• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 997 0

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