Though the Soviet defenders were roughly equal in numbers of fighting men to the German invaders (just over 3 million on each side), they were little match for them. A combination of their weak deployment close to the border (based on the military doctrine of ‘defence through attack’ which did not allow effective defensive operations), lack of training, inexperience of their commanders, and inadequate military hardware (much of which was outdated or in need of repair) meant that the Soviet forces were easy prey for the encirclement tactics of the Germans.
The invaders had elevated their Blitzkrieg attack to a new level of tactical deftness. Conventional military theory had asserted that armoured attack should be in waves – first bombers, then artillery, then tanks, then motorized infantry and so on. But under General Heinz Guderian, Commander-in-Chief of Panzer troops and the man whose original thinking about armoured warfare had made successful Blitzkrieg possible, the Germans had revolutionized that approach. Instead their tanks, dive bombers and artillery all focused simultaneously on one narrow point in the enemy line – sometimes no wider than a single road. This level of coordination was possible only because of both sophisticated communications – spotters inside the forward tanks would radio back the exact position that the artillery batteries should shell – and extensive previous battle experience. ‘We were well trained in it,’ says Wolfgang Horn. ‘We had done it in France – when breaking through to the port of Calais, for example. So we knew how to attack as a spearhead, regardless of what was on the sides . . . it was a very coordinated attack, always.’
Once the Panzers had burst through the enemy line, they forced their way on, leaving the following infantry to plunge through the gap and encircle the bewildered opposition. In the early days of Barbarossa it was Army Group Centre that had most success with this tactic, swiftly advancing to Smolensk deep inside the Soviet Union. But Blitzkrieg tactics had not been designed for such an enormous country and in the vast distances involved the conventional infantry could not keep up with the Panzer advance, so the spearheads had to stop and wait for them.
But these were problems of success, and from the individual German soldier’s point of view the early weeks of Barbarossa were essentially days of glorious victories. ‘You thought it was a doddle,’ says Albert Schneider, a soldier in the 201st Assault Gun Battalion. ‘The Russians will all defect in droves or will be taken prisoner and detained in a camp somewhere.’ The ease of the initial advance made him think ‘we will have a splendid life and the war will be over in six months – a year at most – we will have reached the Ural Mountains and that will be that . . . At the time we also thought, goodness, what can happen to us? Nothing can happen to us. We were, after all, the victorious troops. And it went well and there were soldiers who advanced singing! It is hard to believe but it’s a fact.’
On the morning of 22 June Stalin was awoken at his dacha at Kuntsevo just outside Moscow when Marshal Zhukov, then Chief of the General Staff, telephoned him with the news of the invasion. Initially Stalin thought there must have been a mistake – perhaps there had been a coup and Hitler’s generals had taken over, or perhaps this was just another provocation. Stalin ordered the Foreign Ministry to ask the Japanese to help – maybe they could mediate with the Germans. Stepan Mikoyan’s father was summoned to a crisis meeting that morning at Stalin’s office in the Kremlin. Then, and for the first few days of the war, ‘nobody understood what was going on . . . communications had been disrupted. It wasn’t clear where our army was or where the Germans were.’
‘I fought on the border for three days and three nights,’ says Georgy Semenyak, then a twenty-year-old soldier in the Soviet 204th Division. ‘The bombing, shooting . . . explosions of artillery gunfire continued non-stop.’ On the fourth day his unit began to retreat – into chaos. ‘It was a dismal picture. During the day, aeroplanes continuously dropped bombs on the retreating soldiers . . . When the order was given for the retreat, there were huge numbers of people heading in every direction – although the majority were heading east.’ As he trudged east through Belorussia, Georgy Semenyak watched in despair as his officers deserted. ‘The lieutenants, captains, second-lieutenants took rides on passing vehicles . . . mostly trucks travelling eastwards.’ By the time his unit approached Minsk, capital of Belorussia, his section was left with ‘virtually no commanders. And without commanders, our ability to defend ourselves was so severely weakened that there was really nothing we could do . . . The fact that they used their rank to save their own lives, we felt this to be wrong. But every man has his weaknesses.’
Blame should not be unqualified for those officers who deserted their men. For by the time of the German invasion in 1941, one estimate is that, as a result of the purges and the hasty expansion of the Red Army, about 75 per cent of officers and 70 per cent of political officers had been in their jobs for less than a year.23
Stalin’s actions, in those early days of the war, bore little relation to the reality on the battlefield. He berated his generals and called for advances into enemy territory, action in pursuit of the original Soviet plan of counter-attack – a plan now utterly unrealistic in the face of German advances of up to 60 kilometres on the first day of Operation Barbarossa.
As Hitler saw the early German successes, he must have felt confirmed in his belief that the Red Army would be destroyed within weeks. And he was not the only one, as the invasion began, to have little faith in the Soviet capacity to resist. The US Secretary of the Navy wrote to President Roosevelt on 23 June: ‘The best opinion I can get is that it will take anywhere from six weeks to two months for Hitler to clean up on Russia.’ Hugh Dalton, the British Labour politician, recorded in his diary on 22 June: ‘I am mentally preparing myself for the headlong collapse of the Red Army and Air Force.’24 Just before Barbarossa had been launched, the British Joint Intelligence Committee had stated that in their judgement the Soviet leadership lacked initiative and the Red Army had ‘much obsolete equipment’.25 The British War Office told the BBC that they should not give out the impression that Russian armed resistance would last more than six weeks.26
A crisis occurred in Moscow on 27 June when Stalin and other members of the Politburo attended a meeting at the Commissariat of Defence on Frunze Street. Stepan Mikoyan’s father was there: ‘They began asking Zhukov questions and they realized that the military were almost totally in the dark. They couldn’t tell them anything: where the army was . . . where our army was . . . where the Germans were . . . how far they’d advanced . . . Nothing was clear. Zhukov was so shaken up that, as my father described it, he was on the verge of tears.’ Stalin was now aware that the Germans were about to take Minsk – and the Red Army could do nothing to prevent it. He stormed out of Frunze Street, saying: ‘Lenin founded our state and now we’ve fucked it up.’ Shortly after the meeting he left for his dacha – and stayed there.
In Germany, Goebbels had been concerned about how the public would react to news of the invasion. He had been the one who had read out Hitler’s proclamation at 5.30 a.m. on 22 June, stating that the war was necessary to ‘counter this conspiracy of the Jewish-Anglo-Saxon warmongers and the equally Jewish rulers of the Bolshevik headquarters in Moscow’. Maria Mauth, then a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl, recalls hearing her father react to the news of the invasion in the way Goebbels must have feared: ‘I will never forget my father saying: “Right, now we have lost the war!”’ But then, as the accounts of the first easy successes arrived, the attitude changed. ‘In the weekly newsreels we would see glorious pictures of the German Army with all the soldiers singing and waving and cheering. And that was infectious of course. We thought about it in those terms and believed it for a long time, too. We simply thought it would be similar to what it was like in France or in Poland – everybody was convinced of that, considering the fabulous army we had.’
The fact that Germany was attacking a country with which it had signed a Non-Aggression Pact made little difference. It was the Pact itself that had been the aber
ration. Now Germans could voice once more their comfortable prejudices about the nature of the hordes who lived on their Eastern borders. ‘Russian history had always been barbaric,’ says Maria Mauth, ‘and we now thought, well, there must be something to it – just look at them! And everybody said: “Gosh, just look at them! Right, well, that’s not a life worth living!” Those were the actual words. That was the image of the Russians, and on top of that they were cowardly too, because they had retreated so quickly.’
Germans like Maria Mauth didn’t form their views about the Russians out of fear of denunciation if they failed to spout these prejudices – she is a sincere woman who at the time believed that ‘We were not like them. We were much better.’ The propaganda newsreels confirmed her view that the ‘Russians’ were ‘ugly, underdeveloped. Sometimes they were shown with faces like apes, with huge noses, no hair, in rags, filthy – well, that was the image, so you said to yourself, well, God, OK, why not?’
Such sentiments as these were widespread not just amongst German civilians but throughout the army as well, and helped ensure that this war did not just begin as a brutal racist war but escalated from there. On the battlefield, in those early days of the war, Walter Schaefer-Kehnert, an artillery officer in a Panzer division, found his belief confirmed that these ‘Russians’ – as the Soviet people were most often referred to by the Germans – were ‘more stubborn, more primitive, less civilized’. ‘When they counter-attacked and we had to leave the wounded behind and then we came back again, we found all the wounded had had their heads split open with short infantry blades. Now you can imagine our soldiers, when you see your wounded friend has been brutally killed, then they were furious.’
Another reason why the war in the East was so ‘different’ from the one in the West was the murder away from the battlefield. According to plan, the Einsatzgruppen began their terrible work in the very first days of the war. They immediately killed, amongst others, ‘Communist party officials and Jews in the service of the party or state’ – a definition that was interpreted in the widest sense. (See Chapter Eight for a fuller description of the work of the Einsatzgruppen.)
‘Jewish-Bolshevism, you see, that was the big enemy,’ confirms Carlheinz Behnke, then a soldier in the SS-Panzer Division Wiking. ‘And these were the people to fight against because they meant a threat to Europe, according to the view at the time . . . And the Jews were simply regarded as the leadership class or as those who were firmly in control over there in the Soviet Union.’ (In fact, contrary to the Nazi stereotype, Jews were no longer very prominent, with a few exceptions, in the Soviet leadership.)
This comforting prejudice also made the killing of the Soviet political officers, the commissars, easier. ‘Our task was absolutely clear to us,’ says Walter Traphöner, a soldier in an SS cavalry regiment that fought in the East. ‘We knew that Bolshevism was the World-Enemy Number One . . . And we were told that their aim was to overrun Germany and France and the whole of Europe down to and including Spain. That’s why we had to fight.’ In the context of this fight against ‘World-Enemy Number One’ the commissars were ‘particularly dangerous’ and ‘when we caught any of them, they just had to be killed’. When pressed on how it could be right to execute somebody just because of their political opinions, Traphöner replied: ‘We never really asked about the reasons for anything much. I mean they were just blokes who were supporting their system, just like it was with us . . . The commissars just had to be killed . . . We wanted to prevent the Bolsheviks from conquering the world.’
Back in Moscow, Stalin was coaxed out of his dacha at the end of June after two days, when a delegation from the Politburo ‘convinced’ him to lead the Soviet Union to victory. (At least one historian believes that Stalin, in retreating to his dacha, was following a ruse of Ivan the Terrible’s – feigning collapse to see who supported him and who didn’t.) In any event, there was no alternative leader of the Soviet Union. Stalin had helped get them into this disastrous situation – now he would have to help them get out of it.
On 3 July Stalin finally made a radio broadcast to the Soviet people and spoke about the German invasion. ‘Comrades, citizens, brothers and sisters, men of our Army and Navy,’ he began (the reference to ‘brothers and sisters’ was significant – it appealed to a nationalist rather than Communist sentiment), ‘my words are addressed to you, dear friends! The perfidious military attack begun on 22 June is continuing. In spite of the heroic resistance of the Red Army, and although the enemy’s finest divisions and finest Air Force units have already been smashed and have met their doom, Hitler’s troops have succeeded in capturing Lithuania, a considerable part of Latvia, the western part of Belorussia and part of western Ukraine. The Fascist aircraft are extending the range of their operation, bombing Murmansk, Orsha, Mogilev, Smolensk, Kiev, Odessa, Sevastopol. Grave danger overhangs our country. How could it happen that our glorious Red Army surrendered a number of our cities and districts to the Fascist armies? Is it really true that the German-Fascist troops are invincible, as the braggart Fascist propagandists are ceaselessly blaring forth? Of course not!’
Stalin went on to defend the Soviet Union’s participation in the Non-Aggression Pact (‘we secured our country’s peace for a year and a half’) and to promise military success (‘this short-lived military gain for Germany is only an episode’). But there is no disguising the defensiveness of his comments nor the self-justifying thread that runs through them.
One way out for Stalin, of course, would have been to try to make peace with the Germans. There was a precedent for this. In order to extricate the Soviet Union from World War I and to consolidate the Revolution, Lenin had concluded the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Under this agreement, which Lenin never intended to be permanent, he had ceded large tracts of territory (nearly 1.4 million square kilometres, including Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the Ukraine, Georgia and Armenia) to Germany. Was something like this contemplated – even as an option – in the first weeks of this war? In the rigid Communist version of the history of their ‘Great Patriotic War’ any peace treaty with the Germans would have been unthinkable treachery. (And any peace negotiations would also, incidentally, have broken the treaty of alliance signed by Britain and the Soviet Union on 12 July, which stated that neither country would ‘negotiate nor conclude an armistice or treaty of peace [with Germany] except by mutual agreement’.)27
The truth is rather different. Anecdotal rumours that approaches were made through one of Beria’s agents to get Ivan Stamenov, the Bulgarian Ambassador in Moscow, to intercede with the Germans have been known in the West for many years. But no document from the Communist period confirmed it – until now. A research team led by Professor Vladimir Naumov, one of the academic consultants for the television series on which this book is based, recently discovered in the Presidential Archive in Moscow a report from Pavel Sudoplatov, one of Beria’s most trusted officers. This report was written in 1953 at the time of Beria’s arrest, and describes how an approach to the Bulgarian Ambassador took place between 25 and 27 July 1941. Sudoplatov writes: ‘Beria instructed me to pose four questions in my discussion with Stamenov. Beria listed these questions looking at his notebook and they amounted to the following:
‘1. Why did Germany break its pact of non-invasion and start a war with the USSR?
‘2. If Germany were to arrange it, under what conditions would Germany agree to stop the war?
‘3. Would the Germans be happy with the handing over of such Soviet lands as the Baltic States, the Ukraine, Bessarabia, Bukovina and the Karelian peninsula?
‘4. If not, which territories would Germany want in addition?’
In 1991, shortly before his death, Sudoplatov was interviewed by the KGB about his life as an officer of its predecessor, the NKVD. He briefly mentioned the Stamenov affair, recalling that Beria had been supposed to meet Stamenov personally but Molotov had objected since ‘it would be too official’ if he went. Sudoplatov also revealed that Stamenov was selected as t
he go-between not just because as Bulgarian Ambassador he now represented German interests in the Soviet Union, but also because Beria believed that he was sympathetic to the Soviet cause. Beria had done Stamenov favours in the past, including organizing a job in Moscow for his wife, and Sudoplatov goes so far as to describe Stamenov as a Soviet agent.
On Beria’s orders the meeting was to take place at the Georgian Aragvi restaurant in Moscow. Sudoplatov records that his boss added one more condition: ‘Beria gave me the strictest warning that I should never tell anyone, anywhere, at any time about this commission of the Soviet government; otherwise myself and my family would be destroyed.’
Sudoplatov dutifully posed the four questions to Stamenov in Beria’s private room at the Aragvi restaurant. The Bulgarian Ambassador reacted nonchalantly. ‘Stamenov tried to behave as a man convinced of Germany’s defeat in the war. He attached little significance to Germany’s rapid gains during the first few days of the war. The thrust of what he said boiled down to the USSR’s forces, without question, surpassing those of the Germans, and that even if during the initial period the Germans took substantial territory from the USSR and maybe even reached the Volga, in the long run Germany would none the less suffer defeat and would be smashed.’ Immediately after the meeting, according to Sudoplatov, he briefed Beria on his conversation with the ambassador; his own involvement in these peace feelers stopped at this point.
What are we to make of this report? It was written in the context of the attack on Beria after Stalin’s death. That explains one strange contradiction: at the beginning of the report Sudoplatov writes that he believed Beria was acting with the full consent of the Soviet government, whilst at the end he says he is now convinced (because of what Beria’s ‘investigators’ have just told him) that his former boss acted on his own in ‘these actions of betrayal and sabotage’. Obviously, the report has no merit as an attack unless it is asserted that Beria was acting alone, but this is implausible and illogical – what possible reason could Beria have to think that it was worth pursuing an individual attempt to gain peace? Equally, since Beria’s career was built upon his closeness and subservience to Stalin, why would he take such a gigantic risk and act in this way without his master’s consent, especially since Stalin was the Soviet leadership, as head of the government, Defence Commissar, Supreme Commander-in-Chief and Party General Secretary?
The Nazis- a Warning From History Page 17