All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [92]
The huge troop movements preceding Barbarossa became the stuff of café gossip on the streets of Europe: writer Mihail Sebastian was telephoned by a friend in Bucharest on 19 June who said, ‘The war will begin tomorrow morning if it stops raining.’ Yet Stalin forbade every movement that might provoke Berlin, overruling repeated pleas from his commanders to alert the front. He ordered anti-aircraft defences not to fire on Luftwaffe overflights of Soviet territory, of which ninety-one were reported in May and early June. Himself a warlord of icy purpose, Stalin was confounded by the apparent perversity of Hitler’s behaviour. Under the terms of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, Germany was receiving enormous material aid from Russia: supply trains continued to roll west until the very moment of the invasion; the Luftwaffe’s aircraft were largely fuelled by Soviet oil; the Kriegsmarine’s U-boats had access to Russian port facilities. Britain remained undefeated. Stalin thus refused to believe that Hitler would precipitate a cataclysmic breach with him, and was personally responsible for the fact that the German onslaught, no surprise to his senior commanders, caught the defences unprepared. Georgy Zhukov, chief of the general staff, dispatched an alert order to all commands late on 21 June, but this reached them only an hour before the Germans attacked.
On the Western Front, some 2.5 million of Stalin’s 4.7 million active soldiers were deployed – 140 divisions and forty brigades with more than 10,000 tanks and 8,000 aircraft. Hitler launched against them 3.6 million Axis troops, the largest invasion force in European history, with 3,600 tanks and 2,700 aircraft of superior quality to those of the Russians. Under the overall command of Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, the Germans struck in three army groups. Hitler rejected the urgings of his best generals to make a single thrust towards Moscow, insisting upon a simultaneous drive into Ukraine, to secure its vast natural and industrial resources. This is sometimes described as a decisive strategic error. It seems more plausible, however, to question whether Germany had the economic strength to fulfil Hitler’s eastern ambitions, in whichever way these were addressed.
Many German people were shocked, indeed appalled, by news of the invasion. Goebbels wrote: ‘We must win and win quickly. The public mood is one of slight depression. The nation wants peace, though not at the price of defeat, but every new theatre of operations brings worry and concern.’ A young translator at the Soviet Embassy in Berlin, Valentin Berezhkov, recorded a notable experience during his confinement with the rest of his delegation after the outbreak of war. He was befriended by a middle-aged SS officer named Heinemann, who took him out to a café for a drink, where they were embarrassed to be joined by six other SS men. Heinemann hastily covered himself by saying that his guest was a relation of his wife’s, engaged in secret work that he could not discuss.
They talked about the war for a while, until the SS officers declared a toast to ‘Our victory.’ Berezhkov raised his glass ‘To our victory’ without attracting unwelcome attention. Heinemann was desperately anxious that his son, who had just joined the SS, should not perish in Russia, and was also short of cash to fund medical treatment for his wife. Berezhkov gave him a thousand marks from the Embassy safe, knowing that the Russians would not be allowed to take large sums with them when they were repatriated. At their parting Heinemann, who helped to organise the mission’s eventual evacuation in the exchange of Moscow and Berlin diplomats, gave the Russian