The Nazis- a Warning From History

by Laurence Rees

  That spring key decisions were also taken about the manner in which the invasion should be conducted. To Hitler and the Nazis, the Soviet Union was not like France or Belgium or any other ‘civilized’ country in the West. From the beginning, this was viewed as a war against savages who carried within them the dangerous, corrupting belief of Communism infested with Judaism. Halder, reflecting Hitler’s desires, noted on 17 March 1941 that ‘The intelligentsia put in by Stalin must be exterminated’ and that ‘In Great Russia force must be used in its most brutal form.’ Hitler did not hide from his generals his view that this was to be a war of ‘annihilation’ – he said as much to them in a speech on 31 March. They, in turn, did not resign or protest, as these views were codified in a series of orders that set the letter and spirit in which the war was to be fought. These orders, which were labelled ‘criminal’ at the Nuremberg trials after the war, were prepared not by the SS but by the legal arm of the Army’s own High Command.

  The first ‘criminal’ order was the Barbarossa-Decree, under whose terms partisan fighters were to be shot out of hand and collective reprisals against whole communities were authorized. This was followed by the infamous Commissar Order, which called on soldiers to shoot Soviet political officers – the commissars. (For much of its life the Red Army operated under ‘dual command’, with the professional military officers having to consult political commissars before issuing substantive orders. One of the great fears of the early revolutionaries had been that the Army might one day move against the Communist Party – they hoped the presence of the commissars ensured this could not happen.)

  It is hard today to understand how the modern army of a cultured people like the Germans could have accepted that they were about to fight a war outside international convention – a war in which they were expected to be not just soldiers but murderers. But to meet Bernhard Bechler is to comprehend the mentality of the time that made it possible. He wasn’t just a soldier who accepted the contents of the Commissar Order – he was one of the people who put his name to it. Acting as ADC to General Müller, a ‘General for Special Tasks’ in the Army High Command, he signed to witness the signature of Field Marshal von Brauchitsch. ‘I was proud of the fact that my name was on the order,’ says Bechler. ‘But back then one shouldn’t think of it as a special event. There were 20, 30 events happening at the same time and this is just one of them . . . Insights never come until after the fact. Afterwards, when I realized its significance, what a dirty business it actually was, yes. But at the time one didn’t really notice much of it.’

  In so far as he did stop to think about it, Bechler felt that ‘at the time we were still convinced that there would be a victory. And if we had won, everything would have been right. You must not forget that. If we had won the war against the Soviet Union, none of this, not even the crimes or whatever, would have mattered.’

  When pressed harder on the ethical question – the sort of moral standards he was working to in issuing such orders – Bechler replied: ‘If I believe that there is a danger for the Western world, that the Soviet Union is a threat to civilization, if this is what I believe and embrace, I take a moral stance. I am morally obliged to prevent this, and my morals prompt me to avail myself of means which I wouldn’t have used otherwise – in order to prevent Bolshevism prevailing in Europe . . . One didn’t see it as a crime against the Russian people because Hitler had said: “There is no such thing as a crime on the part of the Germans.” This was simply our moral stance: they had to be destroyed. The potential had to be destroyed, everything that kept the system going.’

  Bernhard Bechler’s response, with its convoluted logic, is significant. It represents the same reasoning process that Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer SS, used in order to justify the killing of Jewish children. In essence it amounts to: ‘The threat to our society from these people in the future is so great that in this case the end justifies the means.’ By such reasoning do intelligent people justify their most bestial acts. It shows that sophistication and culture are no bar to atrocity – indeed, they can be an aid, for once the intelligent mind devises a justification, there is no limit to the consequent brutality.

  The German Army had already seen how the Einsatzgruppen – the special ‘task forces’ charged with liquidating the Nazis’ ideological enemies under Reinhard Heydrich, Head of the Main Reich Security Office – had operated in Poland against Jews and the Polish intelligentsia. Nearly two years on, the German Wehrmacht – and especially its more ambitious members – knew that brutality was to be expected. But this wasn’t a case of just ‘putting up’ with a war of annihilation. The Army and its High Command knew they had to compete with Himmler’s SS for a role in the future Great German Empire. If they were perceived as ‘weak’, they would later be brushed aside. After the conquest of the Soviet Union, only those military leaders who showed ‘ideological purity’ could hope to receive the Führer’s blessing.

  Not everyone in the German Army went along with the ‘criminal’ orders. But the majority of German Divisions did enforce them.20 The forthcoming war was presented to them not only as a ‘crusade’ against a brutal, savage enemy, an attempt to bring civilization in the form of a German empire to the East, but also as a struggle that seemed to be a military and economic necessity – if it was lost, then Germany was lost. Such circumstances made it easier for them to understand why this had to be a war without rules. As Goebbels recorded in his diary of 16 June 1941: ‘The Führer says that we must gain the victory no matter whether we do right or wrong. We have so much to answer for anyhow that we must gain the victory because otherwise our whole people . . . will be wiped out.’21

  The Germans set about assembling the force of 3 million men that would invade the East, and inevitably Stalin learnt of the new troop concentrations. But what should he make of this intelligence? Was this just a provocation – a means of ensuring that the Soviet Union did not interrupt the flow of raw materials to the German war machine? Or was it more serious – did it mean war? One of those Soviet agents who did learn the true reason behind the German military build-up was Anatoly Gurevich, head of Soviet military counter-intelligence in France and Belgium. Established with a cover as a South American company director, he managed to infiltrate himself into a circle of German commanders in Belgium. In October 1940 Gurevich learnt that the Germans planned to attack the Soviet Union the following year. ‘I started to find out how the troops were moved,’ he says, ‘and that they were being transferred to the Eastern Front.’ By the beginning of 1941, Gurevich recalls, he was sending messages to Moscow via the Soviet embassy in Brussels that ‘the war had to start in May 1941’. Richard Sorge, the Soviet agent in Japan, sent messages to Moscow to much the same effect.

  Stalin’s attitude can be gleaned from a secret document released only since the fall of Communism. Dated 16 June 1941, it was sent by the People’s Commissariat for State Defence of the USSR, V.N. Merkulov, and reads: ‘A source working in the German Aviation Headquarters reports: 1. Germany has concluded all necessary measures for war in preparation for an armed assault against the USSR and an attack can be expected at any moment . . . In the Ministry for the Economy they are saying that at a meeting of all the economic planners destined for the “occupied” territories of the USSR, Rosenberg [who was shortly to be appointed Minister for the Occupied Territories by Hitler] also made a speech, stating that “the very notion of the Soviet Union must be wiped off the map”.’ Across the front of this report Stalin has scrawled: ‘Comrade Merkulov, you can send your “source” from his position on the staff of the German Air Force to his fucking mother. He is not a “source” but a disinformant.’

  Stalin has often been berated for not taking warnings such as these more seriously. But, once more, it’s easy to mount such criticisms with hindsight. At the time, it can’t have seemed so clear-cut. As Stalin would have seen it, Hitler’s prime concern was Britain, and invading the Soviet Union would have committed Germany to a war on two fronts. Fu
rthermore, the Soviet Union was keeping to its various agreements with Germany to provide raw materials for the Nazi war effort. In October 1939 the Soviet Union had even let the German Navy use an ice-free port east of Murmansk to repair its U-boats for the war in the North Atlantic. Why would Hitler want to jeopardize this fruitful relationship?

  On 10 May 1941 Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s Deputy, had parachuted into Scotland. What prospects did this conjure up in Stalin’s mind? Were the British and the Nazis colluding with each other? If they were, this was good reason to ignore the British intelligence information he was now receiving, which claimed there would be a German invasion. Perhaps the British were trying to force the Soviet Union into a foolish strike against Germany so as to let themselves off the hook. The British, remember, had been less than enthusiastic about an alliance between themselves and the Soviet Union in 1939.

  Stalin considered all these possibilities against the background of his overwhelming desire to do nothing to provoke the Germans. A war against the Nazis in 1941 would not have been in his interests. It is likely that he thought the Soviet Union could not escape an eventual conflict against the Germans, but he felt that this war would not come until 1942–3 at the earliest. In the meantime he could prepare his army and benefit from the secret protocol of the Non-Aggression Pact with Germany which gave the Soviet Union increased territory in Europe – including a large portion of Poland. So a part of Stalin’s determination to believe that there was no definite plan to invade the Soviet Union must have been wishful thinking – what seemed a good idea to the Germans would have seemed a very bad idea indeed to Stalin.

  Stalin was not alone in believing that appeasing Hitler would enable the Soviet Union to escape invasion. Marshal Zhukov, appointed Chief of the Soviet General Staff in February 1941, later said, ‘Most of the people around Stalin supported him in the political judgements he made before the war, especially the notion that, as long as we did not rise to any provocation, or make any false step, then Hitler would not break the Pact and attack us.’22

  It is against this background that one should judge the claims, which have emerged since the fall of Communism, that the Soviet Union itself was planning a strike against the Germans in 1941. (This was also the claim that Hitler and the Nazi propagandists made immediately after the invasion to justify their attack – although there is no evidence that they actually believed it when they were planning the invasion.) Such hard evidence as has emerged essentially revolves around one Soviet document, dated 15 May 1941, entitled ‘Considerations for planning the strategic deployment of the Soviet Union’s Armed Forces in the event of war with Germany and its allies’.

  A study of the complete document reveals that it is far from being the ‘smoking gun’ that justifies the conspiracy theorists in claiming that Stalin was planning an imminent attack on Germany. The context of the document makes it clear that it is written in response to the information reaching the Soviet military that the German Army is massing on the borders of the Soviet Union: ‘The situation, in the current political climate, suggests that Germany, if it were to attack the USSR, would be able to raise against us as many as 137 infantry divisions, 19 tank divisions, 15 motorized divisions, 4 cavalry divisions and 5 landing aircraft divisions – a total of 180 divisions . . .’ The report goes on to talk of the probable direction of the main thrust of the German attack ‘south of Demblin’ and that ‘This attack will, in all likelihood, be accompanied by an attack in the north from East Prussia against Vilna and Riga, as well as a short, concentrated attack from around Suvalki and Brest against Volkovysk, Baranovichi.’

  After listing the possible route of the German attack, the report suggests that ‘we should attack the German Army when it is still at the deployment stage and has not yet had time to organize the front and co-ordinate the different arms of the service’. Two counter-offensives are then suggested into German territory.

  A careful reading of the report shows that it represents not a plan for an unprovoked attack on Germany but a response to German mobilization and an attempt to frustrate a possible invasion. It is also evident that far from being a secret plan kept hidden until that moment, the document is the last in a series of deployment plans – a contingency in the event of invasion from the West.

  Despite the popular myth that the Soviets did nothing to prepare for a possible German attack, the truth is that the leaders of the Red Army did consider in detail how their forces should be deployed – the only problem was that they deployed them in the wrong way. The basic military assumption that the 15 May document, and those that preceded it, rested upon was that in the event of war the Red Army should practise ‘active defence’. Instead of using the vast depth of the Soviet Union to soak up the enemy, Stalin believed that large portions of the Red Army should be positioned right against the frontier, ready for a massive counter-attack into enemy territory.

  Stalin’s behaviour in the spring of 1941 is that of a man desperately trying to do nothing to antagonize the Germans, rather than that of a warlord waiting to strike. (The Russian historian Professor Viktor Anfilov states that Marshal Zhukov told him that Stalin did see the 15 May document and reacted angrily: ‘Are you mad? Do you want to provoke the Germans?’) And newly declassified documents confirm that the Soviet Union was still honouring its deliveries of raw materials to Germany up to the moment of the invasion.

  Just because Stalin had no desire to invade Germany at this time, it doesn’t mean, of course, that had the war gone on he would have felt his Pact with the Nazis was sacrosanct. But Stalin’s natural caution made him wary of over-committing himself. He did not break his neutrality treaty with Japan until after the Americans dropped their first atomic bomb. Only then did Stalin order the Red Army to invade Japanese-held territory in China and rush towards Japan itself. In parallel, then, one can posit a scenario in which Stalin would first have waited to see how the war in the West progressed and then, if he could have moved in the endgame to the benefit of the Soviet Union, no treaty would have prevented him.

  This is, it is worth remembering, exactly the reason why the Germans felt they needed to eliminate the threat from the Soviet Union so quickly. Both Hitler and Stalin knew that time favoured the Soviet Union. To this limited extent, then, not just the Nazi leadership but many former German soldiers still consider this a preventive war: ‘I don’t want to claim that Hitler waged a preventive war in the sense of forestalling a looming attack,’ says Rüdiger von Reichert, then an artillery officer with Army Group Centre. ‘You can use the term “preventive war” only in so far as saying that he [Hitler] knew that the conflict was necessary, and that he was in a more favourable position if he launched an attack first, and that he had to take into account that Stalin might launch an attack too. So in this way there was sympathy for the decision to attack Russia.’

  The original plan for Operation Barbarossa had called for an attack in May 1941, but this start date could not be met because in March a military coup in Belgrade had overthrown the Nazi ally Prince Paul. As a result, on 6 April German troops invaded Yugoslavia. For strategic reasons Hitler ordered them to carry on into Greece. The Italians had botched their own invasion of the country some months earlier, and Hitler could not risk the German Army’s southern flank being exposed during Barbarossa. Both Yugoslavia and Greece swiftly fell to the German Blitzkrieg and the war was over by the end of April. But because of these unforeseen military actions Barbarossa could not be launched until June.

  Hitler himself, as the Eastern campaign fell around him in 1945, was to blame the eventual German failure in the Soviet Union on the delay in implementing Barbarossa. Whilst there was some confusion caused by the swift redeployment of German units back into their start positions for Barbarossa, it was a particularly wet spring and the likelihood is that the invasion date would have been in June regardless. In any event, it was not the matter of a few weeks’ delay that spelt doom for Operation Barbarossa, but a fundamental miscalculation about the true nature and
difficulty of the task ahead.

  Certainly none of the German veterans we spoke to felt at the time that Barbarossa was going to fail because it was launched in June rather than May. On the contrary, many were filled with optimism about the ease of the task ahead. On the morning of the attack Bernhard Bechler went to his sister’s to say goodbye – he was about to travel to Hitler’s new advance headquarters in East Prussia: ‘I said, “Listen, we will part now. In a few weeks I’ll ring you from Moscow.”. . . I was utterly convinced that this would happen, and I was in fact proud of our plans.’

  Just before dawn on Sunday 22 June 1941 Rüdiger von Reichert, as an artillery officer with the 268th infantry division, waited to cross the border into Soviet-held Poland. ‘The situation was made so grotesque because approximately an hour before a brightly lit, peaceful train had driven by, destined to go to our then ally who was about to be attacked.’ At half past three they attacked ‘with a huge burst of fire, and on the demarcation line opposite the guards were shot down’. For Wolfgang Horn, a soldier in the 10th Panzer Division, the massive artillery barrage that signalled the opening of the war gave him ‘a great feeling about the power being unleashed against the dubious and despisable [sic] enemy’.

  The Germans moved forward in three great thrusts along an invasion front of 1800 kilometres, the longest in history: Field Marshal von Leeb with Army Group North aiming for the Baltic states and Leningrad, von Bock with Army Group Centre attacking towards Minsk, Smolensk and eventually Moscow, and von Rundstedt with Army Group South heading into the Ukraine.