Military history

CHAPTER 10

BARBAROSSA

Operation Barbarossa started with the invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941 and ended on 5 December with the German Army on the defensive in the face of determined Soviet counter-attacks. Stalin had ignored all indications that an attack was imminent, including strongly worded warnings from the British. Some Russian historians suggest that Hitler correctly anticipated an imminent Soviet attack to seize the vital oilfields of Romania and that some, at least, of the early catastrophes that overtook the Red Army were the result of being concentrated forward for attack rather deployed in depth for defence. The Germans, however, had grossly underestimated the ruthless adaptability of a Soviet regime they had expected to collapse like a rotten building once the door was kicked in, as well as the mobilisation potential of the Red Army and the extent to which patriotic fervour against the invader would submerge the hatreds and divisions within the Soviet Empire. The basic premise of Barbarossa was that German forces would have won complete operational freedom within five to six weeks following the collapse of the Red Army. When this did not occur Hitler lost his nerve and first weakened the central thrust towards Moscow in order to pursue economic-strategic goals in the south, then halted an advance on Leningrad in the north that might have succeeded in order to bolster the central front. The Soviets, meanwhile, had learned from Richard Sorge in Tokyo (see Chapter 2) that the Japanese would not attack and brought west the Siberian Army, well-trained and far better equipped for winter fighting than the Germans. The pattern for the rest of a war that was characterised by almost unimaginable cruelty and sacrifice on both sides was set by the staggering fact that by the end of 1941, despite having lost four and a half million soldiers (equivalent to the entire German Army) and half a million square miles of territory with seventy-five million inhabitants, the Soviets took the offensive and sustained it through the winter.

MAJOR GENERAL WALTHER WARLIMONT

Deputy Chief of Wehrmacht Operations

On 29 July 1940 I first heard about Hitler's intentions to go to war with Russia, after the French campaign and the triumphant victory. We were of a good mood since we believed that Chief of Operations Staff General Alfred Jodl would come and announce promotions for his Staff Officers too. But this assumption soon vanished when he arrived with a very closed face and ordered that the doors were shut up and sentries had to be before these doors. And when we were sitting all together, all the live officers including him, without any introduction he started to tell that Hitler had resolved to go to war with Russia. Was a great shock for all of us and we at once began to raise our objections against this, asking him how it would be possible to protect the German life against the British Air Force when the bulk of German forces would have been shifted to the east, and what at all should be the aim of this new campaign after a treaty had been closed just one year ago, and many more questions. He answered to all of them but none of his answers could persuade us that Hitler's intention was to the well-being of the German Reich. Finally he said, 'We have to take in mind that in the short or long term it will be necessary to go to war with Russia in order to crush Bolshevism. At most it is better to begin the war as soon as possible because now we are at the height of our military strength and it will not be necessary to cause the German people to another war within a short period.'

DR GRIGORI TOKATY

Lecturer at the Zhukovsky Academy of the Soviet Air Force First of all we were not ready to start a war, we were weak. Stalin wanted to gain time and at the same time to direct Germany against England. The other aspect was that while doing this he displayed his complete mistrust to the British – the British warned us, that must mean that they try to put us against Germany – that's the main reason he neglected the warnings. I belonged to a leading military academy and naturally the process of war in the west used to be discussed daily. We were not fools; we knew what was going on. We anticipated that Germany will turn against us sooner or later. As far as the general public was concerned the Soviet Telegraph Agency Press made two denials that German aircraft tried to fly over our territories, and these incidents created a mood in Moscow. One must remember that Russians are Russians, Moscow is Moscow; you have rumours more than anywhere else, and rumours are usually inclined to exaggerate, so there were really bunches of population that thought immediately tomorrow we'll be attacked. People kept this under the surface: we did have a centralised propaganda machine which did not allow any other public statement, and central propaganda said there is no danger, so everybody kept quiet. But there was great unease.

SIR JOHN RUSSELL

British Minister in Moscow

I think the people in Russia always had a fear that the Germans might be going to attack them. There's a very deep-lying mistrust in the Russian people for the Germans, going way back through history. But the government, the Soviet government, was so determined not to admit the possibility that any speculation about it was suppressed.

HANS KEHRL

Nazi industrialist

We had the greatest trade agreement we had ever had and the Russians delivered promptly and from an economic point of view everything seemed to be in order. I personally made negotiation with them for putting up a synthetic-fibre mill in Russia and the treaty was signed by the 15th of June 1941 and the first ten million marks in gold were to be shipped on the 1st of July 1941.

MAJOR GENERAL WARLIMONT

I was convinced before the war started that it was a great disaster, a great wrong. Even after the campaign in Poland my conviction didn't change because on 3rd September, the third day of our going to war, the Western Powers had declared war on Germany. After the campaign in France in 1940 my conviction became uncertain, but when I heard one or two months after the armistice with France that now Hitler was to go with Russia, the old conviction came up again and it was at this moment that I changed the place of living for my family, moved them from Berlin to the place where are today.

CAPTAIN EKKEHARD MAURER

German Army

The morning of 22nd June 1941 my battalion commander and myself, I was his Adjutant, at the time were in our foxholes very close to the barbed wire and just before the artillery barrage began he whispered over to me something like, 'Don't ever forget 22nd June 1941 at three-fifteen in the morning.' Then he paused for a moment and said, 'Well, I don't think I have to tell you not to forget because you won't forget it anyway. At this very moment the worst decline, the worst disaster of German history in many centuries, is going to begin.'

DR TOKATY

I think the right mood was deep depression, deep disillusionment, so many people simply cried. Through the 1930s we were told that the Red Army will never fight on its own territory and the very first shot will be made on enemy territory, then suddenly on the 22nd we were told the enemy smashed right down our forces. People couldn't understand how this could happen. Within a few hours I'd been talking to a person who worked inside the Kremlin and he told me that inside the Kremlin they were really frightened because that we were not prepared, that our armed forces had been wiped out and there was nothing to stop the Germany Army. About one month after the war started the government issued a secret order, demanded to begin evacuation of the main strategic centres at once at any cost. It gave a clear impression that the government did not believe that they will be able to stop the enemy, so we have panic and the frightful feeling that we will be defeated very deeply rooted in the centre. We anticipated that the Germans would arrive here and we will be unable to defend Moscow.

SIR JOHN RUSSELL

From June 1941 until October 1941, when the government evacuated Moscow and went down to Kuibyshev, it was a funny sort of atmosphere because the shock of realising that the Germans had betrayed them was sinking in and of course the Soviet government had to do a great adjustment and we, from being a hostile or semi-hostile foreign capitalist power, suddenly became friends, and the second 'Fascist–Imperialist' war suddenly became the 'Struggle for the Defence of the Motherland', and there was a great deal of adjustment, psychologically, to be done all round.

AMBASSADOR W AVERELL HARRIMAN

President Roosevelt's Special Envoy to Europe

After the meeting when the Atlantic Charter was issued Roosevelt and Churchill agreed that there should be a joint mission. Churchill appointed Beaverbrook and Roosevelt myself, and we went together to Moscow and we both agreed to give a certain amount of aid to the Soviet Union. A great deal of it came out of Britain because what we might have given to Britain we diverted to Russia, so it was an extremely generous act on the part of the British government – but it was important for Britain to keep Russia in the war. There we saw Stalin, we had three long talks with him and then the great banquet happened. At first Stalin was very rough with us. He said, 'The paucity of your offers proves that you want us to be defeated in the war.' But after he'd finally gotten everything he could out of us he said, 'This is very generous,' he was very complimentary about what we were trying to do and he gave us this big banquet. That was in early October 1941; the Germans were very close to Moscow but I gained the impression that Stalin was going to hold out – he was a great war leader in spite of the horror of his tyranny. He had tremendous spirit and gave confidence to the Russian people.

DR TOKATY

Stalin showed himself as the supreme leader of the whole war effort to the public on 3rd July 1941 when he made his first war speech and for the first time and for the last time addressed his countrymen, very gently, very beautifully. Everybody repeated it since then. I think he realised by this time his mistakes and tried to correct them.

ALBERT SPEER

Hitler's Chief Architect

Now Hitler took over from the Army so many commands, he was the highest in command and he was in command of the whole Army. And more or less he was also in command of the Armaments Office because he told me details of the armaments and this compelled him to have another itinerary of the day. The day was now filled up from morning to evening with the different duties he had to do because the decisions had to be made and the map of the situation was there and had to be shown to him, if he liked it or not. And I think this made a change in Hitler's whole system, health system, he was getting more and more – he was no more approachable. He was getting more and more a man without any possibilities to discuss. I think he was also getting some numbness and some of the liveliness went out of him. He was in some way – 1 have the experience of being a prisoner for twenty years – he was in some way behaving like a prisoner. Hitler hadn't had any vacations in this whole period; he never stepped out because he thought without him all would be wrong.

COLONEL HASSO-ECCARD FREIHERR VON MANTEUFFEL

Battalion Commander, 7th Panzer Division

The first stage of the Russian campaign were going according to schedule and the plan worked out but in the end of July came a halt at the autobahn in Moscow. And I was with my division and we asked why and were informed that Hitler have a new order, Directive 33, the main failure of the Russia campaign in 1941. Hitler gave an order to disperse the forces. At the beginning of the war against Russia, on June 21st, we had a main objective Moscow, but now in July he ordered in another direction. One Army Group would go south-east and another to take cities first, then attack against Moscow. During August we faced the empire of mud and in beginning of October of snow. But the dispersion was the main failure of the campaign and when Hitler ordered to attack Moscow at the end of October we had not sufficient forces to attack.

DR TOKATY

Ordinary people lost any regard for the authorities and the authorities themselves were utterly sure that Moscow will be taken and they were unable to do anything else but to swallow lots of insults, sometime direct attacks on the security forces' automobiles, just to stop top-ranking secret-service officers and shout insults at them without any fear. The real patriotic part of the population found itself united. I don't think any attempt on the part of the secret services to continue their traditional lines these days would lead to anything we could possible imagine today. I think it would be a revolt. We could not afford any land of revolt these days because the Germans were next to Moscow. Yes, we hated Stalin; very many people began to speak openly against the Party. But we could not contemplate revolt because that would mean weakening our position. Everyone with a keen heart used to say, never mind who, Stalin or the devil himself, number one is not to allow the Germans to take our town. Nothing was allowed to interfere with that and the secret service realised that and behaved accordingly. Although the official history denies it I was there, I saw it; my colleagues and everybody else was looting – but I wouldn't say there was widespread looting. It's extremely interesting that the Soviet population displayed another quality, highly disciplined attitude to the situation. There were certain parts of the population which tried to begin preparing themselves to serve the new masters when they come, but they were in a very limited scale. Literally hundreds of thousands of women and people with children, old men, were digging defence lines at the very same time outside of Moscow. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary people, without being mobilised, doing everything possible for their town, for their history.

MAJOR HANS HINRICHS

German Army engineer

It was completely different from France and, of course, from the desert area. France had a very dense road network, there were only a few woods and the population of France was rather indifferent. There were no ambushes. It was really a war in a very civilised country. In Russia we had very few roads and these became rather muddy already in September. You couldn't diverge for a moment in Russia because of the large woods and of course the many rivers and streams you had to cross without bridges or river-crossing installations. I, with my engineer company, built more than a hundred bridges on the way to Moscow.

DR TOKATY

When the country found itself face to face with the enemy, with the danger look in the eyes, something else appeared among us. Religious feeling just appeared in the midst of nowhere and that helped to unite the people. Religion, the church, suddenly joined the ranks of those who opposed the enemy and after that was natural that nobody even dared say a word against the church, an ally. We were driving through Moscow and suddenly we stopped after a dreadful night and suddenly I walk along my train. I thought everyone must be dead asleep and I heard somebody singing about the defeat of Napoleon, a very patriotic song which glorified the eternal values of Russia, that which never dies and I don't think it will ever die. Russia is too big a place to chop off just in one go.

ALBERT SPEER

Of course I hadn't much knowledge of what the German people was thinking because in a system if you are on a higher level you are quite a distance to the people itself – I heard only from some officials of administration who said they were very poor conditions in Russia and that there was a catastrophe of the transport. Of course I realised too from the newspapers, which said the advance had stopped. I was bothered about those situations and in November 1941 I offered Hitler to use about thirty thousand of my workmen, which were working on these huge peace buildings in Berlin, for to rebuild the transport system in Russia. But Hitler still didn't want to be convinced of his defeat in Russia and he hesitated for a few weeks until he gave the order that his workmen in Berlin are to be shifted to rebuild the Russian transport system.

ANTHONY EDEN

I was leaving from Scapa Flow with Ambassador Maisky and Sir Alec Cadogan, my Permanent Secretary, in a cruiser called HMS Kent. The weather was appalling and it was the only time in the war I got flu. I went to Invergordon and was anxious to get on board the destroyer and get to the cruiser as soon as possible and sail. And to my slight indignation I got a message from Winston saying I must talk to him on the telephone. That meant a long march to a shed where the telephone was, so I asked if it was really very important, because I wanted to get on board if it wasn't, and the message came back that it was of the utmost importance. This was Winston telling me about Pearl Harbor. So then I said to him, 'Well, what do we do now?' He said, 'I'm going to the United States,' and I asked, 'Do I go on to Russia?' He said, 'Certainly, you can't not go. Stalin's expecting you. It would make the worst impression. You go to Russia and I'll go the United States and we'll feed our telegrams to each other,' which is what happened.

DR TOKATY

Stalin gave a speech on 6th November from an underground station, a very good speech. He said, 'Hitlers come and go, but people remain' – and we used to say, 'Stalins come and go, but people remain.' The next morning he received the parade in Red Square and we could see that in spite of all his shortcomings, Stalin rendered a great service to the USSR by that presence because it showed the Supreme Commander does not run away and that is very important in critical times. Secondly he made a speech about Lenin which showed that Stalin retained his nerve. That sense spread at once into all the armed forces, all the commanders began saying, 'Stalin himself hasn't lost his nerve, he is sure – let us fight,' and that made a tremendous impact on the battle qualities of the armed forces.

ANTHONY EDEN

Stalin himself was always a tough negotiator, imperturbable, unyielding, ruthless, but I have a regard for him as a leader and a statesman despite all the cruelties that I have no doubt he did perpetrate. We had difficult discussions because he wanted me to give all sorts of commitments about the post-war period, which I wasn't in a position to give. But it was typical of him that he knew then, with the Germans a few miles from the gates of Moscow, exactly what he wanted to get at the peace table. And he wanted to get it into my head as soon as he possibly could, and if possible get a commitment from me, which he didn't get, to back what he wanted. And what he wanted above all was the security of Russia, never mind anybody else's particular interests in the matter. Max Beaverbrook had been there a little before I went out, with Harriman, on a purely supply mission, and he'd done a very good job in making the Russians understand that we were prepared to play our full part fairly with them. But I've no doubt the Russians had a lingering suspicion, and they ought to have guilty consciences. During the period we were alone they did absolutely nothing to help but they did a good deal to help the Germans. And so perhaps they did suspect that we would play the same sort of game they'd played, do very little, the minimum, and leave them to bear the burden. But gradually I think they realised that wasn't so, and not because of any great generosity on our part. It was due to the fact that it was very much in our interests that the Russians should make as fine a show as they could against the Nazis.

MAJOR HINRICHS

The conditions became very bad during the period end of October to early November, when the mud period set in. And particularly bad for mechanised forces once we had the first frost in the middle of November. My company was mechanised; we had large lorries carrying one section and these lorries stuck in the mud – frozen the next morning, could not move at all. Within a period of two or three days we had to improvise mobility by requisitioning horses and wagons.

LIEUTENANT HEINRICH SCHMIDT-SCHMIEDEBACH

German artillery

The mud froze to irregular hard waves and we had horses. I was the platoon commander with two three-inch guns and this frozen mud was very bad for the horses. And the carts, they were often demolished only by movement, not by shooting, so we had doubts that our material would be in a position to march towards Moscow. At first it was not so bad, perhaps fifteen or twenty degrees under zero and there was no danger for our weapons. But suddenly at a certain point the rifles didn't shoot any more. This was the turning point in the winter war, I think, and it was the greatest point for the soldiers. The lubricating oil we had was not suitable for this sub-arctic winter, but the Russians had the real lubricating oil for their weapons.

ANTHONY EDEN

Towards the end of my stay I was allowed, after a lot of pushing, to go to the front, or near the front, and that taught me a lot about the war on that front because I saw some captured German prisoners. That was about the most pathetic thing I'd ever seen because it was ice cold and none of them had a decent overcoat at all, hardly even a pullover of any sort. And there they were dragging their shirt cuffs down over their hands to try to keep warm. They thought I was a Russian officer or a Russian politician and began to complain to me about the cold, not surprisingly. There was little I could do for them but seeing those youngsters – they'd mostly come from the Sudetenland – there in those conditions made you realise how unprepared the so-called perfect Hitler machine had been for a winter war in Russia. And I remember saying to Winston when I got back, 'They can't be all that good because I can't believe we would have sent divisions into Russia at this time of year without something, some form of overcoats.'

ALBERT SPEER

We were all quite happy about the success of the German armies in Russia and the first inkling that something is wrong was when Goebbels made a big action in the whole of Germany to collect furs and winter clothes for the German troops, and then we knew that something was happening that was not foreseen.

ANTHONY EDEN

The Russians were avid in their demands: tanks, aircraft, raw materials, aluminium, wanted them all and I don't blame them for wanting, they were carrying the main burden of the battle in those days, but to get them to them was a problem and our shortages were very real. And I always feel that perhaps in this country we forget too easily the tremendous contribution of our Merchant Marine, protected by the Royal Navy in those convoys to Russia. The conditions were so terrible, the cold, and yet they got through after heavy losses sometimes. The Russians certainly never understood: partly they didn't understand the problem of the whale and the elephant again [a sea power versus a land power], what it meant, how difficult it was, partly perhaps they didn't want to understand. I had many arguments with Stalin about these convoys. Once we virtually had to stop them because we considered he wasn't treating our sailors the way they should be treated and he retaliated that our sailors were not treating his people properly, which was not true.

ALBERT SPEER

Because Dr Todt was responsible for the whole construction work in Germany I was with him around Christmas 1941 to discuss how my workmen should be used. This time Todt was very depressed and he told me that we shall certainly lose the war because not only physically but also psychologically the Russians are much stronger than the German soldier. 1 was shocked because I knew that Todt was rather an optimist.*25

COLONEL MANTEUFFEL

My division, which was a panzer division, was the only unit which crossed a bridge within thirty miles of Moscow. We cannot see the capital because of the mountains but we could ride with electric train to Moscow and took the bridge, which had not been demolished, in the night of 27th November 1941. I hoped that was a great success for the whole Army. Some hours after I put my feet on the bridge and my troops were going on towards the hills that were north-west of Moscow I heard from my radio operator that no troops came after my division, and because I command no reserves we have to retreat.

ANTHONY EDEN

It was obvious from our first tough conversations, at which Ambassador Sir Stafford Cripps was present too, that we were going to have plenty of trouble in the future. My general view was the sooner we could get down to discussing these matters with the Russians the better. Because as the war progressed, as we were confident we would win it, so it was likely the Russian demands would become more formidable and if we could pin them down it would anyhow strengthen our position for argument later. But of course one couldn't move in any of this except in agreement with the United States, which is what I told Roosevelt then, and also in consultation with the Dominion governments who were all in the war at the time. I think the Russians were doubtful as to what our attitude really was. We had been a year in the war already and the Russians had certainly done nothing to help us in their time. On the contrary, they supplied Germany with a great deal that Hitler had asked for, materials of various kinds, in order, presumably, to try and buy him off, to delay the moment of his attack on them. So it would be natural that they were suspicious, but I think gradually they got to understand that we were in the business completely with them. Churchill's broadcast after Russia was attacked was a masterpiece in that respect and I'd been with him in Chequers the night before and discussed this, and we'd agreed I should go and see Maisky and speak to him in exactly the same sense, which I did. I think the Russians were gratified; they began to feel perhaps we really would help. But then, of course, they wanted everything.*26

AMBASSADOR HARRIMAN

The question of wartime strategy was a matter of concern; General Marshall wanted to make a cross-Channel operation a major effort and so back as early as 1942 we were talking about what might be done. There was a misunderstanding of American Chiefs of Staff and the British capability. I think you had twenty-six divisions but they were only twenty-five to forty per cent equipped and in no sense in a position to engage immediately in warfare. So when it was finally decided to postpone that Second Front, which Stalin had asked Eden for when he went to Moscow in December 1941 to relieve the pressure on the Russian Front, Churchill decided that he'd better go and see Stalin himself to give the news that there could be no Second Front in Europe, but there could be one in Africa. I worked with him and Churchill had some very tough talks with Stalin in August 1942. That was the time Stalin accused the British of being cowardly in their action. Stalin said never before in history had the British Navy turned back, and once the British realised the Germans were not supermen they would have the courage to fight. You could imagine this did not go down well with Churchill and, I think in one of the most brilliant speeches he ever made, answered Stalin and he told what the British had done within their resources and were prepared to do. And in spite of his annoyance he never did ask Stalin where he was with the Second Front when he made his deal with Hitler. He kept his temper. There was an old interpreter with the British Embassy who tried to interpret but Churchill had a bad habit, from an interpreter's standpoint, of making long statements. I would have thought that to translate Churchillian English to Russian would be very difficult at best. In any event he was trying his best and seemed to be stumbling along. Churchill pushed him, 'Did you tell him this – did you tell him that,' and at one point Stalin put his head back and roared with laughter. He said, 'Your words of no importance, what is vital is your spirit.' And that exchange, the brutality of Stalin and the manner in which Churchill took it, laid the basis of this wartime relationship. Stalin, in my presence, toasted him, 'My comrade in arms during the war, a man of insatiable courage and determination' – but he added, 'in this war'. I think he knew quite well there would be very little in common between them at the end of the war.

ANTHONY EDEN

From the first Stalin was eager for the Second Front and I don't blame the Russians for doing that – they were sustaining a terrific burden from the German attack. On the other hand it was quite impossible at any time, though we had endless conversations, to make him understand the difficulties of an operation across the sea. The elephant just couldn't understand the whale's limitations of operation and I suppose to some extent the whale was impatient with the elephant for not understanding. It was a constant source of trouble until eventually the landings in Normandy put an end to the dilemma as far as it existed in Stalin's mind. He was quite clear in his mind as to what he wanted: he wanted us and the Americans in due course to agree on what should be the main terms of the peace settlement that ended the war. What concerned him was the security of Russia and he wanted to be quite sure what had happened to his country should not happen again, regardless of what the effect of that would be on the feelings of some of his neighbours.

SIR STAFFORD CRIPPS

Speech given at a 'Russia, First' rally, 1942

The Soviet Union has no idea and no wish to interfere in the internal affairs of any other country. I know that from the lips of Stalin himself.

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