The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [87]
On 16 June 1941, in a long conversation with Goebbels at the Reich Chancellery – the Propaganda Minister had to enter by the back door to avoid being noticed – Hitler said that there must be no repeat of Napoleon’s experience in Russia.39 During this in-depth, heart-to-heart discussion they declared that the Greek campaign had ‘cost us dear’; that the Wehrmacht and the Red Army had between 180 and 200 divisions each, although there was ‘no comparison’ in terms of personnel and equipment; that Barbarossa would take only four months – Goebbels thought fewer – and that Bolshevism ‘will collapse like a house of cards’. No geographical limits were set for the operation: ‘We shall fight until Russia’s military power no longer exists.’ The Japanese, although they had not been forewarned, would be supportive because they could not attack America ‘with Russia intact to her rear’. His pre-emptive strike would avoid a two-front war, Hitler believed, and after victory Britain could be dealt with, as ‘the U-boat war will start in earnest. England will sink to the bottom.’ The Luftwaffe would also be used against Britain ‘on a massive scale’ because invasion was ‘a very difficult prospect, whatever the circumstances. And so we must try to win victory by other means.’ Together the two men looked into the smallest details of the operation – the printers and packers of the leaflets to be dropped over Russia would live in total isolation until it had begun, for example – and, as a result of its success, ‘Bolshevism must be destroyed. And with it England will lose her last possible ally on the European mainland.’ Hitler told Goebbels that this was the struggle they had been waiting for all their lives: ‘And once we have won, who is going to question our methods? In any case, we have so much to answer for already that we must win, because otherwise our entire nation – with us at its head – and all we hold dear, will be eradicated. And so to work!’40 They even evolved a plan at that meeting to try to involve Christian bishops in supporting the attack on atheist Bolshevism, something enthusiastically entered into by Alfred-Henri-Marie Baudrillart, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris, who sermonized on 30 July 1941 that ‘Hitler’s war is a noble undertaking in defence of European culture.’
If anyone besides Hitler can be blamed for Germany’s ultimately disastrous decision to invade Russia it was his economics minister, Walther Funk, who argued that, under the British naval blockade of the Continent, Germany’s European Groβraumwirtschaft (sphere of economic domination) ultimately depended on the supplies of food and raw materials that she presently received from the Soviet Union under the terms of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, which could not be counted upon for ever but which needed to be hugely increased. Economic imperatives thus neatly dovetailed with ideological, strategic, racial and opportunistic ones; indeed every factor pointed to an invasion, save one: logistical reality. Although in Directive No. 21 Hitler had made a passing reference to ‘the vastness of Russian territory’, he initially envisaged only swallowing European Russia ‘from the general line Volga–Archangel’, with Russian industry in the Urals being ‘eliminated by the Luftwaffe’.41 The sheer size of the steppes should have given him and his Staff pause for thought, but it does not seem to have done so.
Retaining the initiative had always been the key to Hitler’s many spectacular successes up to June 1941, and he was to keep it for another four months, until he was checked at the gates of Moscow that October. For years he had gambled on his enemies’ indecision and weakness, and again and again he had been proved right. The stakes might have increased exponentially over the years, but his gambler’s instinct never left him. The magnitude of the