All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [91]
1 The war can only be continued if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year.
2 If we take what we need out of the country, there can be no doubt that many millions of people will die of starvation.
Barbarossa was therefore not merely a military operation, but also an economic programme expected to encompass the deaths of tens of millions of people, an objective which it partially attained. Some generals protested against orders requiring their men to participate in the systematic murder of Soviet commissars, and rather more questioned Hitler’s invasion strategy. Maj. Gen. Erich Marcks, the brilliant officer responsible for early planning, proposed that the decisive thrust should be delivered north of the Pripyet marshes, because Russian deployments anticipated an assault further south. Several commanders argued that a conquered population which was treated mercifully would be more manageable than one which gained nothing by accepting subjection. Such objections were framed in pragmatic rather than moral terms; when Berlin rejected them, the critics lapsed into acquiescence and faithfully executed Hitler’s orders.
Industrialised savagery was inherent in Barbarossa. Goering told those charged with administering the occupied territories: ‘God knows, you are not sent out there to work for the welfare of the people in your charge, but to get the utmost out of them, so that the German people can live.’ Col. Gen. Erich Hoepner, the fifty-five-year-old cavalryman commanding Fourth Panzer Group, said: ‘The war with Russia is a vital part of the German people’s fight for existence. It is the old fight of German against Slav, the defence of European culture against the Muscovite-Asiatic flood, and the repulse of Jewish Bolshevism. This war must have as its goal the destruction of today’s Russia – and for this reason it must be conducted with unprecedented harshness. Every clash, from conception to execution, must be guided by an iron determination to annihilate the enemy completely and utterly.’ From June 1941 onwards, few German senior officers could credibly deny complicity in the crimes of Nazism.
The Soviet Union on the eve of Hitler’s invasion was the most rigorously regulated and policed society in the world. Its machinery of domestic repression was much more elaborate, and in 1941 had killed far more people, than that of Nazism: six million peasants perished in the course of Stalin’s programme of enforced industrialisation, and vast numbers of loyal comrades had fallen victim to his paranoia. Germans, other than Jews, had greater personal freedom than did any 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