The Attack Against the Soviet Union: Decisive Battle? —Liberation Campaign? — War of Extermination?
Chapter 5 Section 1
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This below is Chapter 5 Section 1:
Chapter V. The German-Soviet War 1941-1945
The Attack Against the Soviet Union: Decisive Battle? —Liberation Campaign? — War of Extermination?
On the morning of June 22, 1941, when the German Wehrmacht had already crossed the borders of the Soviet Union on a front from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea for an hour and a half, the German ambassador in Moscow presented Foreign Minister Molotov a statement which in its conclusions stated that the foreign policy of the Soviet Union had become increasingly hostile to Germany and that the Soviet government had broken the treaties concluded with the Reich by deploying its armed forces on the borders, ready to jump in order to stab Germany in the back in its struggle for existence. Therefore, the leader of the Wehrmacht had given the order to counter this threat with all available means of power. According to this announcement, Hitler understood the campaign against the Soviet Union as a pre-emptive war. Molotov, on the other hand, in his reply described this justification as an “empty pretext,” because only “special maneuvers” were taking place near the western border, which the Soviet government would have dispensed with if it had received a corresponding request from the Reich government. Therefore, in a historically unprecedented manner, Germany had broken the non-aggression and friendship pact that bound it to the Soviet Union. This sentence was obviously tantamount with the thesis that Germany had launched an unprovoked war of aggression. In fact, by this time a large part of the Soviet Air Force had already been destroyed. It was therefore only consistent that Molotov concluded his remarks with the words: “We didn’t deserve that.”
Thus, even in the first hours of the war, the two opposing theses stood sharply side by side and against each other in the official formulations: Germany was waging a pre-emptive war or a war of aggression; the Soviet Union was an intolerable threat or the unsuspecting victim of an invasion. To this day, the question has not been reliably decided, and each side was able to put forward considerable arguments immediately before the outbreak of the conflict and during the first weeks of the war. But doubts remained in one case as in the other.
It could hardly be denied that the Soviet Union had violated the letter and the spirit of the treaties when it demanded Bukovina from Romania and not only established bases in Lithuania but concentrated a significant number of divisions there. It was also difficult to reconcile with a friendship pact the fact that the Soviet Union had supported the coup in Belgrade and immediately concluded an agreement with the Simović government. In addition, the German troops had found documents in the Soviet Union’s Belgrade embassy which all too clearly revealed hostile intentions towards Germany. The strongest evidence, however, soon had to be a fact that had become obvious after the first 14 days of the war: the three army groups North, Center and South under Field Marshals von Leeb, von Bock and von Rundstedt had a total of around 3,500 tanks, and already in the encirclement battles of Bialystok and Minsk, Army Group Center alone had destroyed or captured around 6,000 enemy tanks. Thus, there were far more tanks massed in the protruding arch of Bialystok than the entire German Eastern Army, and the Soviet Major General Pyotr Grigorenko, admittedly a dissident, was certainly right when he wrote that such a formation is only justified if it is intended for a surprise offensive. However, he saw this as a serious mistake on Stalin’s part, since in reality he did not have such an intention to attack. In any case, it is unlikely that there was any sense of imminent threat on the German side. For example, Major General Marcks, who drew up the first operational draft on August 5, 1940, based it on the idea that “the Russians will not do us the kindness of an attack,” and Hitler himself claimed even as late as January 1941 that Stalin was a clever man and that he would not act openly against Germany, but would simply cause increasing difficulties. Furthermore, all the planning and preliminary discussions concerning “Barbarossa” testify to an extremely confident sense of strength among almost everyone involved, who believed they could “overthrow Russia in a quick campaign,” and even though Hitler warned several times against underestimating the enemy, he occasionally made a statement such as that the Red Army was nothing more than a joke. Pre-emptive warfare cannot be based on objective facts alone; its concept indispensably includes a feeling of immediate threat on the part of the aggressor. But a war of aggression, just because it is not a pre-emptive war, is not necessarily aggression as such. It can be an objectively justified and unavoidable decisive struggle. Just a few weeks later, on September 1, 1941, in one of his “fireside chats,” Roosevelt compared the “Nazi submarines and pirate ships” to rattlesnakes that you had to smash before they rushed at you, thus justifying the order to shoot he had given to the American warships. But the German submarines were carrying out the blockade of a country with which Germany was at war, and the USA was a neutral country not involved in a war anywhere. Germany’s situation, however, was completely different. There was also good reason to remember statements such as those made by the head of the Central Political Administration of the Red Army, L. S. Mechlis, at the 17th Party Congress in March 1939: in the now foreseeable “second imperialist war” the USSR would be carry its military operations into the enemy’s territory and multiply the number of Soviet republics. Announcements like these were not uncommon in literature and life and were transmitted to the German government in numerous reports. They had to be regarded as mental acts of war, and one could even ask whether a completely isolated and highly armed country did not pose a dangerous threat to its neighbors just by existing this way.
It seems that Stalin himself was imbued with the feeling that a decision had to be made now and that Germany could no longer accept that the Soviet Union’s attitude would keep it in a state of inability to act vis-à-vis England. The greater probability, however, suggests that he did not believe that this decision necessarily had to be made through a war between Germany and the Soviet Union. His behavior during the last few months before June 22 has continually posed a mystery and given rise to a number of attempts at explanation. Apparently he did not take seriously the warnings that came to him from many quarters and pursued a policy of appeasement towards Germany. This included the much-described scene at the Moscow train station upon the departure of Japanese Foreign Minister Matsuoka in April, when he embraced the German military attaché Colonel Krebs with the words: “We will be friends with you—whatever may come,” but also that the increased supplies of raw materials should not be forgotten either, and at least the German ambassador von der Schulenburg interpreted Stalin’s assumption of the leadership of the government on May 6, 1941 in the sense that he was determined to work with all his might to improve relations with Germany. The fact that Stalin broke off relations with the governments-in-exile of Yugoslavia, Belgium and Holland fit this picture well. Although the leadership of the Soviet Union was by no means in a deep sleep during the night of June 21-22, as Georgy Zhukov’s memoirs clearly show, the mass of troops were undoubtedly surprised by the German attack, as was a large part of the air force was without camouflage on the airfields near the border. Since the revelations that Khrushchev made in his secret speech, Stalin’s conduct has often been sharply criticized in Soviet literature. However, three reasonable explanations suggest themselves.
In Tehran, Stalin said to Churchill: “I would have liked another six months.” From this a certain confirmation of the German pre-emptive war thesis could be derived, but the fact of the surprise would remain unexplained.
It could be that Stalin wanted to appear as the invaded and the unsuspecting victim of a nefarious attack because only under this condition could he expect unconditional assistance from Great Britain and the USA. He would then have foreseen the actual course of the war very precisely and consciously sought an alliance with the Anglo-Saxon powers. What speaks against this, however, is the fact that he thus ended up in a war against Germany, which would be a single-front battle for at least a few months and which put the Anglo-Saxon powers in the situation that he himself wanted to occupy, namely in the situation of the unweakened third party, which would ultimately gain the upper hand over the two exhausted antagonists. And it seems that, extremely disturbed by Rudolf Hess’s flight to England in May, he had little doubt that the main power of capitalism would ultimately throw its weight in favor of the capitalist-fascist military state against the socialist sixth of the world.
The third and most likely possibility may be derived from the striking frequency of the word “negotiations” in these weeks. The famous TASS denial of June 14 stated that Germany had not made any demands on the Soviet Union or proposed a new, narrower agreement to it, and as a result, negotiations on this matter could not have taken place. This sounds like an urgent call to enter into such negotiations, and the impression is reinforced when one considers that Molotov and Stalin later emphasized that Germany had invaded the Soviet Union without initially proposing negotiations. It appears that Stalin expected to receive an ultimate offer of negotiation from the German side until the last moment, and that he was inclined to accept it. Presumably during Molotov’s visit to Berlin, he had, using the widespread method, allowed Molotov to put forward maximum demands and was now prepared to abandon them, i.e. to join the planned continental bloc while foregoing European demands, to increase deliveries and, if necessary, even to withdraw the Red Army from the border areas. This version is supported by the fact that, according to Khrushchev’s report, when the war broke out Stalin was initially seized by despair and exclaimed: “We have lost everything that Lenin created,” and that, according to his daughter’s story, he still used say full of deep regret several years later: “Together with the Germans we would have been invincible.” In fact, he had to choose this path if he wanted to see his basic foreign policy ideas realized: to keep the powers of capitalism at war with each other and ultimately to be the laughing third party. No sacrifice was too heavy for this, and he might even have—as contemporaries speculated—leased the Ukraine to the Germans for direct exploitation, because there is no doubt that he assessed the enormous productive power of the USA much more correctly than Hitler did, and that he was convinced that Germany would ultimately lose the war against the Anglo-Saxon naval powers after having previously inflicted enormous losses on them. If, on the other hand, he crushed Germany in alliance with America and took the brunt of the burden, then he could be defeated, and the probability of defeat was all too great according to his own assumptions.
In any case, there are good reasons to believe that Stalin was as convinced as Hitler that a decision had to be made, but that he did not believe that it would now take the form of a war between Germany and the Soviet Union. Then Hitler and Germany were not responsible for the situation in which a decision was necessary—Stalin had contributed to this as much as Hitler—but they were the cause of the decision being made by a German-Soviet war.
But if this path was taken, then another alternative required a clear answer. The war against France had ended with a military victory, and France had given itself a new government willing to cooperate with Germany. The new government had initiated a change of system and installed an authoritarian regime under the most respected man in the country, Marshal Pétain. The fact that Alsace-Lorraine would be lost again was acceptable to this government, but there was no fear of further weakening—at least initially. In any case, a military victory over the Soviet Union would have resulted in a new government and a new system, and a Russian Pétain would have agreed to cooperate with Germany and certainly also made the concession that Soviet sham-federalism would have been replaced by genuine federalism. In the midst of and through the struggles between states, the European civil war would have proved to be the ultimately determining reality. But from a “national German” perspective, there was a tremendous difference compared to France: this new Russia would only have been militarily weaker than Germany, but still stronger in terms of population and raw material wealth. Unless one wanted to be guided by trust in one’s partner and confidence in one’s own abilities, one had to envisage a more thorough weakening of Russia. This was precisely the intention of Alfred Rosenberg, who was appointed “Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories” by Hitler in July. As early as April 2, he developed a plan in a memorandum to break up the existing Greater Russia into its ethnic parts and “to keep in check” a future “Muscovy” by a ring of independent states, namely Ukraine, Belarus, the Don region and the Caucasian region. Just as in 1919 the Western powers had formed a cordon sanitaire around Soviet Russia from states that had belonged in whole or in part to the Tsarist Empire, and just as the same victorious powers had not tolerated the emergence of a Greater Germany, but had surrounded Prussian Germany with hostile states, so Alfred Rosenberg now sought a Versailles solution for a core area of Germany’s only rival in Europe that had to be held down. Viewed abstractly, this was a political way of thinking that is characteristic of decisive battles, and it deserves as little or as much moral censure as the actions of the Allied powers in 1919. But from the outset it placed itself in a difficult relationship with one another another aspect of the complex problem, and this fact came out most clearly when Rosenberg said in a speech on June 20, 1941: “Today we are not carrying out a ‘crusade’ against Bolshevism, just for the sake of saving the ‘poor Russians’ from this Bolshevism for all time, but to pursue German world politics and secure the German Reich… To exchange Stalin for a new tsar or even to install a nationalist leader in this area, that would mobilize all energies against us all the more.” In place of this previously common idea of a unified Russia, there was now a completely different conception of the Eastern question. If the war was a decisive struggle in this sense, then it could not even induce the disenfranchised former people and dispossessed kulaks of Russia or their children to take the German side. [translator: former people/byvshiye lyudi is a phrase popularized by Maxim Gorky, meaning loss of high social status. After the bolshevik revolution it applied to the imperial aristocracy, military, bureaucracy, clergy etc.]
Nevertheless, there was no doubt that this war was also understood by its authors as a resumption of the civil war and that all the emotions that had once prevailed in Russia and Germany came to life anew. They may have been toned down to routine statements, for example when the Foreign Office declared in its note of June 21 that it was the task of the German people to “save the entire cultural world from the deadly dangers of Bolshevism” or when the “German diplomatic-political information” on June 27 claimed that Germany’s fight against Moscow would become Europe’s crusade against Bolshevism, and that it was a matter of preserving and restoring the great basic principles of all human and national coexistence, namely the restoration of the dignity and freedom of the human personality, the family, private property, freedom of religious belief and the cultural independence of peoples and ethnic groups throughout Europe. In such phrases, the spirit of the national uprising of 1933 came up once again, as it were, but Alfred Rosenberg expressed the experiences, the bitterness and the hatred of the early post-war period much more directly when he wrote in his General Instructions for the Reich Commissioners in the Occupied Eastern Territories on May 8 the sentence that the Germans of Eastern Europe, who had achieved tremendous feats over many centuries, had their entire property taken away without compensation and that hundreds of thousands were deported or starved to death. However, Adolf Hitler had already descended most deeply into the emotions of the civil war on March 30, 1941, in a speech to the generals. Bolshevism, he said, is anti-social criminality and communism is a tremendous danger for the future. “We must break away from the standpoint of soldierly comradeship. The communist is not a comrade before and not a comrade after… The struggle must be waged against the poison of decomposition… Commissars and the GPU-people are criminals and must be treated as such.” During the civil war, no one actually thought of seeing in the Red or the White enemy a comrade who needed to be treated chivalrously. On the Soviet side too, the memory of the White atrocities had always been kept alive, and even in the Finnish War it had been hardly mere propaganda when the Red Army men were told that they would be tortured to death if they fell into the hands of the “White Finnish butchers.” Ataman Kaledin had also considered the Bolsheviks to be “anti-social criminals” because they appealed to the most primitive instincts with the slogan ‘Steal what was stolen,” and the “decomposition” had prevented General Kornilov from entering the capital. Hitler rarely made direct reference to the events of the civil war, and he displayed an unmistakable dislike for the Russian émigrés who had failed in his eyes,. But there is no doubt that the most important events were very present for him, and this was also expressed in random asides, such as (at a later date) that it had been Ukrainians who had murdered the best friend of the Ukrainian people, Field Marshal Eichhorn in Kiev in 1918. Thus, when he spoke of a battle of annihilation, he was talking about the annihilation of an ideology and its champions, and such an intention had been self-evident to all participants in the civil war. The “commissioner order” must also be seen in the same context, which was certainly an order “inhumane” and “contrary to international law,” but which proceeded from a premise that had also been a prerequisite for both parties to the civil war: that the enemy would certainly commit criminal acts and actions contrary to international law. Therefore, these “Guidelines” of June 8 stated: “In the fight against Bolshevism, the enemy is not to be expected to behave in accordance with the principles of humanity or international law. In particular, hateful, cruel and inhumane treatment of our prisoners is to be expected from political commissars of all kinds as the actual bearers of the resistance.” Therefore, political commissars could not be recognized as soldiers and they were to be “finished off after separation has been carried out.”
Insofar as this order is to be seen in the context of the worldview war, it was not “criminal” but consistent. The crime lies much deeper, namely in unleashing such a war without any compelling reason. In this respect, the question of pre-emptive war or the unavoidable decisive battle must come up again. But the order was in any case a foolish order, because the German leadership had not realized that the Soviet government had in the meantime moved one step beyond the realities and emotions of the civil war. Indeed, it considered all members of the Red Army who were captured alive to be deserters, whose family members were held collectively responsible for this act of cowardice and treason. The captured commissars were therefore criminals worthy of death in the eyes of their own government, and Hitler made himself Stalin’s stooge when he had them “finished off.” In fact, the order was largely disobeyed and rescinded in 1942, and later former political commissars were among Vlasov’s closest associates.
But if the war against the Soviet Union rested on a foundation of emotions that had already been the emotions of the Russian Civil War and the struggle between communists and National Socialists in the Weimar Republic, then it could not be a mere campaign of revenge, nor just a “defensive struggle of the West,” although the Commissioner Order on the one hand and the announcements of the Foreign Office on the other may suggest such interpretations. Regardless of the will of its author, the war had to be a war of liberation and be perceived as such by large parts of the population, for the party leadership’s thesis about the complete moral and political unity of the Soviet people would have been correct precisely because of the collectivization, the great purge and deportations from eastern Poland and the Baltic countries. Although quite a number of units of the Red Army defended themselves with the greatest bravery, indeed with a fanaticism that was deeply alienating to the Germans and which often drove the last defenders of a position to commit joint suicide, hundreds of thousands allowed themselves to be taken prisoners in the first weeks of the war, the incoming German troops were greeted with cheers in all towns and villages in Lithuania and Latvia, in the Ukraine they were welcomed with salt and bread in countless places, and even before they entered Lemberg, a provisional state authority had been formed there that was obviously ready for full cooperation with Germany. Here too, liberation and revenge were closely linked. Thus, NKVD troops in Lemberg and other places had horrifically murdered almost all the inmates of the prisons as well as some German airmen who had fallen into their hands, and the Ukrainian population had taken an equally terrible revenge on those whom they believed to be the originators, so that a new era of Jewish pogroms seemed to herald itself. But it was reasonable could expect that the German Wehrmacht would put an end to such spontaneous actions and that liberation would be a more comprehensive reality than revenge. In any case, this was the tone of the Wehrmacht propaganda, which was directed by the “WPr” department in the Wehrmacht High Command and which in millions of leaflets and posters presented Adolf Hitler as the liberator of the hitherto oppressed.
The fertility of the ground on which this propaganda fell, however, was demonstrated by no one more clearly than by Stalin. On July 3, he gave a radio speech for the second time in his life, and for the first time he addressed his listeners as “brothers and sisters” and “my friends.” Of course, he first denounced the Germans’ “breaking of word” and “invasion” and asserted that the enemy’s best divisions and the best units of his air force had already been crushed. For him, Germany was now “fascist” again, and he called Hitler and Ribbentrop “monsters and cannibals.” He left no doubt, however, that a “serious danger had loomed over the homeland.” He also drew on the emotions and concepts of the civil war when he claimed that the enemy’s goal was to restore the power of the landowners, to restore tsarism, to deprive the free peoples of the Soviet Union of their statehood and to make them “slaves of the German princes and barons.” The term “Patriotic People’s War” could also be traced back to a phrase by Lenin. What was new was that Stalin remembered with a “feeling of gratitude” Churchill’s historic speech on June 22 and the corresponding declaration by the United States government, which had announced its help to the Soviet people after Hitler had exposed himself “in the eyes of the whole world as a bloodthirsty aggressor.” But the most striking thing was that he spoke with the strongest emphasis of the “defeatists and cowards, the panic-mongers and deserters” and a second time of the “disorganizers of the rear, the deserters, panic-mongers, rumor-spreaders, spies and wreckers” and called for the support of the “military police battalions.” There could be little doubt that he placed his trust not in the unquestioning loyalty of the entire Soviet people, but in the method which he later described to Churchill when he said that in the Soviet Union everyone was a hero, because everyone knew that he could survive if he attacked the enemy, but that he must die if he retreated. After all, he counted on so much reliable support that he announced the scorched earth tactics and called for the “ignition of partisan warfare.”
But Adolf Hitler seems not to have noticed at all that in this speech Stalin was making it clear how fragile the ground on which he stood was and how exceedingly numerous were the people who could not believe his claim that he had led them to “free labor and prosperity.” Rather, in a conversation with the Japanese ambassador Oshima on July 15, Hitler merely referred to the extermination order and drew the conclusion that millions would have to die because of Stalin’s extermination orders because Germany could provide neither coal nor food to the Russian population. Eight days later, he had Keitel expressly announce that the troops had to spread the kind of terror that alone was capable of depriving “the population” of any desire for resistance. If one remembers that Hitler the day before had told the Croatian Marshal Kwaternik that today’s Russian people apparently consisted of 70-80% Mongolians, then it becomes quite clear that he was willing not to content himself with the destruction of a worldview , but that he sought the destruction of the biological substance of the “Eastern peoples” because he wanted to take possession of their land as a living space for German settlers and as a security zone for future wars—as he had already postulated in his early speeches and in “Mein Kampf.” had. In a conversation with Rosenberg, Lammers, Keitel, Göring and Bormann on July 16, he spoke of in this sense of the “giant cake” that had to be cut up handily in order to “firstly master it, secondly manage it and thirdly exploit it.” To be sure, he did not rule out “propaganda” — “that we were the bringers of freedom.” But how could a man and a leadership make credible statements to the Soviet population, who intended to clear Crimea of all foreigners and to settle it with Germans, to incorporate Galicia, the entire Baltic region and even the Volga colony into the Reich, to raze Leningrad and Moscow to the ground and turn the area around Baku into a German military colony? How could even the most German-friendly among the émigrés and the most determined Stalin-haters in the Red Army in good conscience made themselves available to this man who “never” wanted to allow "anyone other than the German to bear arms"?
There could be no doubt at all: the man who had made Germany powerful enough to wage a decisive battle for supremacy in Europe and who shared all the anti-communist emotions of the post-war period nevertheless wanted above all to wage a war of extermination and enslavement against the Slavic peoples, and he had in mind an even more radical war of extermination against the Jews as Jews, as he had already indicated in his speech on January 30, 1939.
This was the beginning of the most astonishing reversal of all. Stalin had had far more Russians and Ukrainians and Jews killed than Hitler had taken the lives of Germans or, after September 1939, even Jews and Poles, and yet he now had to become the personification of the self-assertion and will to survive of all the peoples of the Soviet Union, if Hitler wanted to weaken or even destroy the biological substance of Russians, Ukrainians and Jews; although Hitler had devastated the intellectual and political life of the Germans, he had nevertheless led them to the maximum level of power, and now he would become the author of his nation’s self-destruction if other powers intervened in the upcoming decision and if Stalin was guided by his example.
Thus the three aspects of the German-Soviet war cannot be separated from one another, and in Hitler they were even united in such a way that, out of anti-Bolshevik emotion, he only wanted to recognize the physical destruction or definitive weakening of the Asiatics united in the Soviet Union as a genuine decision. But these are not mere abstractions, but rather tendencies and possibilities which were multiplicious in themselves and that could enter into a number of combinations. Even Adolf Hitler was not so powerful that his basic ideas and intentions had to prevail under all circumstances. It therefore makes sense to focus on the course of the war in its main events in such a way that one of the aspects is highlighted at a time. As a final step before the final consideration, we must then ask in what way the eventual victory of the Bolshevik Soviet Union and the defeat of National Socialist Germany are to be most appropriately characterized.