Ostkrieg (2 page)

For decades after the end of World War II, much of our understanding of the German-Soviet war came from the German perspective, for the very good reason that only German documents and archives were readily available. Equivalent Soviet sources were either unavailable, marred by ideology, or limited in their circulation because of language problems. Moreover, the various histories of the Ostfront, or eastern front, that emerged were skewed in other ways as well. Many of the earliest accounts were written by German generals who did not have access to original records but wrote from their own diaries or memories, the latter being, of course, both unreliable and easily distorted over time. In addition, German officers writing either on their own or under the auspices of the U.S. Army's historical project rather consciously sought to create an image of the Wehrmacht as professionally competent, technically proficient, and, above all, “clean.” In this version of history, which largely confined itself to accounts of battles and military events, not only had the army suffered from Hitler's megalomania, constant interference, and poor strategic and operational judgments, but its leaders had neither known of nor condoned the massive crimes committed against the Soviet civilian population, especially the Jews. In the narrative the generals created after the fact, the military operations and the massive crimes perpetrated by German forces on the eastern front existed in two separate and parallel spheres, with little interaction between the two. This, of course, was later shown to be a self-serving cover-up, but for a variety of reasons—not least the growing impact of the Cold War—this initial version of events stuck in the Western mind. Thus, standard narratives of the Ostkrieg, the war in the east, available in English primarily focused very narrowly on the sweep of military events and ignored the intersection of the war and Hitler's overtly ideological, racial, and economic plans for the conquered eastern territories.

Two things have combined to change this view, at least among professional historians. The first was the collapse of the Soviet Union some
twenty years ago, which gave historians unprecedented access to formerly unavailable archival material. As a result, over the past fifteen years there have been, and continue to be, a number of excellent new accounts in English of the eastern war from the Soviet perspective, ranging from the detailed studies of David Glantz to the narrative overview of Richard Overy to the integrative analysis of Evan Mawdsley. All these have deepened and enriched our understanding of the conflict by providing the badly needed Russian context. At the same time, the massive ten-volume “semiofficial” history of the war initiated some four decades ago by the Military History Research Office of the German Bundeswehr has not only exploded the myth of the clean Wehrmacht by showing its complicity in Nazi crimes in the east but has also integrated the separate “wars” on the eastern front into the
Vernichtungskrieg
, or war of annihilation, originally envisioned by Hitler. This history having finally been completed, the interested English-language reader faces a dual problem: not only have the English translations lagged behind the German originals, but the entire ten volumes (some with two parts) run to well over fifteen thousand pages. In addition, other German historians, in investigating specific issues, have produced outstanding works on a variety of topics ranging from the decision for and implementation of the Holocaust to the larger Nazi plans for a racial-demographic restructuring of the east to the question of the continuing support for the Nazi regime.

It is important, then, to note from the beginning what this book is not. It is not a work based on primary research; rather, it is intended as a synthesis, an integrated narrative based primarily on exhaustive research by German, British, and American historians over the past two or three decades. It is also clearly told from the German perspective, with no pretense of being a balanced account of the war. My aim is to provide a deeper understanding of the complexity and immensity of the Ostkrieg by anchoring the military events of the war within their larger ideological, racial, economic, and social context. There have been many military histories and numerous other works that have highlighted the atrocities committed on the eastern front but none that have attempted to integrate the military, ideological, and economic dimensions. Without a sense of the comprehensively murderous nature of Hitler's aims, the full scope of the eastern war cannot be grasped. The Holocaust, for example, cannot be adequately comprehended without reference either to German military success or to Nazi plans for a larger racial reordering of Europe. For all Hitler's anti-Semitism and verbal radicalism, the Final Solution neither was intended from the beginning, nor sprang out of the blue, but evolved as a result of specific time and spatial circumstances
and largely as a result of the unprecedented scale and barbarity of the German war in the east. It was the Ostkrieg that radicalized and crystallized Nazi intentions regarding the Jews, while the process of annihilation was largely determined within the context of military events. By the same token, many of Hitler's seemingly irrational military decisions seem much more explicable when set within their larger economic or strategic context. A purely operational focus, such as has dominated narratives of the eastern front, is not merely incomplete but misleading.

Why is a book like this necessary? Despite the ongoing fascination with World War II in this country and the English-speaking world in general, there is surprisingly little on the German-Russian war and virtually nothing within the past thirty years that aims to cover the entire period 1941–1945—let alone a narrative that places the military events within a larger interpretive framework. In fact, it is not too much to say that a good bit of the genesis of this work was frustration, both with trying to find acceptable books for my World War II classes to read and with otherwise knowledgeable American readers who failed to understand the importance of the eastern front or acknowledge the inherent connection between military events and Nazi criminality. Contrary to the belief of many in the West, Hitler did not blunder into the war in the east. For him, the “right” war was always that against the Soviet Union, for to him Germany's destiny depended on attaining Lebensraum and solving the “Jewish question.” Both of these, in turn, hinged on destroying the Soviet Union. Which of these aims was most important? Given Hitler's views, it would be artificial to attempt to prioritize or separate them. For him, the war against “Jewish-Bolshevism” and for Lebensraum was comprehensive and of whole cloth.

I have also attempted to infuse this account with irony, paradox, and complexity—all the things necessary for comprehending history but largely absent from the prevailing American view of World War II as the “good war” (which, again, is not so much wrong as incomplete). In addition, I have aimed to reestablish the eastern front as the pivotal theater of the war. The Second World War was not won or lost solely on the Ostfront, but it was the key—while the scale of fighting there dwarfed anything in the west. In retrospect, the disproportional nature of the Ostkrieg is striking: roughly eight of every ten German soldiers who died were killed in the east; from June 1941, in no single month of the war did more Germans die in the west than in the east, and the only month that came close was December 1944 (when during a “quiet” period over ten thousand more
Landsers
fell in the east than on all other fronts); the Red Army, at the cost of perhaps 12 million dead (or approximately thirty
times the number of the Anglo-Americans), broke the back of the Wehrmacht; total German and Soviet deaths (military and civilian) numbered around 35 million, compared with less than 1 million for Great Britain and the United States. At times, indeed, the Ostkrieg often seemed more murder than war. That it took the most murderous regime in Europe's history to defeat its most genocidal certainly tarnishes Western notions of the good war. Nonetheless, Stalin's alleged observation—England provided the time, America the money, and Russia the blood—contained a good deal of truth.

Why wars start, why they last so long, why they are so difficult to end, are all key questions that serious historians ask. In addition, a number of other themes infuse this work. Perhaps most important is the intersection of impulses—military, ideological, economic, racial, and demographic—that account for the violent, destructive nature of the eastern war. It was a war for hegemony, of conquest of Lebensraum, an ideological war against Jewish-Bolshevism, a war for food and raw materials, a racial-demographic war to reshape the borderlands of East-Central Europe, perhaps even a sort of colonial war in its ultimate goal of creating a vast “Greater Germany.” Each of these points reflects a valid aspect of Hitler's war in the East and has elicited much recent research. Obtaining raw materials, for example, was regarded as vital by Hitler in his strategic goal of elevating Germany to a position of world power status. Without secure access to large quantities of key resources, a mid-sized power such as the Third Reich could never throw off its constraints and aspire to compete against the likes of Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States. With it, however, a German-dominated Europe could aspire to maintain its world ascendancy. Indeed, in many respects, World War II can be seen above all as a war for oil, with those lacking it (Germany, Italy, Japan) seeking to defeat those who controlled it (Great Britain, America, and Russia). A war to secure Germany's economic future, however, could also serve to guarantee the Reich's racial future as well since the area targeted for expansion—European Russia—with its polyglot ethnic makeup seemed ripe for exploitation. Not for nothing did Hitler refer to it as “Germany's India” or note approvingly the opportunities for settlement similar to America's west. The “wild east” would be Germany's frontier, a space within which racial demographers and economic planners could work from a blank slate—once
x
number of millions of native inhabitants had been resettled or killed. From the outset, the war against the Soviet Union was planned as a war of annihilation, with the full knowledge and complicity of the Wehrmacht leadership.

Related to this was Hitler's obsession with World War I as well as his realization of the looming potential of the United States. The first war colored all aspects of the second one for Hitler. The ruinous blockade that accentuated German deficiencies in food and raw materials, the searing memory of mass hunger and privation that sapped domestic morale, the actions by the so-called November criminals (Jews, Communists, socialists) that allegedly caused the collapse of the German war effort, the belief in an active “Jewish conspiracy” that had plunged an encircled Germany into war in the first place—all would have repercussions on the direction of “his” war, a war fought primarily to undo the results of the first. This second war could not be fought in a vacuum, however, because of the hulking presence of potential American power, which put significant time pressures on Hitler. The logic of many of his decisions, in fact, stemmed from his acute awareness of German deficiencies and the limited window of opportunity available to remedy the situation. To secure German hegemony in Europe, ironically, he first had to conquer the necessary resources and ruthlessly exploit them for his own purposes, a scenario fraught with vulnerability and danger.

A further theme, then, would be Germany's large-scale unpreparedness for war against the Soviet Union. While Stalin's hugely ambitious industrialization plans had turned the Soviet Union into the most gigantic military-industrial state in modern history, Hitler's rearmament had begun much more slowly than originally believed and by 1939 had brought Germany barely level with its western rivals, Britain and France. Although Hitler had blundered into a war for which his nation was ill-prepared, he had been saved by the twin good fortunes of Allied incompetence and the luck of a blitzkrieg attack that went largely according to plan. The latter, however, obscured the fact that Germany had enjoyed no material advantage over its western rivals, let alone vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The myth of the Wehrmacht—that it was an invincible, mechanized juggernaut that had devised a war-winning strategy—was just that, a myth. The German army that assaulted the Red Army a year after its great triumph in France was barely stronger yet had to contend with a much larger foe in a vastly greater space. It could, in fact, project its power no farther than three hundred miles, a sobering fact when Moscow lay some seven hundred miles to the east, with the vital resources and oil of southern Russia even more distant. Nor was the German armaments industry, suffering from serious shortages of labor and raw materials, prepared for the rigors of a long campaign. With a few motorized divisions trailed by masses of men marching on foot and supported by a war industry that was hardly a model of rational efficiency, it was
little wonder that everyone in the German leadership hoped for a quick victory. Operation Barbarossa was high-risk, high-cost warmaking, an all-or-nothing gamble on rapid success.

Paradoxically, although the Wehrmacht failed to deliver a swift knockout blow, forcing Germany into an attritional war it likely could not win, its spectacular victories in 1941 and again in 1942 raised the prospect of just such a triumph, with the attendant planning and implementation of a whole host of murderous schemes, none more so than the Final Solution. By 1943, as a consequence of fierce Soviet resistance and the Germans' own mistakes and inadequacies, any sort of victory, even in the east, was unlikely. Total German defeat, however, resulted from the growing importance of the other fronts: in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the skies over Germany, and finally, Western Europe. In a coalition war, Hitler's Reich was at a decided disadvantage as his allies were no match for Stalin's. Why did German soldiers fight on in an increasingly hopeless situation? A complex set of motives was at work: ideology, the successful creation of a Nazified vision of the nation, a sense of duty, the material successes and rewards proffered by the regime, fear of communism, a strong sense of camaraderie, and the growing realization that the enormity of Nazi crimes left them no out. In any case, Hitler had long vowed that there would never again be another “November 1918,” the ultimate symbol of disgrace in his mind. In keeping this vow, he plunged his nation into total ruin. He had insisted at the outset that Germany faced only two choices, world power or downfall; in failing at the former, he ensured the latter.