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 majorit
y 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.
Army Group South, commanded by Generalfeldmarschall von Rundstedt, advanced into Ukraine. Rundstedt was soon supported by two Romanian armies eager to take back Bessarabia from the Soviets. Their dictator and commander-in-chief, Marshal Ion Antonescu, had assured Hitler ten days before: ‘Of course I’ll be there from the start. When it’s a question of action against the Slavs, you can always count on Romania.’
Stalin, having drafted a speech announcing the invasion, told Molotov to read it on Soviet radio at noon. It was broadcast over loudspeakers to the crowds in the streets. The foreign minister’s wooden delivery ended with the declaration: ‘Our cause is just, the enemy will be smashed, victory will be ours.’ Despite his uninspiring tone, the people as a whole were outraged by this violation of the Motherland. Vast queues of volunteers immediately formed at recruiting centres. But other, less orderly queues also developed, with the panic-buying of tinned or dried foods and the withdrawal of money from banks.
There was also a strange sense of relief that the treacherous attack had released the Soviet Union from the unnatural alliance with Nazi Germany. The young physicist Andrei Sakharov was later greeted by an aunt in a bomb shelter during a Luftwaffe raid on Moscow. ‘For the first time in years,’ she said, ‘I feel like a Russian again!’ Similar emotions of relief were also expressed in Berlin that at last they were fighting ‘the real enemy’.
Fighter regiments of Red Army aviation, with inexperienced pilots in obsolete machines, stood little chance against the Luftwaffe. German fighter aces soon began to clock up huge scores, and referred to their easy kills as ‘infanticide’. Their Soviet opponents felt psychologically defeated even before encountering their enemy. But, although many pilots avoided battle, a longing for vengeance began to grow. A handful of the bravest simply rammed a German aircraft if they got a chance, knowing that there was little hope of fastening on to its tail to shoot it down.
The novelist and war correspondent Vasily Grossman described waiting for the aircraft of a fighter regiment to return to an airfield near Gomel in Belorussia. ‘Finally, after a successful attack on a German column, the fighters returned and landed. The commander’s aircraft had human flesh stuck in the radiator. That’s because the supporting aircraft had hit a truck with ammunition that blew up at the very moment when the leader was flying over it. Poppe, the commander, is picking the mess out with a file. They summon a doctor who examines the bloody mass attentively and pronounces it “Aryan meat!” Everyone laughs. Yes, a pitiless time–a time of iron–has come!’
‘The Russian is a tough opponent,’ wrote a German soldier. ‘We take hardly any prisoners, and shoot them all instead.’ When marching forward, some took pot-shots for fun at crowds of Red Army prisoners being herded back to makeshift camps, where they were left to starve in the open. A number of German officers were appalled, but most were more concerned about the lack of discipline.
On the Soviet side, Beria’s NKVD massacred the inmates of its prisons near the front so that they would not be saved by the German advance. Nearly 10,000 Polish prisoners were murdered. In the city of Lwów alone, the NKVD killed around 4,000 people. The stench of decomposing bodies in the heat of late June permeated the whole town. The NKVD slaughter prompted Ukrainian nationalists to begin a guerrilla war against the Soviet occupiers. In a frenzy of fear and hatred, the NKVD massacred another 10,000 prisoners in the areas of Bessarabia and the Baltic states, seized the year before. Other prisoners were forced to march eastwards, with NKVD guards shooting any who collapsed.
On 23 June, Stalin set up a supreme command headquarters, giving it the old Tsarist name of the Stavka. A few days later, he entered the commissariat of defence, accompanied by Beria and Molotov. There they found Timoshenko and Zhukov attempting in vain to establish some sort of order along the enormous front. Minsk had just fallen. Stalin peered at the situation maps and read some of the reports. He was clearly shaken to find that the situation was even more disastrous than he had feared. He cursed Timoshenko and Zhukov, who did not hold back in their replies. ‘Lenin founded our state,’ he was heard to say, ‘and we’ve fucked it up.’
The Soviet leader disappeared to his dacha at Kuntsevo, leaving the other members of the Politburo bewildered. There were mutterings that Molotov should take over, but they were far too frightened to move against the dictator. On 30 June, they decided that a State Committee for Defence with absolute power had to be set up. They drove out to Kuntsevo to see Stalin. He looked haggard and wary when they entered, clearly believing that they had come to arrest him. He asked why they had come. When they explained that he had to lead this emergency war cabinet, he betrayed his surprise, but agreed to take on the role. There have been suggestions that Stalin’s departure from the Kremlin was a ploy in the tradition of Ivan the Terrible to encourage any opponents within the Politburo to reveal themselves, enabling them to be crushed, but this is pure speculation.
Stalin returned to the Kremlin the next day, 1 July. Two days later he made his own broadcast to the Soviet peoples. His instincts served him well. He surprised his listeners by addressing them as ‘Comrades, citizens, brothers and sisters’. No master of the Kremlin had ever ad
dressed his people in such familial terms. He called upon them to defend the Motherland in a scorched-earth policy of total warfare, evoking the Patriotic War against Napoleon. Stalin understood that the Soviet peoples were far more likely to lay down their lives for their country than for any Communist ideology. Knowing that patrotisim is shaped by war, Stalin perceived that this invasion would revive it. Nor did he conceal the gravity of the situation, even if he did nothing to acknowledge his part in the catastrophe. He also ordered a people’s levy–narodnoe opolchenie–to be set up. These militia battalions of ill-armed cannon-fodder were expected to slow the German panzer divisions, with little more than their bodies.
The terrible suffering of civilians caught up in the fighting did not enter Stalin’s calculations. Refugees, driving the cattle from collective farms in front of them, tried in vain to stay ahead of the panzer divisions. On 26 June, the writer Aleksandr Tvardovsky saw an extraordinary sight from his carriage window when the train halted at a wayside stop in Ukraine. ‘The whole field was covered with people who were lying, sitting, swarming,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘They had bundles, knapsacks, suitcases, children and handcarts. I had never seen such huge quantities of household things that people took with them when leaving home in haste. There were probably tens of thousands of people in this field… The field got up, started moving, advanced towards the railway, towards the train, started knocking on the walls and windows of carriages. It seemed capable of tipping the train off the rails. The train began to move…’
Hundreds if not thousands died in the bombing of the cities of Belorussia. Survivors fared little better in their attempts to escape eastwards. ‘After Minsk began to burn,’ a journalist noted, ‘blind men from the home for invalids walked along the highway in a long file, tied to one another with towels.’ Already there were large numbers of war orphans, children whose parents had been killed or lost in the confusion. Suspecting that some of them were used for spying by the Germans, the NKVD treated them with little compassion.
The Second World War Page 27