The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (69 page)

Perhaps most crucially, one of the dictators showed no sign of being satisfied with the territory he had thus far acquired. If he meant what
he had written in
Mein Kampf
, then Hitler’s pact with Stalin could only be a temporary expedient. As the astute German diplomat Ulrich von Hassell put it, ‘It is still an open question how far the [Nazi-Soviet] Pact is merely a dishonest expedient for both authoritarian regimes or how far it goes toward drawing the two countries close together on the basis of further nationalization of the Soviets and the bolshevisation of the Nazis.’ Stalin regarded this question as closed. Far from fearing a future betrayal by Hitler, he exhorted his subordinates to give top priority to maintaining harmonious relations with his new best friend. Trade between the two totalitarian regimes flourished, with Soviet exports to Germany reaching heights not seen since 1930. Sometimes this trade is portrayed as if Stalin were simply giving Hitler raw materials in return for nothing. In reality, as Table 12.1 shows, Germany was also exporting substantial quantities of manufactures to the Soviet Union in 1940, principally machinery, precision instruments and electrical equipment, as well as 3.4 million tons of coal. Indeed, the volume of German exports to the Soviet Union exceeded the volume of imports from there. However, this was largely due to the bulk of the coal that went eastwards. In value terms, it was the Soviet Union that was running the trade surplus. This was unusual. For much of the inter-war period the Soviet Union had run a trade deficit with Germany, particularly in the period of the first Five-Year Plan, when imports of German machinery had surged. Not so in 1940. The Soviet Union supplied Germany with goods that had an aggregate value 76 per cent greater than the goods it was receiving. The lion’s share was made up of agricultural raw materials (including timber and cotton), foodstuffs (mainly barley) and more than 600,000 tons of militarily vital oil. In addition, Stalin allowed the German navy to use the White Sea port of Murmansk for refuelling, and no effort was spared to facilitate German attacks on British shipping.

Hitler was happy to reassure him that all was well. According to some Russian sources, Hitler personally wrote to Stalin in December 1940 and May 1941, swearing on his ‘honour as a chief of state’ that the German troops massing in the German-occupied half of Poland were in fact preparing to invade England; they were in Poland simply to keep them out of range of British bombers. Hitler’s only anxiety was that:

Table 12.1: The main components of Soviet–German trade, 1940

one of my generals might deliberately embark on… a conflict [with Soviet border forces] in order to save England from its fate… I ask you not to give in to any provocations that might emanate from those of my generals who might have forgotten their duty… And, it goes without saying, try not to give them any cause.

Stalin deserves his reputation as one of the most paranoid, untrusting individuals in modern history. The supreme irony is, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once observed, the Soviet dictator only ever trusted one man. Unfortunately, that man was the most unscrupulous liar in history.

On April 20, 1939, Hitler received an extraordinary fiftieth birthday present from Martin Bormann, the man who would later become his private secretary and one of the most powerful figures in wartime Germany. Perched on top of the Kehlstein mountain, six thousand feet above the Nazi elite’s Obersalzberg playground, the Eagle’s Nest was a magnificent granite lodge built in the best
völkisch
style. Apart from its fireplace, a gift from Mussolini, and the carpet in the main hall, which had been sent to Hitler by the Emperor Hirohito, every
part of it was of impeccably German origin. To get Hitler there, Fritz Todt – the builder of the
Autobahnen
and the Siegfried Line – had constructed a winding four-mile road up the mountainside, a remarkable feat of engineering in its own right, the more remarkable for having been partly built in the depths of the Alpine winter. A torch-lit pedestrian tunnel, more than 300 yards long, led to a sumptuous brass-panelled elevator, the shaft for which had been blasted out of the mountain’s core. By these means the Führer was elevated to the literal pinnacle of his power. From here it seemed as if the whole of Europe lay prostrate beneath his famously piercing gaze. If the Nazi empire was Mordor, then this was Sauron’s Tower.

Sadly for Bormann, Hitler hated it. The tunnel to the lift made him claustrophobic and the outlook from the top gave him vertigo. But in one respect the Eagle’s Nest provided inspiration, in the form of its magnificent view of the mountain known as the Untersberg. Here, according to legend, lay slumbering the twelfth-century Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick I: Friedrich Barbarossa. It seemed an appropriate name to give to the most ambitious military operation – and the most bloody act of betrayal – of the twentieth century.

Hitler had always intended to attack the Soviet Union.
Mein Kampf
made it clear that only here could the German
Volk
find the living space it needed. Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland were mere appetizers for the Nazi empire. They could not supply sufficient agricultural land for the anticipated hordes of German settlers – nor, perhaps more importantly, the oil and other minerals essential to the German war machine. But, as Hitler put it in November 1936, he meant to ‘get into the paternoster lift [only] at the right time’; invading Russia was never intended to be his first military move. Three years later he explained his priorities to Carl Burckhardt, the Swiss Commissioner to the League of Nations in Danzig: ‘Everything that I undertake is directed against Russia. If those in the West are too stupid and too blind to understand this, then I shall be forced to come to an understanding with the Russians to beat the West, and then, after its defeat, turn with all my concerted force against the Soviet Union.’

Hitler also had at least two good military reasons for invading in the summer of 1941. First, the Red Army’s poor performance in Poland and subsequently in Finland (which Stalin had invaded in
November 1939) had exposed how enfeebled the Soviet officer corps had been by Stalin’s purges. The Red Army, Hitler and his military advisers agreed, would be easy meat for the Wehrmacht’s tried and tested blitzkrieg tactics. Secondly, and crucially, Hitler had failed to win the Battle of Britain. However, he persuaded himself that British morale would be dealt a death-blow if the Soviet Union could now be put to the German sword. With Russia smashed, he had reasoned in July 1940, England’s last hope would be extinguished.

There was another reason for fighting Stalin. The partition of Poland had been a generous deal from the Soviet point of view. Despite leaving nearly all the fighting to the Germans, the Soviets ended up with a slightly larger share of the Polish population. They also proceeded to acquire the Baltic states, which included territory coveted by proponents of German
Drang nach Osten
(‘eastward drive’) like the Estonian-born Alfred Rosenberg. In June 1940, following alleged ‘acts of provocation’, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were occupied by Soviet troops. As in eastern Poland, occupation was followed in short order by the arrest and deportation of tens of thousands of alleged ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Stalin’s attack on Finland was only one of several moves he had made further to extend the Soviet empire. In June 1940, in violation of the secret protocols of the Ribbentrop – Molotov pact, he unilaterally demanded that Romania cede to him Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, which included some of Romania’s most productive agricultural land. This was land the Germans had been hoping would provide them with soya beans and other valuable imports; it was also home to substantial ethnic German communities, not least in the town of Cernaŭti (Czernowitz). The Soviet acquisition of this territory brought them to within 120 miles of the Ploeşti oilfields, a crucial source of fuel for the Wehrmacht. When the Soviets made it clear that they intended to extend a ‘security guarantee’ to Bulgaria, Hitler discerned fresh evidence that Stalin intended to pre-empt him in the Balkans. (In March 1941 Hitler had persuaded Bulgaria to join Romania and Hungary as new recruits to the Axis side.)

In July 1940 Hitler gave the initial order to prepare for an invasion of the Soviet Union; he confirmed that this was his intention at a meeting with his military chiefs held at the Bergh of on July 31. On
December 18, 1940, he authorized Directive Number 21, the plan for Operation Barbarossa. Originally intended for the spring of 1941, the attack was postponed until June 22 to allow the Wehrmacht to secure the Balkans. This delay was Mussolini’s fault. The Italian invasion of Greece, launched in October 1940, had gone disastrously wrong. By March 1941 the Greeks had successfully expelled the invaders and crossed the border into Albania, which had been occupied by Mussolini in 1939. Hitler had hoped to rectify the situation with a swift attack on the Greek rear, but this was dependent on being given transit rights across not only Bulgaria but also Yugoslavia. On March 25 the Regent Paul had agreed to join the Axis, but two days later he was overthrown in a military coup. This encouraged Hitler to broaden the scope of his planned offensive. On April 6 Yugoslavia was invaded; eight days later the government in Belgrade had to ask for an armistice. By now the Germans were sweeping into Greece, out-manoeuvring the Greeks and forcing another British expeditionary force to take to their heels. On April 30 the British evacuated the Peloponnese, retreating to Crete where British troops had been sent the previous October. Onwards the Germans swept; their airborne invasion of the island (May 20-31) forced yet another desperate British evacuation. This Balkan blitzkrieg cost Hitler precious time, yet it also seemed to furnish fresh proof of the irresistible might of German arms. Small wonder the British expected the Red Army to fold in a matter of weeks. They themselves had now done so not just once but three times: in France, in Greece and in Crete.

Just a few hours before the offensive against the Soviet Union was due to be unleashed, Hitler had invited Albert Speer into his private apartment in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Turning on his gramophone, he played Speer the bombastic fanfare from Liszt’s
Les Préludes.
‘You’ll hear that often in the near future,’ Hitler told him, ‘because it is going to be our victory fanfare for the Russian campaign… How do you like it?’ As if to reassure the architect that he too would benefit from this new undertaking, he added: ‘We’ll be getting our granite and marble from there, in any quantities we want.’

The bloodiest divorce in history was not hard to foresee. So widespread was anticipation of the German attack that it reached even into the most sheltered retreats of British academic life. On June 16, 1941, six days before the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, Claude Hurst, Tutor in Physics at Jesus College, Oxford, made a bet with his geographer colleague J. N. L. ‘Monkey’ Baker, then a Flight Lieutenant in the RAF. The stake was ‘one bottle of Port Wine’, and the bet was ‘that before noon GMT on July 1st 1941 German armed forces will have crossed the Russian frontier’. It was a bet the Physics Tutor won with eight days to spare. It is thus not too much to say that anyone but a monkey could have predicted Operation Barbarossa.

Hurst’s bet was not an instance of astonishing clairvoyance, much less a lucky guess. Having cracked the German Enigma code, British intelligence was well informed about German troop movements in the months leading up to June 22. Churchill later made much of his hint to Stalin that Hitler was up to no good, though he left Stalin to draw the right inference from the information that three panzer divisions had been ordered to Poland following the Yugoslav Regent Paul’s agreement to join the Axis. But Stalin had no need of a British tip-off. His own intelligence service had received numerous reports of an impending German attack. As early as May 1939 he was sent a six-page document entitled ‘The Future Plans of Aggression by Fascist Germany’, based on a German briefing obtained by Soviet spies in Warsaw. In December 1940 the Soviet agent Rudolf von Scheliha (codenamed Ariets) reported that Hitler planned to declare war on the Soviet Union ‘in March 1941’. On February 28, 1941, the same agent was able to provide a provisional launch date of May 20. This intelligence was corroborated by sources in Bucharest, Budapest, Sofia and Rome, to say nothing of the famous spy Richard Sorge (code-named Ramsay) in Tokyo, who had it on especially good authority since he was the former lover of the German ambassador Eugen Ott’s wife. On March 5 Sorge was able to send microfilm copies of German documents indicating that an attack was planned for mid-June. On May 15 he gave the date as June 20. Four days later he reported that
150 divisions were being readied by the Germans for a full-scale invasion. His sources, he assured Moscow, were ‘95 per cent certain’ the attack would come ‘in [the] latter part of June’. He reiterated the warning on June 20. The story was confirmed from sources in Germany and its Bohemian protectorate. On April 17, for example, a Prague informant predicted a German invasion ‘in the second half of June’. The precise date and time of the invasion were revealed by a source in Berlin fully three days before the Germans attacked. On June 21 the Soviet ambassador in Berlin confirmed that the attack would happen the next morning. One estimate puts the total number of such warnings relayed to Moscow at eighty-four. It is, in short, impossible to fault Soviet intelligence-gathering in 1941. With sources planted in the German Economics Ministry, Air Ministry and Foreign Ministry, they knew all the essentials of Hitler’s plan.