The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (167 page)

Hitler, it must be noted here, was doing his best to contradict the rumors, but at the same time he was busy trying to convince his generals and top officials that Germany was in growing danger of being attacked by Russia. Though the generals, from their own military intelligence, knew better, so hypnotic was Hitler’s spell over them that even after the war Halder, Brauchitsch, Manstein and others (though not Paulus, who seems to have been more honest) contended that a Soviet military build-up on the Polish frontier had become very threatening by the beginning of the summer.

Count von der Schulenburg, who had come home from Moscow on a brief leave, saw Hitler in Berlin on April 28 and tried to convince him of Russia’s peaceful intentions. “Russia,” he attempted to explain, “is very apprehensive at the rumors predicting a German attack on Russia. I cannot believe,” he added, “that Russia will ever attack Germany … If Stalin was unable to go with England and France in 1939 when both were still strong, he will certainly not make such a decision today, when France is destroyed and England badly battered. On the contrary, I am convinced that Stalin is prepared to make even further concessions to us.”

The Fuehrer feigned skepticism. He had been “forewarned,” he said,
“by events in
Serbia
… What devil had possessed the Russians,” he asked, “to conclude the friendship pact with
Yugoslavia
?”
*
He did not believe, it was true, he said, that “Russia could be brought to attack Germany.” Nevertheless, he concluded, he was obliged “to be careful.” Hitler did not tell his ambassador to the Soviet Union what plans he had in store for that country, and Schulenburg, an honest, decent German of the old school, remained ignorant of them to the last.

Stalin, too, but not of the
signs
, or of the
warnings
, of what Hitler was up to. On April 22 the Soviet government formally protested eighty instances of border violations by Nazi planes which it said had taken place between March 27 and April 18, providing detailed accounts of each. In one case, it said, in a German reconnaissance plane which landed near
Rovno
on April 15 there was found a camera, rolls of exposed film and a torn topographical map of the western districts of the U.S.S.R., “all of which give evidence of the purpose of the crew of this airplane.” Even in protesting the Russians were conciliatory. They had given the border troops, the note said, “the order not to fire on German planes flying over Soviet territory so long as such flights do not occur frequently.”
⁹⁷

Stalin made further conciliatory moves early in May. To please Hitler he expelled the diplomatic representatives in Moscow of
Belgium
,
Norway
, Greece and even Yugoslavia and closed their legations. He recognized the pro-Nazi government of
Rashid Ali
in
Iraq
. He kept the Soviet press under the strictest restraint in order to avoid provoking Germany.

Though Stalin had long been the absolute dictator of the Soviet Union this was the first mention by Schulenburg in his dispatches of the term “Stalin Government.” There was good reason. On May 6 Stalin had personally taken over as Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, or Prime Minister, replacing Molotov, who remained as Foreign Commissar. This was the first time the all-powerful secretary of the Communist Party had taken government office and the general world reaction was that it meant the situation had become so serious for the Soviet Union, especially in its relations with Nazi Germany, that only Stalin could deal with it as the nominal as well as the actual head of government. This interpretation
was obvious, but there was another which was not so clear but which the astute German ambassador in Moscow promptly pointed out to Berlin.

Stalin, he reported, was displeased with the deterioration of German–Soviet relations and blamed Molotov’s clumsy diplomacy for much of it.

Did the crafty Soviet dictator not realize by now—the middle of May 1941—that this was an impossible goal, that there was nothing, short of an abject surrender to Hitler, that he could do to attain it? He surely knew the significance of Hitler’s conquest of
Yugoslavia
and Greece, of the presence of large masses of German troops in Rumania and Hungary on his southwest borders, of the Wehrmacht build-up on his western frontier in Poland. The persistent rumors in Moscow itself surely reached him. By the beginning of May what Schulenburg called in a dispatch on the second day of that month “rumors of an imminent German–Russian military showdown” were so rife in the Soviet capital that he and his officials in the German Embassy were having difficulty in combating them.

The veteran ambassador was getting suspicious himself. He was instructed by Berlin to continue to deny the rumors, and to spread it about that not only was there no concentration of German troops on Russia’s frontiers but that actually considerable forces (eight divisions, he was told for his “personal information”) were being transferred from “east to west.”
¹⁰¹
Perhaps these instructions only confirmed the ambassador’s uneasiness, since by this time the press throughout the world was beginning to trumpet the German military build-up along the Soviet borders.

But long before this, Stalin had received specific warnings of Hitler’s plans, and apparently paid no attention to them. The most serious one came from the government of the United States.

Early in January 1941, the U.S. commercial attaché in Berlin, Sam E. Woods, had sent a confidential report to the State Department stating that he had learned from trustworthy German sources that Hitler was making plans to attack Russia in the spring. It was a long and detailed message, outlining the General Staff plan of attack (which proved to be quite
accurate) and the preparations being made for the economic exploitation of the
Soviet Union
, once it was conquered.
*

Secretary of State
Cordell Hull
thought at first that Woods had been victim of a German “plant.” He called in
J. Edgar Hoover
. The F.B.I, head read the report and judged it authentic. Woods had named some of his sources, both in various ministries in Berlin and in the German General Staff, and on being checked they were adjudged in Washington to be men who ought to know what was up and anti-Nazi enough to tattle. Despite the strained relations then existing between the American and Soviet governments Hull decided to inform the Russians, requesting Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles to communicate the substance of the report to Ambassador Constantine Oumansky. This was done on March 20.

If it was grateful, indeed if it ever believed this timely intelligence, it never communicated any inkling to the American government. In fact, as Secretary Hull has related in his memoirs, Moscow grew more hostile and truculent because America’s support of Britain made it impossible to supply Russia with all the materials it demanded. Nevertheless, according to Hull, the State Department, having received dispatches from its legations in Bucharest and
Stockholm
the first week in June stating that Germany would invade Russia within a fortnight, forwarded copies of them to Ambassador Steinhardt in Moscow, who turned them over to Molotov.

Churchill too sought to warn Stalin. On April 3 he asked his ambassador in Moscow,
Sir Stafford Cripps
, to deliver a personal note to the dictator pointing out the significance to Russia of German troop movements in southern Poland which he had learned of through a British agent.
Cripps’ delay in delivering the message still vexed Churchill when he wrote about the incident years later in his memoirs.
¹⁰³

Before the end of April, Cripps knew the date set for the German attack, and the Germans knew he knew it. On April 24, the German naval attaché in Moscow sent a curt message to the Navy High Command in Berlin:

   
The British Ambassador predicts June 22 as the day of the outbreak of the war.
¹⁰⁴
*

This message, which is among the captured Nazi papers, was recorded in the German Naval Diary on the same day, with an exclamation point added at the end.
¹⁰⁵
The admirals were surprised at the accuracy of the British envoy’s prediction. The poor naval attaché, who, like the ambassador in Moscow, had not been let in on the secret, added in his dispatch that it was “manifestly absurd.”

Molotov must have thought so too. A month later, on May 22, he received Schulenburg to discuss various matters. “He was as amiable, self-assured and well-informed as ever,” the ambassador reported to Berlin, and again emphasized that Stalin and Molotov, “the two strongest men in the Soviet Union,” were striving “above all” to avoid a conflict with Germany.
¹⁰⁶

On one point the usually perspicacious ambassador couldn’t have been more wrong. Molotov, at this juncture, was certainly not “well-informed.” But neither was the ambassador.

The extent to which the Russian Foreign Commissar was ill-informed was given public expression on June 14, 1941, just a week before the German blow fell. Molotov called in Schulenburg that evening and handed him the text of a
Tass
statement which, he said, was being broadcast that very night and published in the newspapers the next morning.
¹⁰⁷
Blaming Cripps personally for the “widespread rumors of ‘an impending war between the U.S.S.R. and Germany’ in the English and foreign press,” this official statement of the Soviet government branded them as an “obvious absurdity … a clumsy propaganda maneuver of the forces arrayed against the Soviet Union and Germany.” It added:

Even the recent German troop movements from the Balkans to the Soviet frontiers were explained in the communiqué as “having no connection with Soviet–German relations.” As for the rumors saying that Russia would attack Germany, they were “false and provocative.”

The irony of the Tass communiqué on behalf of the Soviet government
is enhanced by two German moves, one on the day of its publication, June 15, the other on the next day.

From
Venice
, where he was conferring with
Ciano
, Ribbentrop sent a secret message on June 15 to Budapest warning the Hungarian government “to take steps to secure its frontiers.”

The Germans were tipping off the Hungarians, but not their principal ally. When Ciano the next day, during a gondola ride on the canals of Venice, asked Ribbentrop about the rumors of a German attack on Russia, the Nazi Foreign Minister replied:

While the Kremlin was smugly preparing to broadcast to the world on June 14, 1941, that the rumors of a German attack on Russia were an “obvious absurdity,” Adolf Hitler that very day was having his final big war conference on Barbarossa with the leading officers of the Wehrmacht. The timetable for the massing of troops in the East and their deployment to the jumping-off positions had been put in operation on May 22. A revised version of the timetable was issued a few days later.
¹⁰⁹
It is a long and detailed document and shows that by the beginning of June not only were all plans for the onslaught on Russia complete but the vast and complicated movement of troops, artillery, armor, planes, ships and supplies was well under way and on schedule. A brief item in the Naval War Diary for May 29 states: “The preparatory movements of warships for Barbarossa has begun.” Talks with the general staffs of Rumania,
Hungary
and Finland—the last country anxious now to win back what had been taken from her by the Russians in the winter war—were completed. On June 9 from Berchtesgaden Hitler sent out an order convoking the commanders in chief of the three Armed Services and the top field generals for a final all-day meeting on Barbarossa in Berlin on June 14.

Despite the enormity of the task, not only Hitler but his generals were in a confident mood as they went over last-minute details of the most gigantic military operation in history—an all-out attack on a front stretching
some 1,500 miles from the Arctic Ocean at
Petsamo
to the
Black Sea
. The night before, Brauchitsch had returned to Berlin from an inspection of the build-up in the East. Halder noted in his diary that the Army Commander in Chief was highly pleased. Officers and men, he said, were in top shape and ready.