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By Root 1005 0

’s personal direction of Russia’s 1941 campaigns inflicted disasters which at times threatened to become irretrievable. His refusal to yield ground was responsible for the loss of many of the 3.35 million Russian soldiers who passed into German captivity that year. But his people revealed a will to fight, and a willingness to die, that owed little to ideology and much to peasant virtues, a visceral devotion to Mother Russia, and the fruits of compulsion. A soldier, Boris Baromykin, described the execution of a comrade from a Central Asian republic, charged with unauthorised withdrawal from his position: “The poor fellow was standing just a couple of metres from me, peacefully chewing a piece of bread; he could only speak a few words of Russian and had no idea what was going on. Abruptly the major heading the military tribunal read out an order: ‘Desertion from the front line—immediate execution,’ and shot him in the head. The guy collapsed in front of me—it was horrible. Something inside of me died when I saw that.”

But Baromykin, acknowledging the chaos of one of their retreats, “like a herd of desperate cattle,” added: “The only thing holding us together was fear that our commanders would shoot us if we tried to run away.” A soldier shot by his comrades as he attempted to desert swore at them as he lay dying in the dust: “They’ll kill the lot of you.” He glimpsed Nikolai Moskvin, the unit’s political officer. “And you, you bloodstained commissar, they’ll hang you first.” Moskvin drew his revolver and finished the man off. He wrote in his diary: “The boys understood; a dog’s death for a dog.” To discourage desertion, the Red Army adopted a new tactic: dispatching groups of men towards the German lines with their hands in the air, who then tossed a shower of grenades. This was designed to provoke the Germans to fire on others who attempted to surrender in earnest.

The ruthlessness of the Soviet state was indispensable to confound Hitler. No democracy could have established as icily rational a hierarchy of need as did Stalin, whereby soldiers received the most food; civilian workers less; and “useless mouths,” including the old, only a starvation quota. More than 2 million Russians died of hunger during the war in territories controlled by their own government. The Soviet achievement in 1941–42 contrasted dramatically with the feeble performance of the Western Allies in France in 1940. Whatever the limitations of the Red Army’s weapons, training, tactics and commanders, Soviet culture armoured its forces to meet the Wehrmacht with a resolution the softer citizens of the democracies could not match.

“This is no gentleman’s war,” admitted Wehrmacht Lt. von Heyl in a letter to his family. “One becomes totally numb. Human life is so cheap, cheaper than the shovels we use to clear the roads of snow. The state we have reached will seem quite unbelievable to you back home. We do not kill humans but ‘the enemy,’ who are rendered impersonal—animals at best. They behave the same towards us.” The spectacle of starving prisoners dehumanised Russians in the eyes of many Germans, in a fashion that destroyed any instinct towards pity. A Wehrmacht soldier wrote: “They whined and grovelled before us. They were human beings in whom there was no longer a trace of anything human.”

German savagery reconciled Stalin’s nation to the savagery of its own leaders: Hitler’s invasion united tens of millions of Russians who had hitherto been alienated by ideological and racial differences, purges, famines, institutionalised injustice and incompetence. The “Great Patriotic War” Stalin had declared became a reality that accomplished more for the cohesion and motivation of his peoples than any other event since the 1917 revolution. Even Hitler’s SS became reluctantly impressed with the Soviets’ indoctrination of their own soldiers. Whatever delusions persisted in Berlin, on the battlefield almost every German soldier now recognised the magnitude, perhaps the impossibility, of the task to which his nation was committed. The panzer officer Wolfgang Paul