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By Root 1178 0

guided by three principles: ‘first to rule, second to administer, third to exploit’; all dissent was to be rewarded by death. As early as 31 July, Goering ordered preparations for a ‘total solution to the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe’. Tens of thousands of Russian Jews were slaughtered where they were found by the Einsatzgruppen killing squads which followed the Wehrmacht’s spearheads. Nazi officials began drafting plans for a transfer east of thirty million Germanic colonists. Hundreds of thousands of young women were shipped to the Reich from Ukraine and the Baltic states to become domestic servants and farm labourers. Some went not unwillingly: amid the ruin of their shattered homes and communities, they faced destitution. On 19 August, in his diary Goebbels expressed surprise that Hitler thought the war might end soon and suddenly: ‘The Führer believes a moment may come when Stalin will sue for peace … I asked him what he would do if that happened. The Führer replied that he would agree to peace. What then happened to Bolshevism would not matter to us. Bolshevism without the Red Army does not represent a threat.’

Since the 1917 Revolution, the population of the Soviet Union had endured the horrors of civil war, famine, oppression, enforced migration and summary injustice. But Barbarossa transcended them all in the absolute human catastrophe that unfolded in its wake, and eventually became responsible for the deaths of twenty-seven million of Stalin’s people, of whom sixteen million were civilians. A soldier named Vasily Slesarev received a letter, carried to the Soviet lines by partisans, from his twelve-year-old daughter Manya in their home village near Smolensk: ‘Papa, our Valik died and is in the graveyard … Papa, the German monsters set fire to us.’ The family home was burnt, and Slesarev’s son Valerii died of pneumonia while hiding from the invaders. Manya continued: ‘Many people have been killed in the villages round here. And all they think about is the bloodthirsty monsters, you can’t even call them humans, they’re just robbers and drinkers of blood. Papa, kill the enemy!’ If such missives were cynically exploited by the Soviet propaganda machine, they reflected real circumstances and passionate sentiments in thousands of communities across vast expanses of Russia.

Sergeant Victor Kononov wrote to his family on 30 November, describing his experiences after being taken prisoner by the Germans: ‘The fascists drove us on foot to the rear for six days during which they gave us neither water nor bread … After these six days we escaped. We saw so much … The Germans were robbing our collective farmers, taking their bread, potatoes, geese, pigs, cattle and even their rags. We saw farmers hanging on gallows, corpses of partisans who had been tortured and shot … The Germans fear every bush, every little noise. In every collective farmer, old or young, they see a partisan.’

The partisan movement, sustaining armed resistance behind the German lines, began in June 1941 and became one of the most notable features of Russia’s war. By the end of September the NKVD claimed that 30,000 guerrilla fighters were operating in Ukraine alone. It was impossible for the invaders to secure the huge wildernesses behind the front. But bands of desperate men, conducting a campaign dependent on starving civilians for food, were by no means acclaimed by them as heroes. One of their commissars, Nikolai Moskvin, wrote: ‘It’s not surprising that local people run off and complain to the Germans. A lot of the time we’re just robbing them like bandits.’ Later in the campaign he added an emotional postscript: ‘I am writing for posterity that partisans undergo inhuman sufferings.’ So did civilians. The struggle for survival, in a universe in which the occupiers controlled most of the food, caused many women to sell their bodies to Germans, and many men to enlist as auxiliaries of the Wehrmacht – ‘Hiwis’, as they became known: 215,000 Soviet citizens died wearing German uniforms. But partisan operations achieved