• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1060 0

soldiers, who then, cut off and with supplies dwindling, surrendered or were wiped out. Army Group South was slowed by rains and strong Russian resistance, but nonetheless made steady progress toward Kiev. The Russians were hampered by their lack of prepared positions, by their antiquated command structure and poor communications, and by their party apparatus, which put political commissars at all levels and made them co-commanders, so that military decisions were constantly being upstaged by political posturing. Within two weeks, the German high command believed that the first phase of its operation was complete, that the Russian Army was all but wiped out, and that the Wehrmacht was ready to enter the pursuit and mopping-up phase.

In late July and early August, the Germans threw the game away. The flaws in the plan, and indeed in the entire German system, began to show. On both the military and the political level, things started to go wrong.

Dictatorships not being subject to the sort of press and public criticism that other states are, Adolf Hitler had by now come to believe in his own infallibility; so far, every time his generals had said one thing and he had said another, he had been right. They had been wrong about the Rhineland, he had been right; they had been wrong about Czechoslovakia, he had been right; and so it had gone. It did not occur to him that these previous encounters had been matters of political intuition, and that now he was meddling in affairs of military professionalism. The generals wanted to drive on straight to Moscow; they assessed that Moscow was the heart of Russia and of communism, and that Stalin would be forced, want to or not, to commit everything he had to the defense of the city. Once he did so, they could destroy the remnants of the Red Army, and the war would be won.

Hitler waffled. He decided that the armor ought to be pulled out of Army Group Center, which could continue its advance solely with its infantry formations. This armor would be allocated to Army Group North, to help it get to Leningrad, and to Army Group South, to bolster its increasingly successful advance toward the Crimea and the industrial area of the Donets Basin. There was about a week of protest and argument by the generals, which only served to reinforce Hitler’s conviction that he was right, and then the transfers began. The result was that the Russians gained badly needed breathing space—this became their equivalent of the “miracle of Dunkirk”—and the German armor, though it had some time to catch its breath, lost it again by running back and forth parallel to the front. The decision and the reorganization attendant upon it cost the Germans more time than the side-trip into the Balkans before the campaign began.

The other difficulty was that military considerations became subordinated to some of the more hare-brained Nazi ideological preconceptions. Communism was not popular in large parts of Russia; the vast, rich Ukraine, for example, had tried to break away from Russia after the Revolution and into the twenties. As an ally it would have provided an enormous amount of territory, resources, and population for Germany. When the first German Army units entered the Ukraine, they were greeted as liberators by the local inhabitants. Not since the Anschluss had German troops been treated to girls throwing flowers and men breaking out the wine bottles for them. Nazi ideology, however, dictated that Ukrainians were Slavs, and Slavs were subhuman, fit only to serve as slaves for the Master Race until they died off. Within weeks in the rear areas, the Jew-hunters and the political squads were at work, rounding up, exterminating, robbing, raping, and killing. Soon there were no more pretty girls by the side of the road throwing flowers; there were only bitter men throwing Molotov cocktails. The Master Race found that even it could not afford gratuitously to alienate several millions of people.

What Hitler casually threw away, Stalin picked up. In the early weeks of the war, the regime appealed to all Russians to