Inferno - Max Hastings [91]
1 In this text, for convenience I have referred to all Axis decrypted messages as Ultra, although the Americans used the code-word Magic to denote Japanese traffic.
CHAPTER SIX
BARBAROSSA
AT 3:15 A.M. BERLIN time on 22 June 1941, Russian border guards on the Bug River bridge at Kolden were summoned by their German counterparts “to discuss important matters,” and machine-gunned as they approached. Wehrmacht sappers tore away charges laid on the railway bridge at Brest-Litovsk, then waved forward the assault units at 3:30 a.m. German special forces—“Brandenburgers,” who included some Russian-speakers—had been parachuted or smuggled across the lines during the preceding days, and were already at work sabotaging communications behind the front. Some 3.6 million Axis troops began to advance into the Soviet Union on a 900-mile front from the Baltic to the Black Sea, smashing into the defences with devastating effect. A Russian, the poet David Samoilov, said later, “We were all expecting war. But we were not expecting that war.” Divisions and soon whole armies dissolved in the Germans’ path, so that collapses and surrenders characterised the first weeks of the Red Army’s campaign. A Soviet officer wrote of an exchange with a comrade: “Kuznetsov informed me, with a tremble in his throat, that the only thing left of the 56th Rifle Div was its number.” This was merely one among a thousand such disasters.
Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union was the defining event of the war, just as the Holocaust was the defining act of Nazism. Germany embarked upon an attempt to fulfil the most ambitious objectives in its history, to push back the frontiers of Slavdom and create a new empire in the east. The Nazis argued that they were merely following the historic example set by other European nations in pursuing Lebensraum, living space, by seizing an empire in the territories of savages. The British historian Michael Howard has written: “Many, perhaps most Germans, and certainly most German intellectuals, saw the First World War as a battle for cultural survival against the converging forces of Russian barbarism and, far more subversive, the decadent civilisation of the West, embodied no longer by French aristocrats but by the materialist societies of the Anglo-Saxon world. This belief was taken over in its entirety by the Nazis and provided the bedrock of their own philosophy.”
Millions of young Germans had been conditioned since childhood to believe that their nation faced an existential threat from the Soviet Union. “The situation is ideal for the Bolshevists to launch their attack on Europe in furtherance of their general plan for world domination,” wrote an ardent Nazi Luftwaffe pilot, Heinz Knoke, in 1941. “Will Western capitalism, 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