible centuries before, to demonstrate his indispensability. A State Defence Committee was set up, with Stalin himself in the chair. His retreat had given him the chance to rethink his role. On 3 July 1941, the same day that Franz Halder confided to his diary his belief that victory had already been achieved by the German forces, Stalin spoke to the Soviet people over the radio, for the first time not as Communist dictator but as patriotic leader. ‘Brothers and sisters,’ he said, ‘friends!’ This was an entirely new note. He went so far as to admit that the Red Army had been unprepared for the attack. The Germans, he said, were ‘wicked and perfidious . . . heavily armed with tanks and artillery’. But they would not prevail. The Soviet people had to organize civil defence and mobilize every ounce of energy to defeat the enemy. It was necessary to form partisan groups behind the lines to cause as much damage and disruption as possible. Silence, lies and evasion, people felt, had at last been replaced with some kind of truth.
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Communist Party propaganda began to emphasize the defence not of the revolution but of the motherland. The party newspaper,
Pravda
(‘Truth’), dropped the slogan ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’ from its masthead and replaced it with ‘Death to the German Invaders!’ Nikolai Moskvin noted on 30 September 1941 that ‘the mood of the local population has changed sharply’. From constantly threatening to betray him to the Germans, they came round to the patriotic cause after learning that the occupation authorities were keeping the collective farms going because it made it easier to collect the grain for transporting back to Germany.
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The speech’s patriotic appeal was all the more powerful because people were already beginning to learn the bitter realities of German occupation. Stories of the horrors of the prisoner-of-war camps mingled with eyewitness reports of the mass shooting of civilians and the burning of villages by German troops to produce in the still-retreating ranks of the Red Army a determination to fight the enemy that had been almost entirely absent in the first chaotic days of the war. When the city of Kursk fell, the Germans arrested all the healthy male inhabitants, penned them into open barbed-wire enclosures without food or water, and then put them to work, guarded by Germans wielding rubber truncheons. ‘The streets are empty,’ noted a Soviet intelligence report. ‘The shops have been looted. There is no mains water and no electricity. Kursk has collapsed.’
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Minsk, reported Fedor von Bock, was little more than a ‘heap of rubble, in which the population is wandering about without any food.’
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Other cities and towns were reduced to a similar state. They were deliberately starved of supplies by their German conquerors, who requisitioned the bulk of foodstuffs for themselves, in a situation already rendered critical by the removal of large quantities of supplies by the retreating Red Army. Hitler declared that it was his firm intention ‘to raze Moscow and Leningrad to the ground, so as to prevent people staying there and obliging us to feed them through the winter. These cities are to be annihilated by the air force.’
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Many people fled the advancing German troops - the population of Kiev, for instance, fell by half, from 600,000 to 300,000 - but even for those who were left, staying alive quickly became a priority in every occupied area. The German military issued a stream of orders imposing curfews, drafting young men into forced labour, requisitioning winter clothing, and executing hundreds of citizens in reprisal for every supposed act of arson or sabotage.
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Looting by German troops was as widespread as it had been in Poland. ‘Everywhere,’ wrote General Gotthard Heinrici caustically on 23 June 1941, ‘our people are looking for harnesses and take the horses away from the farmers. Great wailing and lamentation in the villages. Thus is the population “liberated”.’
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Their requisitioning of food, he added on 4 July 1941, was thorough and comprehensive. ‘But the land will likely soon be sucked dry.’
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The troops’ behaviour quickly alienated even people who had initially welcomed them as liberators from Stalin’s tyranny. ‘If our people were only a bit more decent and sensible!’ lamented Hans Meier-Welcker. ‘They are taking everything that suits them from the farmers.’ Meier-Welcker saw soldiers stealing chickens, tearing beehives apart to get at the honeycomb, and throwing themselves upon a gaggle of geese in a farmyard. He tried to discipline the looters, but it was a lost cause.
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