Inferno - Max Hastings [93]
Industrialised savagery was inherent in Barbarossa. Göring 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: 6 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 by 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 and Tokyo, scrawling across one such report from Beria: “You can tell your ‘source’ from the German Air Headquarters that he can go and fuck his mother. This is not a source, but a disinformant. I.St.” The Luftwaffe played its part in Berlin’s deception operations by dispatching 500 bombers against London on 10 May, inflicting 3,000 casualties, days before most of its squadrons redeployed eastwards.
The huge troop movements preceding Barbarossa became the stuff of café gossip on the streets of Europe: the writer Mikhail 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 antiaircraft 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