The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  But long before the first serious partisan warfare—in fact, before the Germans even launched their invasion—preparations were in the works for massacres of Jews. New mobile SS units called Einsatzgruppen, composed of hardened veterans who had carried out killings of intellectuals, clergy, and Jews in occupied Poland, along with special police battalions, followed the advancing German armies into Soviet territory. That summer SS boss Heinrich Himmler made the rounds of those units on the Eastern front to urge them personally to kill Soviet Jews.

  The massacres had begun almost as soon as the German troops moved across the border. When Police Battalion 309 entered the city of Bialystok in late June, the unit went on a rampage against Jews, shooting and beating them. When a desperate group of Jewish leaders went to the headquarters of the security division responsible for the area, the general in charge of the division turned his back on them as one of the members of the police battalion urinated on them. Some Jews were lined up and shot, while others were herded into a synagogue, which was set alight. That fire in turn set off fires in nearby houses, where others Jews were hiding. The tally for the day’s macabre events: about two thousand to twenty-two hundred Jews killed.

  That wasn’t the last of the killings in Bialystok. On July 12, two other police battalions filled the city’s stadium with Jewish men. According to their orders: “All male Jews between the ages of 17 and 45 convicted as plunderers are to be shot according to martial law.” After collecting the valuables of the victims, the policemen drove them to ditches on the outskirts of the city, formed firing squads, and kept shooting late into the evening, at that point using the headlights of their trucks to light up their targets. In this case, the tally was more than three thousand Jews.

  By the end of the summer and early fall, the police battalions were reporting more and more such massacres, which were increasingly composed of any Jews they could capture, including women and children. The terse reports would offer the name of the unit and the number of its victims on any particular day. “August 25: Police Regiment South shot 1,324 Jews,” for example, or “August 31: Battalion 320 shot 2,200 Jews in Minkovtsy.”

  Questioned by American psychiatrist Leon Goldensohn before he was tried at Nuremberg and hanged in 1948, Otto Ohlendorf, the notorious commander of Einsatzgruppe D, matter-of-factly described how his unit functioned during those early months of the war. “The Jews were shot in a military manner in a cordon. There were fifteen-men firing squads. One bullet per Jew. In other words, one firing squad of fifteen executed fifteen Jews at a time.” The victims were men, women and children. How many perished at the hands of his men during the year he spent in Russia? “Ninety thousand reported. I figure actually only sixty to seventy thousand were shot.” Ohlendorf, of course, explained that he was just following orders. “All I had to do was to see to it that it was done as humanely as possible,” he added.

  By the end of September, after Kiev had fallen, the special squads were in action at the ravine of Babi Yar, where more than thirty-three thousand Jews were murdered. All of this would constitute only the first act of the Holocaust. The industrialized killings in the gas chambers were still in the future. The special killing squads were doing their job, though they weren’t as fast and efficient as their leaders wanted them to be. But it certainly wasn’t for lack of trying.

  Like so many of their countrymen, Hitler’s generals would plead ignorance about the Holocaust, including these early massacres. Field Marshal von Manstein, who also found himself on trial after the war but only spent a few years in prison, admitted to Goldensohn that Ohlendorf’s Einsatzgruppe was in his district. “But we were told that these SS formations had purely police functions,” he insisted. “What they did I never knew.”

  Manstein also claimed that he knew nothing of the concentration camps until the war ended. While he was among the generals who frequently found themselves at odds with Hitler on military matters, he hadn’t been ready to condemn the Führer on moral grounds. “Apparently as time went on Hitler lost all his moral scruples,” Manstein told Goldensohn. “However, this is a recognition I have made in retrospect, but which I did not have at the time.” It’s hard to imagine a more self-incriminating statement, though Manstein clearly didn’t see it that way.

  The military brass couldn’t plead ignorance of the Commissar Decree and other military orders that led to systematic atrocities. In his memoirs, Manstein called that order “utterly unsoldierly.” Because it “would have threatened not only the honor of our fighting troops but also their morale,” he maintained, he told his superiors that he would not allow his subordinates to carry it out. Heinz Guderian, the famous panzer leader, also claimed that his troops never implemented it—and, just possibly, the stature of these military commanders allowed them to contravene the Commissar Decree.

  Manstein made clear that his objection was a practical one. “The order simply incited the commissars to resort to the most brutal methods to make their units fight on to the end,” he noted. Even the most obedient generals recognized this probable outcome when the order was first issued. On the eve of the invasion, army commander von Brauchitsch added a line to the instructions on the handling of the commissars that suggested they should be executed “inconspicuously.” It wasn’t shame that prompted that advice; it was calculation.

  Many of the early tensions between Hitler and his generals were triggered by similar disagreements over tactics and goals, certainly not by grand moral principles. Manstein complained later that, from the beginning, the army had tried to stick to its “traditional notions of simplicity and chivalry and its soldierly conception of honor,” despite the constant pressure to conform to Nazi doctrine. Given the army’s subsequent heinous record, it’s certainly an understatement to say that these protestations ring hollow. Even the unsuccessful assassination plot against Hitler by disgruntled officers in 1944 did little to salvage the reputation of a military leadership whose actions put it beyond redemption.

  Nonetheless, it would be wrong to overlook the very real disagreements between Hitler and his generals and the role of those disagreements in Operation Barbarossa and the drive to seize Moscow. Hitler and his generals were partners in crime, but, more often than not, they were uncomfortable partners. Hitler had assumed the title Supreme Commander in 1938 and considered himself the supreme military strategist, one who combined a grasp of battlefield conditions acquired during the previous global conflict with a broad understanding of history, economics, and basic psychology that allowed him to outwit his enemies. None of his generals, he felt, came close to matching his mastery of all those fields. The generals, for their part, were alternately awed and alarmed by his behavior, sometimes seeing him as a genius, at other times seeing him as a dangerous fraud, even if they were usually terrified to admit as much even to themselves.

  The closest the military brass came to confronting and possibly ousting Hitler during the prewar period came in the summer of 1938, when he began threatening Czechoslovakia. General Ludwig Beck, the army chief of staff at the time, asked Hitler to spell out his plans, seeking reassurance that he wouldn’t start a war. While admitting that the crisis over Czechoslovakia could turn into an armed conflict, Hitler claimed that it wouldn’t lead to a larger war. But the Führer wasn’t about to provide the kind of guarantee that Beck was seeking. “The army is an instrument of politics,” he told the general. “I shall assign the army its task when the moment arrives and the army will have to carry out this task without arguing whether it is right or wrong.”

  In August 1938, Beck was ousted as chief of staff. While he was convinced he had some support among other generals critical of Hitler, he felt bitterly disappointed by General von Brauchitsch, the army commander-in-chief, whom he accused of deserting him. After the war, General Halder, who replaced Beck as chief of staff, and others would claim to have still contemplated a plot against Hitler in September, although their accounts were inconsistent and looked suspiciously self-serving, obvious attempts to d
istance themselves from their fallen leader. But any resolve they might have had evaporated when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Premier Edouard Daladier agreed to come to meet Hitler and then acquiesced in Czechoslovakia’s dismemberment by signing the Munich agreement that September. Claiming that he had been preparing a swift putsch and even for Hitler’s possible execution, Halder blamed the Western leaders for pulling out the rug from under the plotters. Without the threat of war, Halder argued, “the entire basis for that action had been taken away.”

  In all probability, Halder and several others embellished their versions of events and of how prepared they were to act. General Beck’s role as an early opponent of Hitler’s march to war was far more convincing, and he would end up shooting himself after he was captured on the night of July 20, 1944, following the failed assassination attempt against Hitler. But whatever will there was among the generals to resist Hitler in 1938 was, in fact, undercut by his amazing successes: first, the annexation of Austria in March, and then the achievement of his goals in Czechoslovakia without having to go to war. As Field Marshal von Manstein would recall later: “We had watched Germany’s precarious course along the razor’s edge to date with close attention and were increasingly amazed at Hitler’s incredible luck in attaining—hitherto without recourse to arms—all his overt and covert political aims. The man seemed to have an infallible instinct.”

  Even when his invasion of Poland led to the wider war that they had feared, the generals weren’t about to challenge Hitler seriously. He ignored their trepidation about violating Belgium’s neutrality and attacking France, and once again the success of his audacious actions made them look as though they were the ones falling short in terms of leadership, although it was their swift victories that made Hitler look so powerful. The Führer didn’t hesitate to express his contempt for “the everlasting hesitation of the generals,” drumming in the message that he, not they, had the vision and drive to catapult Germany to new heights.

  The generals began to perceive slights everywhere. After the defeat of Poland, Hitler came to Warsaw for a victory parade on October 5, 1939. Before flying back to Germany, he made a scheduled stop to visit the commanders and troops. The brass awaited him in a hangar, where they expected to serve him soup from a field kitchen on a table adorned with a white tablecloth and flowers. But when the Führer showed up, he only glanced at these preparations and opted to join the troops outside, where they had their own field kitchen. He tasted the soup, chatted with them briefly, and then headed for his aircraft, ignoring their commanders. Hitler may have been trying to score propaganda points by showing that he felt at home with the ordinary soldiers, but the brass had no doubt it was a deliberate snub.

  Hitler also didn’t hesitate to promote and demote officers as he saw fit, and even his sudden elevation of a dozen generals to the rank of field marshal prompted speculation that he was trying to devalue the military’s highest rank. He left no doubt that he wanted to ensure obedience from his top generals and he was willing to do whatever it took to achieve that aim. In some cases, he simply paid them, providing them with tax-free payments that weren’t recorded in the army accounts.

  “Although this method of payment was an insult according to the honor code of the German officer, many succumbed because of fear of losing their positions and lure of the money,” Fabian von Schlabrendorff, one of the few officers who survived his involvement in the 1944 plot against Hitler, wrote after the war. “In this way Hitler held his higher officers on very effective golden leashes.” General Günther von Kluge, for example, received a personal birthday card from Hitler that included a check for 250,000 marks.

  In most cases, however, payoffs were hardly necessary. Hitler outmaneuvered his generals again and again, sweeping aside their warnings when he saw fit and overruling them on strategy and tactics at will. Even those generals who tried to stand up to him on occasion were clearly cowed by his track record and the sheer force of his personality. “When considering Hitler in the role of a military leader, one should certainly not dismiss him with such clichés as ‘the lance corporal of World War I,’” Field Marshal von Manstein wrote. And notwithstanding his criticism of Hitler for his “excessive self-esteem,” his propensity to ignore information that contradicted his theories and his disdainful handling of the top brass, Manstein added, “Hitler possessed an astoundingly retentive memory and an imagination that made him quickly grasp all technical matters and problems of armaments. He was amazingly familiar with the effect of the very latest enemy weapons and could reel off whole columns of figures on both our own and the enemy’s war production. Indeed, this was his favorite way of side-tracking any topic that was not to his liking.”

  The other method Hitler effectively employed was to throw out theories, or just plain smokescreens, meant to trump any purely military arguments. “He had a genius for suddenly confronting his military collaborators with political and economic arguments which they could not immediately refute and of whose value, in any case, the statesman must perforce be considered the better judge,” Manstein noted with reluctant admiration. All of which meant that Hitler got the better of his generals time and time again. In most cases, it wasn’t even a contest.

  And yet Hitler still subjected his generals to withering tirades. “Before I became Chancellor, I believed the general staff was somewhat like a butcher’s dog, whom you had to hold tight by the collar to prevent its attacking all other people,” he declared on one occasion. “After I became Chancellor, however, I realized that the general staff is anything but a ferocious dog.” He then enumerated the decisions the generals had objected to: rearmament, the occupation of the Rhineland, the annexation of Austria, the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, the invasion of Poland. “The general staff warned me against an offensive in France, and counseled against war with Russia,” he concluded. “It is I who at all times had to goad on this ‘ferocious dog.’”

  It is true that as Hitler decided to abandon plans for an invasion of Britain and to attack the Soviet Union instead, some of the military brass voiced skepticism about such a course. Admiral Erich Raeder, the commander of the navy, argued that the opening of a second front should be postponed “until after victory over England.” General von Brauchitsch also expressed reservations. “Purpose is not clear,” Halder reported him as saying. “We do not hit the British this way. Our economic potential will not be substantially improved. Risk in the West must not be underestimated.” Even Hermann Göring, Hitler’s close associate and commander of the air force, would claim in Nuremberg that he had seen the danger of Hitler’s plan to attack Russia. “Hitler decided that,” he said. “I thought it was stupid because I believed that first we had to defeat England.”

  Field Marshal von Manstein would later expound on Hitler’s misjudgments that led to the ultimate defeat of Germany on the Eastern front. “The first was the mistake committed by Hitler, if by no one else, of underrating the resources of the Soviet Union and the fighting qualities of the Red Army,” he wrote. But if Manstein is more credible than someone like Göring, he fatally undermines his case by trying to pin all the blame on Hitler. The German leader was far from alone in underestimating the Soviet Union. On the eve of Operation Barbarossa, much of the top brass—including Brauchitsch, Halder, Jodl—had convinced themselves, or had allowed Hitler to convince them, that the campaign would produce a victory in a matter of weeks, and they were echoing his optimistic predictions.

  The skeptics weren’t entirely quiet. Shortly before the invasion, Hitler sent military staffers to give briefings on the Soviet economy. They argued that the country wouldn’t be capable of producing good armaments to replace its losses quickly. After one such lecture, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of military intelligence, turned to his colleagues. “Gentlemen, do you really believe all the nonsense you heard today?” he asked. “To the best knowledge of the experts in my department, the entire situation is quite different. So far, no one has succeeded in de
feating and conquering Russia!”

  But the plain fact was that, by then, even those generals who may have shared those doubts were too intimidated by Hitler to speak up. And most had come to the conclusion that their leader had been proven right before, whatever their reservations, and he’d be proven right again. Before he was hanged in Nuremberg in 1946, another top commander, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, wrote off his willingness to believe the Führer partly to ignorance, partly to blind faith. “I believed in Hitler and knew little of the facts myself,” he said. “I’m not a tactician, nor did I know Russian military and economic strength. How could I?”

  Whatever the top brass’s real feelings about invading the Soviet Union, they quickly began questioning Hitler’s military acumen once that invasion was under way. It was one thing to defer to their leader on the major issues of war and peace. It was quite another to sit by quietly while he wavered on how to take advantage of the initial German successes or when he ordered his troops to do battle where they were likely to dissipate rather than concentrate their energy and strength.

  While the German propaganda machine was trumpeting the successes of the forces in the early weeks of Operation Barbarossa, the commanders on the ground knew they were often paying a heavier price for them than expected in terms of casualties—and that, in many areas, the German advance wasn’t moving as swiftly as they had hoped. The forces of Army Group North were still a long way from reaching Leningrad, and it wouldn’t be until late September that they would get close enough to begin the infamous nine-hundred-day siege of the city. Heavy rains were slowing the advance of units in Army Group South, providing a disturbing preview of the much heavier precipitation of late summer and early fall that would bog down entire armies. As the Germans were quickly learning, roads that were marked on their maps would often prove to be no more than mud tracks that would virtually disappear when the weather failed to cooperate.