The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

by Andrew Roberts

  As though the citizens of Occupied Poland, the Ukraine and the Baltic States did not have enough to be terrified of during the German advance, the NKVD also unleashed on them an orgy of sadistic violence quite unlike its normal murder sprees. After Stalin had ordered Beria to purge the Army, wipe out defeatism and rumour-mongering and investigate with maximum distrust anyone who had escaped from the Germans, horrific scenes took place in Russian-held areas just before the Wehrmacht’s arrival. ‘When the prisons were opened up after the Soviet retreat there were scenes of indescribable horror,’ records Richard Overy. ‘Bodies had been savagely mutilated; hundreds of prisoners had been tortured to death rather than dispatched with the usual bullet in the back of the head. In one incident in the Ukraine the NKVD dynamited two cells filled with women prisoners. In another prison the floor was strewn with the tongues, ears and eyes of the dead prisoners.’71 Overy concludes that the NKVD guards had been ‘convulsed by a spasm of retributive violence induced by fear, desperation and rage’. In Lvov alone, 4,000 people were shot, including almost everyone in the city’s prison, which was then burnt down.

  Small wonder, therefore, that when the Germans arrived in many parts of western Russia, the Ukraine and the Baltics, the village elders came out to greet the invaders with their traditional welcoming offers of bread and salt.72 Briefing Hitler on 4 August 1941, Bock was able to ‘plead the cause of the helpful and friendly population’.73 After the Germans had allowed the churches to be reconverted from cinemas and atheist exhibition centres back into places of Orthodox worship, Bock noted in his diary that:

  The population had come, often from far away, cleaned the churches and decorated them with flowers. Many pictures of Christ and icons which had been hidden for decades were brought out. When the military services were over, the people – not just the old, but many young as well – streamed into the churches and kissed the holy objects – including the crosses around the necks of the [German] armed forces chaplains – and often remained there praying till evening. This people will not be difficult to lead!74

  If the German Army had been instructed to embrace this anti-Bolshevik behaviour, and do all in its power to encourage anti-Soviet nationalism, the story of Barbarossa might have been very different. Yet that was not the Nazi way; these regions were earmarked for Lebensraum, so wholesale ethnic cleansing followed, and naturally forced the local populations into outright opposition and partisan activity.

  The Einsatzgruppen that followed the Wehrmacht sacked and burnt villages, enslaving the inhabitants as Slavic Untermenschen, creating implacable enemies among those they did not shoot. Here was yet another crucial instance of Nazi ideology interfering with Germany’s military best interests. ‘One reason why Hitler’s brutal “realism” in fact served him poorly’, observes the historian of the Nazi empire in Europe, ‘was that it deprived the Germans of the chance of exploiting nationalism as a tool of political warfare.’75 When in September 1941 the Abwehr suggested to OKW that a Ukrainian army be raised to fight against the Red Army, the idea was turned down with contempt. It was brought up again in June 1943, but the Führer told Keitel that there was no use ‘claiming that now we just need to establish a Ukrainian state and everything will be all right, and then we’ll get one million soldiers. We won’t get anything – not even one man. That’s a figment of the imagination, just as it was in the past. But we would totally give up our war objective’ – by that he meant Lebensraum and the enslavement of the Slavs.76 Far from nurturing Slavic nationalism, therefore, Hitler merely crushed it.

  Yet such were the cruelties and inefficiencies of the Bolshevik regime that there were many Russians who would have embraced non-Communist, nationalist puppet states if Hitler had set them up, rather than his relying on the same system of direct rule as the Government-General in Poland or the Occupied region of France. Leninism, collectivization, state atheism, the Civil War, repression and the Gulag system of prisons and penal colonies had left a bitter hatred against the Bolsheviks that the Germans ought to have used to their advantage. The nationality question had been decided in favour of the Russians over the 119 other nationalities of the Soviet Union, leaving the proud Ukrainians – several million of whom had been deliberately starved to death in the early 1930s – almost powerless. Many of these nationalities had been part of Greater Russia for less than a century anyway, and had cultures, languages and identities that had somehow survived vicious Bolshevik persecution.

  Although the Germans did initially attempt to pose as liberators to some of these peoples, especially those in the Baltics, the Ukraine, Armenia and Georgia and the Crimean Tatars, this was merely for propaganda purposes and their behaviour on the ground soon made it clear that they simply regarded themselves as conquerors. Yet wherever the Germans did allow a measure of local autonomy – such as to Bronislav Kaminski’s brutal RONA (the Russian National Liberation Army) in the so-called Lokoty Self-Governing District, and to the Cossacks – they tended to fight well. The Cossacks even had autonomous ministries for education, agriculture and healthcare.77 In the Ukraine, for example, the German IL Mountain Corps asked local city leaders to guard their own communities, something that freed up troops for the front line. It worked for a while. The Nazis ought also to have promised the peasants of southern Russia massive agrarian decollectivization, reawakening the hopes of 1917 that they would be allowed their own land and the freedom to cultivate it and to sell their produce for their own profit.

  Good, or at least reasonable, treatment of the immense numbers of Soviet POWs captured in the early stages – over 2 million by November 1941 and 3.6 million by the following March – was also a necessary prerequisite for mass collaboration. Yet here the Nazis, whose plans were for large-scale liquidation, proved themselves incapable of even pretending to act out the role of liberators rather than genocidal conquerors. Lebensraum required annexations, mass executions and the utter enslavement of all Slavic peoples, and this was deemed irreconcilable with a policy of liberation from Stalinism, whatever military advantages beckoned. A more cynical plan would have been to offer Stalin’s subject peoples autonomy until the Bolsheviks were defeated, and only then to put the extermination and Lebensraum plans into operation. Yet the sheer numbers of POWs being captured, the overconfidence inspired by the initial crushing victories, and the food shortages that were already developing in the east made that impractical. With four million soldiers to feed in Russia, almost all of whom were expected under OKW rules to live off the land – despite its being subjected to a scorched-earth policy by the Russians themselves – mass starvation of civilians in western Russia and the Ukraine was probably the only likely outcome, even if the Reich had tried to adopt a conciliatory policy towards Russia’s subject peoples.

  In all, 3.3 million Red Army prisoners were to die in German captivity, or 58 per cent of the total of 5.7 million that were taken. This had even been anticipated in the original German war plans. The Wehrmacht’s Central Economic Agency stated on 2 May 1941 that all German forces involved in Barbarossa would have to ‘be fed at the expense of Russia… thereby tens of millions will undoubtedly starve to death if we take away all we need from the country’.78 This was underlined by the Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, who on 20 June 1941, on the very eve of the invasion, told the bureaucrats who would soon staff the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (Ukraine and Ostland): ‘The southern territories and northern Caucasia will have to make up the deficit in food supplies for the German people. We do not accept that we have any responsibility for feeding the Russian population… from these surplus-producing regions.’79 In fact it was crueller even than that. ‘The purpose of the Russian campaign is to decimate the Slavic population by thirty millions,’ Himmler told colleagues at a weekend party just before Barbarossa.80 With the final Russian death toll at twenty-seven million, he almost reached his target. Hitler’s concept of the Völkerkrieg (clash of peoples) was always intended to end in genocide in the east, or at least in enough ethnic cl
eansing (as it would later be called) to clear the necessary areas for the Aryan farmer–soldiers who were going to colonize the rich agricultural areas. In this as in so much else, the Nazi way of fighting the war triumphed over the most efficient way of finding victory.

  The march on Kiev in July 1941 provided the occasion for one of Hitler’s most controversial decisions of the war, when he opted to take the Ukrainian rather than the Russian capital, although of course he did not see it in those terms at the time. The Soviet Fifth Army had pulled back, but was still capable of threatening the north flank of the German advance into the Ukraine, so OKW determined that as soon as the Red Army near Smolensk had been destroyed, Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Group and the Second Army from Army Group Centre should break off their march on Moscow and swing due south behind the Pripet Marshes to destroy the Soviet Fifth Army and take Kiev in conjunction with the 1st Panzer Group already engaged there. Bock and Guderian opposed this change to the original plan, fearing – rightly as it turned out – that critical momentum would be lost in the drive on the Russian capital, but they were overruled by Hitler. By 11 August 1941 the truth had already dawned upon Franz Halder, as he recorded in his diary:

  The whole situation makes it increasingly plain that we have underestimated the Russian colossus… At the outset of war, we reckoned with about 200 enemy divisions. Now we have already counted 360. These divisions indeed are not armed and equipped according to our standards, and their tactical leadership is often poor. But there they are, and if we smash a dozen of them, the Russians simply put up another dozen. The time factor favours them, as they are near their own resources, while we are moving farther and farther away from ours.81

  In fact the Russians were to field many more divisions than merely 360; some historians have enumerated as many as 600.82

  The war diary of Fedor von Bock, the commander of Army Group Centre, shows how crucial Hitler was to the fateful decision not to push on to Moscow at full strength and speed in August and September 1941. A hint of the Führer’s thoughts came after Generals von Kluge and von Bock had dinner together on 28 July, and Hitler’s chief Army adjutant Rudolf Schmundt arrived at Bock’s headquarters at Novy Borissov late that evening to say of the Führer’s plans that ‘the main thing is to eliminate the area of Leningrad, then the raw materials region of the Donets Basin. The Führer cares nothing about Moscow itself. The enemy at Gomel is to be wiped out to clear the way for future operations.’ Bock’s understandable reaction was: ‘That differs somewhat from what is said in the Army Command’s directive!’83 Directive No. 21 had in fact been ambiguous, giving as equal priorities ‘the prompt seizure of the economically important Donets Basin’ and a ‘rapid arrival at Moscow’.

  A week later, on 4 August, Hitler arrived at Novy Borissov himself, and said that he saw the Crimea as a primary objective, otherwise it might become ‘a Soviet aircraft carrier operating against the Ruman ian oil-fields’. He congratulated Bock on his ‘unprecedented success’ so far, but Bock gleaned from the discussion after his briefing that ‘it appears that he is not yet clear on how the operations should now proceed.’84 Heinz Guderian (2nd Panzer Group) and Hermann Hoth (3rd Panzer Group) explained that relief and repairs necessitated by their rapid advance would take time, which Hitler accepted. The Führer then spoke of ‘an attack to the east’, with which Bock ‘happily agreed and said that in this way we should surely meet the Russian strength and decision against what was probably his last forces to be hoped for there’. In fact of course the Russians had plenty more forces, but a massive assault on Moscow seems therefore still to have been contemplated in early August. This was thought of as the great Entscheidungsschlacht (decisive battle) as prescribed by Clausewitz.

  The early nineteenth-century Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz was the acknowledged guru of the German High Command, but was he actually read by them? Kleist thought not. ‘Clausewitz’s teachings had fallen into neglect by this generation,’ he told Liddell Hart after the war. ‘His phrases were quoted but his books were not closely studied. He was regarded as a military philosopher, rather than as a practical teacher.’ Kleist believed that Schlieffen’s writings ‘received much greater attention’, which was undoubtedly true in Hitler’s case. As for Clausewitz’s maxim that ‘War is nothing but the continuation of politics by other means,’ Kleist believed that ‘Under the Nazis we tended to reverse Clausewitz’s dictum, and to regard peace as a continuation of war.’85 Certainly, Clausewitz’s many Cassandrine warnings about the dangers of invading Russia – he had personally witnessed Napoleon’s nemesis in the retreat from Moscow from the Russian side – went unheeded. In his chapter on the ‘Interdependence of the Elements of War’ in his magnum opus On War, he had written:

  Within the concept of absolute war, then, war is indivisible, and its component parts (the individual victories) are of value only in relation to the whole. Conquering Moscow and half of Russia in 1812 was of no avail to Bonaparte unless it brought him the peace he had in view. But these successes were only a part of his plan of campaign: what was still missing was the destruction of the Russian army. If that achievement had been added to the rest, peace would have been as sure as things of that sort ever can be. But it was too late to achieve the second part of his plan; his chance had gone. Thus the successful stage was not only wasted but led to disaster.86

  It was a vital part of Clausewitz’s message, but not one quoted by many generals – including Kleist – in 1941–42 when it needed to be.

  Hitler was having severe doubts about the wisdom of prioritizing the drive on Moscow over what were – for him – some even more important targets. ‘Modern warfare is all economic warfare,’ he stated, ‘and the demands of economic warfare must be given priority.’87 His desire to take the cereal crops of the Ukraine, the oil of the Caucasus and the coal of the Donets region – and thus simultaneously deny them to Stalin – led him to make the key error of not pushing on to Moscow, but instead driving south to take Kiev. The Clausewitzians on his General Staff wanted to defeat the enemy’s main force, and take Moscow as soon as possible, but Hitler’s more economics-based grand strategy prevailed. By dispersing his forces for these various tasks, he threw away his chance of taking Moscow, but he did not suspect so at the time, believing that that too was attainable before the onset of winter. Yet Moscow was the nodal point of Russia’s north–south transport hub, was the administrative and political capital, was vital for Russian morale and was an important industrial centre in its own right.

  On 21 August, Hitler sent Bock a new directive stating that:

  The army’s proposal for the continuation of the operations… does not correspond with my plans. I order the following… The most important objective to be achieved before the onset of winter is not the occupation of Moscow, but the taking of the Crimea, the industrial and coal region of the Donets Basin and the severing of Russian oil deliveries from the Caucasus area, in the north the encirclement of Leningrad and link-up with the Finns.88

  This Directive was, in Halder’s view, ‘decisive to the outcome of this campaign’. The next day, on 22 August, OKW telephoned Bock with the details, informing him that ‘on orders from the Führer, strong elements of the 2nd Army and the Guderian Group were to be diverted south, in order to intercept the enemy retreating east in front of the inner wings of Army Groups South and Centre and ease the crossing of the Dnieper by Army Group South.’ Bock immediately telephoned Brauchitsch ‘and made clear to him the questionable wisdom of such an operation’. Yet he does not appear to have made himself clear at all, because when that afternoon someone else attempted to talk him out of the operation, Brauchitsch had said: ‘Bock isn’t at all unhappy about the affair.’ Bock then called Halder, telling him that he considered the new plan:

  unfortunate, above all because it placed the attack to the east in question. All the directives say that taking Moscow isn’t important!! I want to smash the enemy army and the bulk of this army is opposite my front! Turning so
uth is a secondary operation – even if just as big – which will jeopardize the execution of the main operation, namely the destruction of the Russian armed forces before winter.

  That evening the Directive came through unaltered, however, and Bock concluded of his protest to Halder: ‘It did no good!’89

  Guderian flew off to see Hitler personally, but was greeted by Brauchitsch with the words: ‘It is all decided and there’s no point in griping!’ Guderian nonetheless described the seriousness of the situation to Hitler, but when he was told ‘how decisive to the war the advance to the south was’, he buckled and told the Führer, in Bock’s astonished words, ‘that an immediate advance by XXIV Panzer Corps and other armoured forces was possible!’ Bock, who wanted to be the general who captured Moscow, and despaired of having such large forces removed from his army group, can be forgiven his overuse of the exclamation mark considering the circumstances, noting of OKW on 24 August: ‘They apparently do not wish to exploit under any circumstances the opportunity decisively to defeat the Russians before winter!’90 He later added that ‘the objective to which I devoted all my thought, the destruction of the main strength of the enemy army, has been dropped.’

  Clausewitz would not have approved, but in Hitler’s defence neither Halder nor Brauchitsch – who supported Bock – seems to have put up much resistance to the diversion southwards of Guderian’s crack units, and thus almost the emasculation of Army Group Centre’s forward thrusting power at such a critical stage. ‘In our private circles,’ Keitel recalled, ‘the Führer had often cracked jokes at Halder’s expense and labelled him a “little fellow”.’91 Bock contented himself with writing a pre-emptive I-told-you-so in his diary: ‘If, after all the successes, the campaign in the east now trickles away in dismal defensive fighting for my Army Group, it is not my fault.’92 Sacked in December 1941, recalled in March 1942 and then sacked again that July, Bock died with his family in an air raid only three days before the end of the war in Europe.