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This below is Chapter 5 Section 2:
Necessities, Coincidences and Alternatives in the German-Soviet War
The terms “necessity” and “coincidence” should not be understood in a philosophical, but in a historical sense: what is considered coincidental is something that depends on the decision of one man or a small group of people in such a way that another action by the same person man or the same group, or a man or a group who would have taken their place, would not have encountered insurmountable resistance. An event should also be viewed as coincidental if tendencies of approximately equal strength collide and the decision is brought about by special circumstances or by the activities of relatively few people. Furthermore, in the historical sense, natural events which have major effects on the human sphere are also coincidental, but which could not have been predicted with certainty or even with a high degree of probability. That which is considered necessary does not have this character of the coincidental. From the interplay of necessities and coincidences alternatives can be seen which could have been realized according to human discretion had coincidental circumstances had occurred differently. The illness that caused the death of Alexander the Great was in this sense accidental, and therefore it must be considered as an alternative that his army, under his leadership, would have advanced as far as the Ganges instead of flowing back; the defeat of Hannibal was necessary because he had not been able to take Rome in the first onslaught, although it could have come about after a shorter or longer time and in a different way. A further distinction should be made between the “mere chance” and the “accidental necessity” of a particular character’s actions.
Hitler’s attack against the Soviet Union was accidental insofar as the alternative of a new agreement with Stalin was probably present; but, it had the character of “accidental necessity” insofar as Hitler had repeatedly referred to the “confrontation with Bolshevism” and the “solution of the German spatial problem” as his “real task.” The timing of the war decision, however, was much more influenced by pure chance. Mussolini’s impulsive decision to attack Greece had forced the Balkan campaign, and therefore the attack could not begin as planned on May 15 or at least the beginning of June, but only at a date that left less than four months until the earliest possible point in the mud and snow period.
What was necessary, according to all premises, was Stalin’s call for partisan warfare (in violation of international law) and the promise of help that Churchill made to the Soviet Union on June 22. However, this promise was only necessary because it also proved that the water was not just up to the neck of Great Britain, but up to the very edge of her lips. No man could have spoken with the greatest determination and using even sharper invectives than Churchill did on this occasion: Hitler was a “monster of wickedness,” a “bloodthirsty street urchin,” over whose “Nazi gang” the “devilish emblem of the swastika” was emblazoned, while “saber-rattling Prussian officers” led the “brute mass of Hun soldiers like a swarm of swarming locusts.” He described England's “single, immovable goal” as the destruction of Hitler and every trace of the Nazi regime. So it was an unconditional promise of help, and if, on the one hand, Churchill demonstrated with his speech that it was not only Lenin and Hitler who tended to dehumanize their enemies using expressions such as “insects” and “bacteria,” then despite all this passion, hardly anyone in the audience could doubt that Churchill considered Hitler’s victory over the Soviet Union to be almost certain and, above all, saw this fight as a breathing space for the beleaguered England, just as did many English and American experts who spoke out in the following weeks. Indeed, if he had believed that a military victory for the Soviet Union was possible, he would indeed have acted in completely incomprehensible manner. After all, the Soviet Union was the country that had destroyed and divided up in its state existence along with Hitler the only ally which Great Britain had gone to war to protect from Hitler’s modest demands and the most basic duty of loyalty to Poland should have been that to make aid conditional on the return of the stolen territories. Churchill did not say a word about this, however, but he apparently felt that his own credibility was so endangered that he included the sentence that the Nazi regime “cannot be distinguished from the worst manifestations of communism,” and he did not take back a word of what he had said about communism for twenty-five years. It was therefore only too necessary that this alliance, so hastily concluded, must be a most difficult and jeopardized alliance if it were to mean anything more to Great Britain than the prolongation of a breathing space.
But two days later, Roosevelt also announced that the United States would provide all possible help to the Soviet Union. This promise would also have been incomprehensible if the President had considered the Soviet Union to be even a somewhat equal opponent of Germany. Indeed, any American who remembered Napoleon from the standpoint of interests alone could hardly have come to a different conclusion than Senator Harry S. Truman, who advised that the two robbers who had gotten into a fight should be allowed to fight their battle alone, and if necessary, to intervene at a later point in time. Had not the entire American press just a year and a half before been outraged by Stalin’s attack on Finland; was it not known in informed circles that England, together with France, had wanted to open hostilities against the Soviet Union because of Finland and that English military officials had continued to work on plans to turn Baku into a sea of flames through a major air raid? And the pacifist current in the country was very strong. It had drawn much strength from the investigations into the role of armaments interests in the United States’ entry into the First World War, and it could not be ruled out that it would now unite with the anti-Bolshevik current, which was particularly powerful among Americans of Italian and Polish descent . On July 18, 1941, the former ambassador to Moscow, Joseph Davies, wrote in a memorandum intended for Harry Hopkins that he was aware of the fact that in the United States “large sections of the population loathe the Soviets to a degree that they are pinning their hopes on Hitler’s victory in Russia.” Precisely for this reason, he said, Stalin must be supported with all one’s strength, since otherwise there would be a danger that he, being the “Oriental and cold realist” that he was, would make peace with Hitler. Fourteen days later, Roosevelt had Hopkins deliver the message to Stalin that he viewed Hitler as the “enemy of mankind” and was therefore determined to help the Soviet Union in its fight against Germany. In this there was undoubtedly more than an opportunistic effort to gain a breathing space and time, but rather a genuine tone of ideological conviction. On this basis, Roosevelt did everything he could to lead the United States into war against Hitler and also against Japan, and he did not shy away from the using blatant lies, such as claiming that he had secret maps and documents of the German government containing plans the division of South America and destruction of all religions, including Hinduism. It was not incomprehensible when Hitler saw the “Jewish press power” at work behind Roosevelt, but he did no succeed even with regard to America in suggesting that the undoubtedly existing and even strong anti-Bolshevism was expanding into antisemitism. And if he had been ready to revise his favorite opinions, he would probably have had to say to himself that a Germanic America certainly could not have tolerated the formation of a world empire in Europe through acts of war that completely changed the balance of power on earth . If Roosevelt could not follow a straight path and had to resort to lies, slander and violations of neutrality, the main reason was that he did not want to eliminate his domestic political opponents like Hitler had done. As many coincidences played a role in the decisions of the Anglo-Saxon powers, as much insincerity was contained in them and as many opposing forces existed, a deeper necessity ultimately emerged in all of this. Therefore, Hitler had to expect that by crossing the Bug river he would lead not only England but also the USA to the side of the Soviet Union. As far as England and America were concerned, therefore, there was no genuine alternative because almost no one in England and America believed and could believe that the Soviet Union would be able to resist Germany on its own for more than a few months.
The situation was different with the last of the five world powers, Japan. Since 1937 it was linked to Germany through the Anti-Comintern Pact and since 1940 through the Tripartite Pact. Nothing could have been more obvious than for Germany to have expressed the expectation that Japan would attack the Soviet Union in the east and thus form a second front that would have considerably increased Germany’s chances of victory. But then one had to make the assumption that there was just one chance. Hitler, however, was confident of victory and did not want to allow any equal power to share in his greatest and most important success. It was he himself who encouraged Foreign Minister Matsuoka in April 1941 to conclude a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union and to look southward to the future “Greater East Asian Prosperity Sphere.” Ribbentrop disagreed with Hitler on this point, and he repeatedly urged the confederates to intervene after June 22. There were strong forces in Japan, especially in the army, who thought along the same lines, although the memory of heavy defeats in the 1939 fighting on the border between Outer Mongolia and Manchukuo was a warning sign. It is highly likely that if the Soviet Union had had to fight this two-front war, it would have collapsed before the onset of winter and before the arrival of significant arms shipments from the United States and England. But Hitler did not express himself in clear terms, and the Japanese Navy prevailed with its plan to make one last attempt at negotiations with the United States and then, if necessary, to break the stranglehold of American economic sanctions by reaching the Dutch East Indies and attacking the American fleet.
So Hitler was not completely right when he said to some of his generals on February 3, 1941: “When Barbarossa rises, the world will hold its breath and remain silent.” Although the world indeed watched the events breathlessly, because it immediately had the feeling that the fate of the earth was being played for, it remained so silent because the three great powers, on whose decisions the outcome had to depend, immediately made or prepared decisions of the most serious nature. For six months however, Germany and the Soviet Union were apparently alone in the world, and the question was whether the Soviet Union would still exist before the beginning of winter.
The events on the battlefields bore an unmistakable resemblance to those in Poland in September 1939, and yet a very different kind of necessity emerged in them. In Poland, the army of the National Socialist industrial state had triumphed over the army of the nationalist agrarian state, and apparently with a high degree of necessity. On the plains of Belarus and Ukraine, an army that stood in the tradition of the World War armies fought with an army that had been created against that tradition. The self-confidence of the Red Army was based on the fact that it had once defeated its opponents as a revolutionary force and that it was now commanded by a corps of commanders, a significant number of whom had already fought in the Civil War, such as Marshals Voroshilov and Budyonny. The German army, on the other hand, was at its core still the army of the German Empire, despite all the upheavals and changes. And now it became clear that Hitler had done well, within the scope of his objectives, to choose General Blomberg over the Chief of Staff of the SA Röhm. The element of surprise explained a lot, and the popular sympathy for the incoming German troops explained a lot, but obviously the German Wehrmacht was better trained and better led. Army Group North reached Riga on July 2 and continued its advance on Leningrad, whereupon the Finns also advanced from the north. After the encirclement battle of Bialystok and Minsk, Army Group Center defeated Marshal Timoshenko’s armies near Smolensk and captured the city, the key of Russia, July 16; Army Group South, supported by Romanian troops behind the Prut river and then towards Odessa, penetrated deep into Ukraine and set its sights on Kiev as its next target. The Chief of General Staff Halder thought the war had been won at the beginning of July, but then it became clear that the resistance in many places was tougher than anyone had expected and that the Soviet side was constantly throwing new troops and tanks into the fight, even though by early August the number of Soviet prisoners of war was not far from one million and more than 10,000 tanks had been destroyed. Above all, it had proven that the most modern and powerful Soviet tank types, especially the “T-34” and the “KV,” were qualitatively superior to the German tanks. Although there were only about 1,000 of them on the entire front, quite a few of the 3,500 German tanks had been lost, and German armaments production was not able to deliver more than 200 replacements per month. Nevertheless, the will and confidence of the German soldiers for victory was unbroken, and Army Group Center, despite all the difficulties and losses, confidently expected to be able to resume their advance on the basis of this momentum and to give the campaign its decisive crowning achievement by capturing Moscow within a few weeks. But Hitler, who had so often been a psychologist, now turned out to be an economist, who wanted above all to cut off the oil of the Caucasus from the Russians. In addition, he estimated the danger posed by the Soviet troops still in Kiev as very high, and so he kept the Army Group Center to remain on the spot and diverted forces from it for the great encirclement battle in the Dnieper arc, which was extremely successful and once again brought several hundred thousand Soviet soldiers into German captivity. It was not until the beginning of October that Army Group Center received the order to attack again, and now it needed its last forces to slowly advance towards Moscow. In the double battle of Vyazma and Bryansk it prevailed against strong enemy forces and the advance guards came within a few kilometers of Moscow. From October 16 to 18, panic and almost anarchy reigned in the Soviet capital: party members tore up party books, soldiers threw away rifles, shops were looted, the government left the city, and if the relevant reports are correct, Stalin also drove out on his special train, only to revise his decision at the last moment and return to the Kremlin. The new commander-in-chief, General Zhukov, announced martial law on the 19th, fresh troops from Siberia were on the way, for reassuring news about Japan’s attitude had arrived from Tokyo from the German ambassador’s confidant, the long-standing party member and agent Richard Sorge, and then the heavy autumn rains began, turning the path and footbridge into an impenetrable morass. For a few days, a tolerable frost made the German troops able to move again, but then the severest winter broke in unusually early, and the Germans no longer only had soldiers and bad roads as enemies, but an overwhelming and unaccustomed force of nature that froze the oil in the engines of the tanks to and sometimes even the rifles in the hands of the infantrymen. In London and Washington, in Tokyo and Paris, people noted in disbelief that Moscow, the center of Soviet life and traffic, had, contrary to all expectations, not fallen into the hands of the enemy and that Hitler might now suffer Napoleon’s fate in the icy deserts of Russia.
This brings up the first major alternative, which was unfavorable to Hitler. If the German armies began to flood back, there might be no stopping them, as second line positions were not prepared and safe winter quarters only existed near the German border. The Soviet Army had fallen to its lowest number of personnel since the beginning of the war, 2.9 million men, and a large part of its troops consisted of older or very young, poorly trained soldiers. But the elite Siberian formations might have been able to swept them along, and it cannot be ruled out that a winter war of movement in an east-west direction would have ended in a German catastrophe, and that Russian divisions would have reached Paris and the Channel coast as in 1814. It was Hitler, and to all appearances he alone, who, after assuming personal command of the army on December 19, through extraordinary willpower and ruthless holdout orders, held the front essentially where it stood, although terrain had to be abandoned especially in the middle section, and Rostov, which had just been conquered, was lost again on the southern front. Field Marshals von Bock and von Rundstedt were replaced, Colonel General Hoepner, who had given the order to withdraw to his tank units in front of Moscow, was dismissed from the Wehrmacht, and General von Sponeck, who had failed in the Crimea, was sentenced to death, but to pardoned to prison. (Stalin had more than half of the air force generals, two colonel generals and an entire army staff shot in July.) Thus, news of victory now came out of Moscow, but no news of a German catastrophe. Nevertheless, the events represented the first major loss of confidence among the German population for Hitler. The fact that a collection of warm winter clothing for the front was carried out at great expense made even the most devout of his followers suspect that Hitler was perhaps the most successful of all generals, but certainly not the greatest, since he was obviously subject to extremely serious errors in judgment. Almost from month to month the people had hoped for a victorious end to the war and thus for peace, and the momentum that had led the German armies to just before Moscow was fueled to a large extent by the expectation that they would be back at home around Christmas. But now no one could be mistaken that the era of lightning campaigns and victories had come to an end and that a long and hard war lay ahead.
Nevertheless, the winter of 1941/42 was full of sensational reports of victories, but these were no longer German victories, but rather Japanese victories. On December 6, the Japanese attacked and largely destroyed the Pacific squadron of the American fleet in Pearl Harbor. This opened the way to Southeast Asia, and a few weeks later Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore were conquered. But in doing so they had given Roosevelt to entry into the war he had long desired and prepared for, and they presented Hitler with the last, fundamental decision of his life. As at the time of Mussolini’s attack against Greece, he was confronted with an independent decision by an ally, for the Japanese had not coordinated their attack with him. To be sure, he had encouraged them to do so several times, but on the other hand he would have had much reason to be angry that the Japanese not only did not enter the war against the Soviet Union, but also did not even prevent the delivery of American military equipment to Vladivostok. The wording of the Tripartite Pact did not oblige him to join in an act of aggression. If he had held back, Roosevelt would have been greatly embarrassed. Roosevelt was primarily concerned with the war against Germany, but public opinion (this time not identical to the published opinion of the major press) would have forced him to turn all war efforts against the perpetrators of the “nefarious attack.” But Hitler obviously could not bear the thought that no news of victory would appear in the press for a whole hard winter, and he probably also had a desire to finally settle accounts with Roosevelt after so long putting up with highly unneutral actions. So on December 11 he declared war on the USA and, in a passionate speech in the Reichstag, attacked Roosevelt as the “chief culprit” in this war, who had torpedoed the possible understanding between Germany and Poland with “diabolical unscrupulousness” and who had committed a number of “most serious crimes contrary to international law” and who—as a descendant of plutocrats and from the outset a hater of his antagonist, who was born in poverty—under the influence of his “Jewish followers” directed the problems of his “socially backward state” outwards and against “socialist Germany.” But if it satisfied Hitler to be able to confront “the Jew” in both democratic and Bolshevik forms, he should have admitted to himself that he was making on a larger scale the same serious mistake that he had made in 1939, namely, to go to war against a power whose help or at least neutrality he needed if he wanted to defeat Bolshevism. Now he was at war against a world empire and the two great continental powers, all of which had the prospect of becoming world powers of a higher order, superpowers. The production figures that Roosevelt gave as targets at the beginning of 1942 for 1942 and 1943 were so extraordinary that Germany simply had to be swept away by material superiority. Hitler began the campaign against the Soviet Union with 3,500 tanks and 2,000 aircraft, and by 1942 the Americans wanted to build 45,000 tanks and 60,000 aircraft. If only a one-twentieth of this found its way to the Soviet Union, Stalin would have the material superiority that he could no longer gain on his own after the heavy losses in the first year of the war, and from the aircraft carrier England, German industry would be crushed by the incessant attacks of many thousands of heavy bombers.
December 1941 is therefore often referred to as the month of the turning point of the war. It is said that now that Germany was at war with the Soviet Union, the United States and the British Empire, material resources were so unequally distributed that it was only a matter of time before Germany would collapse. This calculation, however, ignores the fact that the Soviet Union had lost a considerable part of its industry and around 70 million inhabitants and that the resources first had to be brought to the battlefields. Furthermore, Germany was the supreme power of Europe, and Hitler had emphasized the idea of a European community of culture and interests in his speech. Japan was, as it would only prove irrefutably decades after the war, not only a military but also an industrial world power, and it occupied almost all of Southeast Asia. If Germany and Japan managed to make full use of all these resources, they would not be significantly inferior in material terms to the three opponents. But it was doubtful whether they would be successful. Factors came into play here that cannot be derived from the mere calculation of raw materials and industrial potential for the purpose of accounting for decisive battles of states and that resulted above all from the difference between conquered areas and areas owned or possessed from time immemorial. But after Hitler had succeeded in holding the front in Russia, he did not even have to give up the real aim of his struggle in 1942, insofar as it was a political struggle for power and decision: the achievement of the position of a superpower for Germany instead of the Soviet Union.
He could still hope to completely crush the Soviet Union. When the offensive was resumed in May and a counterattack by Timoshenko’s Army Group on Kharkov and the Ukraine was repulsed, the German troops advanced, it seemed, inexorably towards the Volga and the Caucasus. The tone of Stalin’s orders makes it clear how critical the situation was for him: they were similar to Hitler’s orders from the previous winter. Stalingrad seemed to be all but conquered in early November, and the German flag flew on the highest peak in the Caucasus, Elbrus. The Maikop oil region, although damaged, was in German hands; if Grozny, only 150 kilometers away, was reached and the Volga remained closed to transport, Baku would not even need to be conquered or destroyed from the air, and the Soviet Union definitely would have lost the war.
The island of England had become unassailable, but this did not apply to the British Empire and its lines of communication. German tank troops under General Rommel came to the aid of the Italians in North Africa, and at the end of June the borders of Egypt were crossed. There, all sections of the population were excitedly awaiting the advance to Alexandria and Cairo, including Gamal Abd el-Nasser, then a member of an organization that was described as fascist. East of Egypt, the Arabs of Palestine were facing the decisive hour, and their spokesman, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was in direct contact with Hitler. A call from Hitler might have driven the entire Arab world to revolt against the English, but Hitler was either too cautious or he still loved the English empire too much. Nor did he give any emphatic support to the Indian Subhas Chandra Bose, who seemed to be becoming the leader of the emancipation struggle against the British instead of Nehru.
England itself was still a besieged island struggling for its very existence. In May 1942, German submarines and aircraft sank 170 ships of almost a million gross registered tons, in July they almost completely destroyed an Anglo-American convoy of 38 merchant ships and numerous warships in the Arctic Ocean, and in August three aircraft carriers were destroyed or badly damaged in the Mediterranean along with many merchant ships.
At the end of September, Hitler could actually believe that the war would be won if his tanks advanced to Grozny, if Rommel entered Cairo and if three dozen new submarines were put into service. But as in the previous year, the great victories were achieved using the last reserves. At the decisive moment, the scales tipped in favor of the Allies because they had the deep armaments industry that German experts like General Thomas had lamented as early as 1939.
At the end of October, the British counterattacked in Egypt and broke through the El Alamein position, the success of the submarines visibly diminished because the British and Americans developed better means of defense, and Soviet troops shattered the from of the Romanian 3rd Army that was supposed to protect Stalingrad. Once again, as in the previous year, a major goal had to be achieved with the last effort immediately before the onset of winter, and this time not only was some terrain lost, but an entire army under the leadership of a field marshal surrendered in Stalingrad on January 31, 1943. Far larger numbers of soldiers had been taken prisoner by the Germans the previous year, but this surrender was perceived throughout the world as a symbolic act, an act that marked the turning point of the war. The fact that the British and Americans had landed in North Africa in November was a welcome accompaniment; the fact that Roosevelt was able to demand Germany’s “unconditional surrender” in Casablanca in January 1943 highlighted the change in the situation; and the surrender of the German and Italian troops in the Tunis bridgehead in May 1943 was viewed by the Allies as nothing more than an afterthought. It was now beyond doubt that Hitler could no longer win the war.
And yet it would be unfounded to claim that he had already completely lost it. Stalin, for his part, had already announced at the beginning of 1942 that the day was “not far off” when the red flags would again fly victoriously over the liberated Soviet fatherland, and in the summer of 1943 Hitler was still able to fight the biggest tank battle of the entire war in the middle of Russia, near Kursk, in which the newest German types, the “Tiger” and above all the “Panther,” proved to be technically superior. Although “Operation Citadel” had to be aborted without success, the Western Allies were apparently still a long way from establishing the promised “Second Front” in France, and it was certainly foreseeable that large parts of the Soviet Union would be under German rule. Thus, strange things happened in the fall of 1943. While in Soviet captivity, German soldiers and officers, together with German communists, formed the “National Committee for Free Germany” or the “League of German Officers,” and the publications that were now dropped from airplanes over the German positions were in black, white, and red. Soviet generals acquainted their German partners with ideas from the state leadership that amounted to the coexistence of a Germany, preserved within the borders of 1939, and the restored Soviet Union. At the same time, Moscow put out diplomatic feelers that seemed to have the aim of concluding a separate peace. There are certainly good arguments that both events were clever tactics on the part of Stalin, who wanted to put pressure on his allies. Hitler, for his part, rejected the attempts to contact him. But if one considers the Hitler-Stalin pact and its pre- and post-history, then it is by no means unlikely that in the fall of 1943, for purely political reasons, Stalin preferred to conclude the war that placed the Soviet Union on the continent alongside a half-strong Germany governed by national forces rather than an extremely strong America. Only when Roosevelt and Churchill, at the Tehran Conference in November/December 1943, made far greater concessions to him at the expense of Poland and Germany than Field Marshal Paulus or General von Seydlitz could ever have made, does Stalin seem to have abandoned his favorite idea of the Soviet-German superpower in which he would now have played the role of senior partner, in contrast to what he had envisioned in the summer of 1941. In this respect, only Tehran was the last and final turn of the war.
Nevertheless, Germany could still have certain hopes for 1944. Of course, Hitler could only link them to the development of miracle weapons for himself and his regime. In fact, the foundation for all later development of rocket technology was laid in Germany, and the first jet aircraft were a most promising invention. But it was no coincidence that leading German physicists had complained that German physics had fallen behind American physics. Hitler, after all, had not exactly given scientists or intellectuals any preferential treatment, and the likelihood was high from the start that the more important miracle weapons would be manufactured in the United States. But in the circles of the German resistance, plans for a Westward orientation or an Eastward orientation of a Germany preserved as a great power without Hitler were being considered, and even in the SS and in the party leadership there seemed to be men who who were gradually and cautiously approaching such thoughts. Within the overarching necessity of the Allied victory, there might still be room for final contingencies and alternatives. The most peculiar of all, however, presented itself when one realized that this war was by no means just a decisive battle between world powers over the future picture of the political map of the world, but was also an ideological war between the Bolshevik Soviet Union and National Socialist Germany, thus a civil war in which Russians would choose against “Russia,” Germans against “Germany,” Italians for Stalin, and the French, indeed, Arabs and Indians would tend to decide for Hitler. In this war, the Anglo-Saxon powers, in which, despite widespread and at least latent antisemitism, almost no one decided in favor for Hitler and against their own states, as the last bastions of liberal democracy, took a position that was not clearly defined from the outset.