• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1540 0

and northern Caucasia will have to make up the deficit in food supplies for the German people. We do not accept that we have any responsibility for feeding the Russian population… from these surplus-producing regions.’79 In fact it was crueller even than that. ‘The purpose of the Russian campaign is to decimate the Slavic population by thirty millions,’ Himmler told colleagues at a weekend party just before Barbarossa.80 With the final Russian death toll at twenty-seven million, he almost reached his target. Hitler’s concept of the Völkerkrieg (clash of peoples) was always intended to end in genocide in the east, or at least in enough ethnic cleansing (as it would later be called) to clear the necessary areas for the Aryan farmer–soldiers who were going to colonize the rich agricultural areas. In this as in so much else, the Nazi way of fighting the war triumphed over the most efficient way of finding victory.

The march on Kiev in July 1941 provided the occasion for one of Hitler’s most controversial decisions of the war, when he opted to take the Ukrainian rather than the Russian capital, although of course he did not see it in those terms at the time. The Soviet Fifth Army had pulled back, but was still capable of threatening the north flank of the German advance into the Ukraine, so OKW determined that as soon as the Red Army near Smolensk had been destroyed, Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Group and the Second Army from Army Group Centre should break off their march on Moscow and swing due south behind the Pripet Marshes to destroy the Soviet Fifth Army and take Kiev in conjunction with the 1st Panzer Group already engaged there. Bock and Guderian opposed this change to the original plan, fearing – rightly as it turned out – that critical momentum would be lost in the drive on the Russian capital, but they were overruled by Hitler. By 11 August 1941 the truth had already dawned upon Franz Halder, as he recorded in his diary:

The whole situation makes it increasingly plain that we have underestimated the Russian colossus… At the outset of war, we reckoned with about 200 enemy divisions. Now we have already counted 360. These divisions indeed are not armed and equipped according to our standards, and their tactical leadership is often poor. But there they are, and if we smash a dozen of them, the Russians simply put up another dozen. The time factor favours them, as they are near their own resources, while we are moving farther and farther away from ours.81

In fact the Russians were to field many more divisions than merely 360; some historians have enumerated as many as 600.82

The war diary of Fedor von Bock, the commander of Army Group Centre, shows how crucial Hitler was to the fateful decision not to push on to Moscow at full strength and speed in August and September 1941. A hint of the Führer’s thoughts came after Generals von Kluge and von Bock had dinner together on 28 July, and Hitler’s chief Army adjutant Rudolf Schmundt arrived at Bock’s headquarters at Novy Borissov late that evening to say of the Führer’s plans that ‘the main thing is to eliminate the area of Leningrad, then the raw materials region of the Donets Basin. The Führer cares nothing about Moscow itself. The enemy at Gomel is to be wiped out to clear the way for future operations.’ Bock’s understandable reaction was: ‘That differs somewhat from what is said in the Army Command’s directive!’83 Directive No. 21 had in fact been ambiguous, giving as equal priorities ‘the prompt seizure of the economically important Donets Basin’ and a ‘rapid arrival at Moscow’.

A week later, on 4 August, Hitler arrived at Novy Borissov himself, and said that he saw the Crimea as a primary objective, otherwise it might become ‘a Soviet aircraft carrier operating against the Ruman ian oil-fields’. He congratulated Bock on his ‘unprecedented success’ so far, but Bock gleaned from the discussion after his briefing that ‘it appears that he is not yet clear on how the operations should now proceed.’84 Heinz Guderian (2nd Panzer Group) and Hermann Hoth (3rd Panzer Group) explained