Inferno - Max Hastings [94]
On the Western Front, some 2.5 million of Stalin’s 4.7 million active soldiers were deployed—140 divisions and 40 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 Brauschitsch, 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 a signed photo of himself, saying, “It may so happen that some time or other I’ll have to refer to the service I rendered to the Soviet Embassy. I hope it won’t be forgotten.” The two never heard of each other again, but Berezhkov always wondered if the German, even though an SS officer, secretly apprehended his nation’s defeat in Russia.
Such misgivings did not extend to most of Hitler’s young soldiers, still flushed with the triumphs of 1940. “We were uncritically enthusiastic, proud to be alive in times we regarded as heroic,” wrote twenty-one-year-old paratrooper Martin Poppel. He thrilled to the prospect of fighting in the east: “Our destination is Russia, our objective is war and victory … We’re desperate to be involved in the great struggle … There’s no country on earth that exerts such magnetic attraction on me as Bolshevist Russia.” The Germans struck from East Prussia into Lithuania, from Poland towards Minsk and Kiev, from Hungary into Ukraine. Almost everywhere, they smashed contemptuously through Soviet formations, destroying planes wholesale on the ground—1,200 in the first twenty-four hours.
In the Baltic republics, the