The Second World War (37 page)

Some revisionist historians have tried to suggest that all this constituted a real plan to attack Germany, thus somehow attempting to justify Hitler’s subsequent invasion. But the Red Army was simply not in a state to launch a major offensive in the summer of 1941, and in any case Hitler’s decision to invade had been made considerably earlier. On the other hand, it cannot be excluded that Stalin, alarmed by the rapid defeat of France, may have been considering a preventive attack in the winter of 1941 or more probably in 1942, when the Red Army would be better trained and equipped.

More and more intelligence arrived confirming the danger of a German invasion. Stalin rejected the reports from Richard Sorge in the German embassy in Tokyo, his most effective agent. In Berlin, the Soviet military attaché had discovered that 140 German divisions were now deployed along the USSR’s frontier. The Soviet embassy in Berlin had even obtained the proofs of a Russian phrase-book to be issued to troops so that they could say ‘Hands up’, ‘Are you a Communist?’, ‘I’ll shoot!’ and ‘Where is the collective farm chairman?’

The most astonishing warning of all came from the German ambassador in Moscow, Graf Friedrich von der Schulenburg, an anti-Nazi who was later executed for his part in the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. Stalin, when told of the warning, exploded in disbelief. ‘
Disinformation has now reached ambassadorial level
!’ he exclaimed. In a state of denial, the Soviet leader convinced himself that the Germans were simply trying to put pressure on him to concede more in a new pact.

Ironically, Schulenburg’s frankness was the one exception in the skilful game of deception played by German diplomacy. Even the despised Ribbentrop played cleverly to Stalin’s suspicions of Churchill so that British warnings about Barbarossa produced a contrary reaction in the Soviet dictator. Stalin had also been told of the Allied plans to bomb the Baku oilfields during the war with Finland. And the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia in June 1940, which Ribbentrop had persuaded King Carol to accept, had in fact pushed Romania straight into Hitler’s cynical embrace.

Stalin’s appeasement of Hitler had continued with a large increase in deliveries to Germany of grain, fuel, cotton, metals and rubber purchased in south-east Asia, circumventing the British blockade. During the period of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union had provided 26,000 tons of chromium, used in metal alloys, 140,000 tons of manganese and more than two millions tons of oil to the Reich. Despite having received well over eighty clear indications of a German invasion–indeed probably more than a hundred–Stalin seemed more concerned with ‘the security problem along our north-west frontier’, which meant the Baltic states. On the night of 14 June, a week before the German invasion, 60,000 Estonians, 34,000 Latvians and 38,000 Lithuanians were forced on to cattle trucks for deportation to camps in the distant interior of the Soviet Union. Stalin remained unconvinced even when, during the last week before the invasion, German ships rapidly left Soviet ports and embassy staff were evacuated.

‘
This is a war of extermination
,’ Hitler had told his generals on 30 March. ‘Commanders must be prepared to sacrifice their personal scruples.’ The only concern of senior officers was the effect on discipline. Their visceral instincts–anti-Slav, anti-Communist and anti-semitic–were in line with Nazi ideology, even if many of them disliked the Party and its functionaries. Famine, they were told, would be a weapon of war, with an estimated thirty million Soviet citizens starving to death. This would clear out part of the population, leaving just enough to be slaves in a German-colonized ‘Garden of Eden’. Hitler’s dream of
Lebensraum
at last seemed within his grasp.

On 6 June, the Wehrmacht’s notorious ‘Commissar Order’ was issued, specifically rejecting any observance of international law. This and other instructions required that Soviet
politruks
or political officers, card-carrying Communists, saboteurs and male Jews were to be shot as partisans.

During the night of 20 June, the OKW issued the codeword Dortmund. Its war diary noted: ‘
Thus the start
of the attack is once and for all ordered for 22 June. The order is to be transmitted to the Army Groups.’ Hitler, keyed up for the great moment, prepared to leave for his new Führer
headquarters near Rastenburg, codenamed the Wolfsschanze, or Wolf’s Lair. He remained convinced that the Red Army and the whole Soviet system would collapse. ‘We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten edifice will come crashing down,’ he had told his commanders.

More thoughtful officers on the eastern borders had private doubts. Some had re-read General Armand de Caulaincourt’s account of Napoleon’s march on Moscow and the dreadful retreat. Older officers and soldiers who had fought in Russia during the First World War also were uneasy. Yet the Wehrmacht’s series of triumphant conquests–in Poland, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, France and the Balkans–reassured most Germans that their forces were invincible. Officers told their men they were ‘
on the eve of
the greatest offensive ever’. There were almost three million German troops, soon to be supported by armies from Finland, Romania, Hungary and eventually Italy, in the crusade against Bolshevism.

In the forests of birch and fir which concealed vehicle parks, tented headquarters and signal regiments as well as fighting units, officers briefed their men. Many reassured them that it would take only three or four weeks to crush the Red Army. ‘Early tomorrow
morning
,’ wrote a soldier in a mountain division, ‘we are off, thanks be to God, against our mortal enemy Bolshevism. For me, a real stone has fallen from my heart. Finally this uncertainty is over, and one knows where one is. I am very optimistic… And I believe that if we can take all the land and raw materials up to the Urals, then Europe will be able to feed itself and the war at sea can last as long as it will.’ A signals NCO in the SS Division
Das Reich
was even more confident. ‘
My conviction is
that the destruction of Russia will take no longer than that of France, and then my assumption of getting leave in August will still be correct.’

Around midnight on this midsummer’s eve, the first units moved forward to their attack positions as the last goods train with Soviet deliveries continued past them on its way to Germany. The dark silhouettes of panzers in formation emitted clouds of exhaust as they started their engines. Artillery regiments removed the camouflage netting from their guns to tow them into position close to the concealed piles of shells at their firing positions. Along the west bank of the River Bug, heavy rubber assault boats were dragged to the marshy edge, men whispering in case their voices carried across the water to the NKVD border guards. Opposite the great fortress of Brest-Litovsk, sand had been spread on the roads so that their jackboots made no noise. It was a cool, clear morning, with dew on the meadows. Men’s thoughts turned instinctively to their wives and children or sweethearts and parents, all asleep at home in Germany and blissfully unaware of this mighty undertaking.

During the evening of 21 June, Stalin in the Kremlin became increasingly nervous. The deputy head of the NKVD had just reported that there had been no fewer than ‘
thirty-nine aircraft incursions
over the state border of the USSR’ the previous day. When told of a German deserter, a former Communist who had crossed the lines to warn of the attack, Stalin promptly ordered that he should be shot for disinformation. All he conceded to his increasingly desperate generals was to put the anti-aircraft batteries round Moscow on standby and issue a warning order to commanders along the frontier districts to be prepared, but not to fire back. Stalin clung to the notion that any attack was not Hitler’s doing. It would be a
provokatsiya
by German generals.

Stalin retired to bed unusually early in his dacha just outside Moscow. Zhukov rang at 04.45 hours and insisted that he be woken. There had been reports of a German bombing raid on the Soviet naval base of Sebastopol and other attacks. Stalin was silent for a long time, just breathing heavily, then he told Zhukov that the troops were not to reply with artillery. He was to summon a meeting of the Politburo.

When they were assembled in the Kremlin at 05.45 hours, Stalin still refused to believe that Hitler knew anything about this attack. Molotov was told to summon Schulenburg, who informed him that a state of war existed between Germany and the Soviet Union. After his earlier warning, Schulenburg was amazed at the astonishment this announcement produced. A shaken Molotov returned to the meeting to tell Stalin. An oppressive silence followed.

In the early hours of 22 June, right down the belt of eastern Europe from the Baltic to the Black Sea, tens of thousands of German officers began glancing at their synchronized watches with the light of a shaded torch. Right on time, they heard aero-engines to their rear. The waiting troops looked up into the night sky as massed squadrons of the Luftwaffe streamed overhead, flying towards the gleam of dawn along the vast eastern horizon.

At 03.15 hours German time (one hour behind Moscow), a heavy artillery bombardment opened. On this, the very first day of the Soviet– German war, the Wehrmacht smashed through the frontier defence line with ease along an 1,800-kilometre front. Border guards were shot down still in their underwear, and their families were killed in their barracks by the artillery fire. ‘
In the course of the morning
,’ the OKW war diary noted, ‘the impression is strengthening that surprise has been accomplished on all sectors.’ One army headquarters after another reported that all the bridges on its front had been seized intact. In a matter of hours, the leading panzer formations were overrunning Soviet supply dumps.

The Red Army had been caught almost completely unprepared. In the
months before the invasion, the Soviet leader had forced it to advance from the Stalin Line inside the old frontier and establish a forward defence along the Molotov–Ribbentrop border. Not enough had been done to prepare the new positions, despite Zhukov’s energetic attempts. Less than half of the strongpoints had any heavy weapons. Artillery regiments lacked their tractors, which had been sent to help with the harvest. And Soviet aviation was caught on the ground, its aircraft lined up in rows, presenting easy targets for the Luftwaffe’s pre-emptive strikes on sixty-six airfields. Some 1,800 fighters and bombers were said to have been destroyed on the first day of the attack, the majority on the ground. The Luftwaffe lost just thirty-five aircraft.

Even after Hitler’s lightning campaigns against Poland and France, the Soviets’ plan of defence assumed that they would have ten to fifteen days before the main forces engaged. Stalin’s refusal to react, and the Wehrmacht’s ruthlessness, gave them no time at all. Brandenburger commandos from Regiment 800 had infiltrated before the attack or parachuted in to secure bridges and cut telephone lines. In the south, Ukrainian nationalists had also been sent in to cause chaos and urge an uprising against their Soviet masters. As a result, Soviet commanders had no idea what was happening and found themselves incapable of issuing orders or communicating with superiors.

From the East Prussian border, Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb’s Army Group North attacked into the Baltic states and headed for Leningrad. Its advance was greatly aided by Brandenburgers in brown Soviet uniforms seizing twin rail and road bridges over the River Dvina on 26 June. Generalleutnant von Manstein’s LVI Panzer Corps, advancing nearly eighty kilometres a day, would be halfway to their objective in just five days. This ‘
impetuous dash
’, he wrote later, ‘was the fulfilment of a tank commander’s dream’.

North of the Pripet Marshes, Army Group Centre, commanded by Generalfeldmarschall Fedor von Bock, advanced rapidly into Belorussia, soon fighting a great encirclement battle round Minsk with the panzer groups of Guderian and Generaloberst Hermann Hoth. The only fierce resistance encountered was from the massive fortress of Brest-Litovsk on the border. The Austrian 45th Infantry Division suffered heavy casualties, far more than in the whole campaign for France, as its storm groups tried to winkle out the tenacious defenders with flamethrowers, tear gas and grenades. The survivors, suffering terribly from thirst and without medical supplies, fought on for three weeks until wounded or out of ammunition. But on their return in 1945 from German imprisonment their incredible courage did not save them from being sent to the Gulag. Stalin had ordered that surrender constituted treason to the Motherland.

Frontier guards from the NKVD forces also fought back desperately, when not taken by surprise. But all too often Red Army officers deserted their men, fleeing in panic. With their communications in chaos, commanders were paralysed either by a lack of instructions or by orders to counter-attack which bore no relation to the situation on the ground. The purge of the Red Army had left officers with no experience of command in charge of whole divisions and army corps, while fear of denunciation and arrest by the NKVD had destroyed any initiative. Even the bravest commander was likely to tremble and sweat with fear if officers with the green tabs and cap band of the NKVD suddenly appeared in his headquarters. The contrast with the German army’s system of
Auftragstaktik
, in which junior commanders were set a task and then relied on to carry it out as best they thought, could not have been greater.