The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  Yet the German victories, spectacular as they were, came at a heavy price. The Greeks and their allies had fought determinedly, and the invading Germans had not escaped without casualties. In Crete, 3,352 out of a total of 17,500 invading German troops had been killed, persuading the German armed forces not to mount a similar airborne operation against Malta or Cyprus.111 ‘Our proud paratroop unit,’ wrote one soldier after the victory, ‘never recovered from the enormous losses sustained on Crete.’112 More seriously, the occupation of the conquered territories soon proved to be far from a simple matter. While Bulgaria moved into eastern Macedonia and western Thrace, expelling over 100,000 Greeks from the area and bringing in Bulgarian settlers in a brutal act of ‘ethnic cleansing’, a puppet government was installed in Greece to maintain the fiction of independence. However, the real power lay with the German army, which occupied key strategic points on the mainland and some of the islands, especially Crete, and the Italians, who were given control over most of the rest of the country. As German troops entered Athens, tired, hungry and without supplies, they began to demand free meals in restaurants, to loot the houses in which they were billeted, and to stop passers-by in the streets and relieve them of their watches and jewellery. One inhabitant of the city, the musicologist Minos Dounias, asked:

  Where is the traditional German sense of honour? I lived in Germany thirteen years and no one cheated me. Now suddenly . . . they have become thieves. They empty houses of whatever meets their eye. In Pistolakis’s house they took the pillow-slips and grabbed the Cretan heirlooms from the valuable collection they have. From the poor houses in the area they seized sheets and blankets. From other neighbourhoods they grab oil paintings and even the metal knobs from the doors.113

  While the ordinary troops were stealing what they could, supply officers were seizing large quantities of foodstuffs, cotton, leather and much else besides. All available stocks of olive oil and rice were requisitioned. 26,000 oranges, 4,500 lemons and 100,000 cigarettes were shipped off the island of Chios in the first three weeks of the occupation. Companies such as Krupps and I. G. Farben sent in agents to effect the compulsory purchase of mining and industrial facilities at low prices.114

  As a result of this massive assault on the country’s economy, unemployment in Greece rocketed and food prices, already high because of the damage caused by military action, went through the roof. Looting and requisitioning led to peasant farmers hoarding their produce and attacking agents sent from the towns to collect the harvest. Local military commanders tried to keep produce within their region, disrupting or even cutting off supplies to the major cities. Rationing was introduced, and while the Italians began to send in extra supplies to Greece to alleviate the situation, the authorities in Berlin refused to follow suit, arguing that this would jeopardize the food situation in Germany. Soon hunger and malnutrition were stalking the streets of Athens. Fuel supplies were unavailable, or too expensive, to heat people’s houses in the cold winter of 1941-2. People begged in the streets for food, ransacked rubbish bins for scraps, and in their desperation started to eat grass. German army officers amused themselves by tossing scraps from balconies to gangs of children and watching them fight for the pieces. People, especially children, succumbed to disease, and began dying in the streets. Overall death rates rose five- or even sevenfold in the winter of 1941-2; the Red Cross estimated that a quarter of a million Greeks died as a result of hunger and associated diseases between 1941 and 1943.115

  In the mountainous areas of northern Greece armed bands attacked German supply routes and there were some German casualties; the regional German army commander burned four villages and shot 488 Greek civilians in reprisal. In Crete, stranded British soldiers took part in resistance activities, in the course of which a German general was kidnapped. Whether or not the savage reprisals of the German army had any effect is uncertain. The general state of hunger and exhaustion of the Greek people meant that there were few attempts at armed resistance in the first year or so of the occupation, and no co-ordinated leadership.116

  III

  The situation in occupied Yugoslavia was dramatically different. An artificial creation that had bound together in a single state a variety of ethnic and religious groups since the end of the First World War, Yugoslavia was torn by bitter inter-communal feuds and rivalries that broke out in full force as soon as the Germans invaded. The German Reich annexed the northern part of Slovenia, south of the Austrian border, while Italy incorporated the Adriatic coast down to (and including some of ) the Dalmatian islands and took over the administration of the bulk of Montenegro. Albania, an Italian possession since April 1939, occupied a large chunk of the south-east, including much of Kosovo and western Macedonia, as well as ingesting part of Montenegro, while the voracious Hungarians gobbled up the Backa and other areas they had ruled until 1918, and the Bulgarians, as well as seizing most of Macedonia from the Greeks, marched into the Yugoslav part of Macedonia. The rest of the country was split into two. Hitler was determined to reward his allies and to punish the Serbs. On 10 April 1941, the day that German forces entered Belgrade, the Croatian fascist leader Ante Paveli’, with German encouragement, declared an independent Croatia, encompassing all areas inhabited by Croats, including Bosnia and Hercegovina. The newly independent state of Croatia was far larger than rump Serbia. Paveli’ immediately allied himself with Germany and declared war on the Allies. Like his equivalent, Quisling, in Norway, Paveli’ was an extremist who had little popular support. A nationalist lawyer, he had formed his organization when King Alexander had imposed a Serb-dominated dictatorship in 1929 following demonstrations in which Serb police had killed a number of Croatian nationalists. Known as the ‘Ustashe’ (insurgents), Pavelić’s movement had scored its most spectacular coup in 1934 when its agents had collaborated with Macedonian terrorists in the assassination of the Yugoslav king, along with the French Foreign Minister, during a state visit to France in 1934. The subsequent repression of his organization had meant that Paveli’ had been obliged to run it from exile in Italy, where he had converted it into a fully fledged fascist movement, complete with a racial doctrine that saw the Croatians as ‘western’ rather than Slav. He gave it the mission of saving the Catholic, Christian West against the threat posed by Orthodox Slavs, atheistical Bolsheviks and Jews. By the beginning of the 1940s, however, he is estimated to have won the support of no more than 40,000 out of 6 million Croats in Yugoslavia.117

  Hitler initially wanted to appoint the leader of the moderate Croatian Peasant Party, Vladko Maˇek, as head of the new state, but when he refused, the choice fell on Paveli’, who returned from exile and proclaimed a one-party state of Croatians.118 Paveli’ set about recruiting young men from the urban sub-proletariat for the Ustashe, and almost immediately set in motion a massive wave of ethnic cleansing, using terror and genocide to drive out the new state’s 2 million Serbs, 30,000 Gypsies and 45,000 Jews or turn them at least into nominal Croats by converting them to Catholicism. Ultra-nationalist students and many Croatian-nationalist Catholic clergy, especially Franciscan monks, joined in the action with gusto. Already on 17 April 1941 a decree proclaimed that anyone guilty of offending against the honour of the Croat nation, either in the past, present or future, had committed high treason and thus could be killed. Another decree defined the Croats as Aryan and banned intermarriage with non-Aryans. Sexual relations between male Jews and female Croats were outlawed, though not the other way round. All non-Croats were excluded from citizenship. While the new treason law was at least paid lip-service in the towns, the Ustashe did not bother even with the appearance of legality in the countryside. After shooting dead some 300 Serbs, including women and children, in the town of Glina in July 1941, the Ustashe offered an amnesty to the inhabitants of the surrounding villages if they converted to Catholicism. 250 people turned up at the Orthodox Church in Glina for the ceremony. Once inside, they were greeted not by a Catholic priest but by Ustashe militia, who forced them to lie down and then bea
t their heads in with spiked clubs. All over the new Croatia, similarly terrible scenes of mass murder were enacted during the summer and autumn of 1941. On several occasions, Serb villagers were herded into the local church, the windows boarded over, and the building burned to the ground along with everybody in it. Croatian Ustashe units gouged out the eyes of Serbian men and cut off the women’s breasts with penknives.119

  The first concentration camp in Croatia opened at the end of April 1941, and on 26 June a law was enacted providing for a network of camps across the country. The purpose of the camps was not to hold opponents of the regime, but to exterminate ethnic and religious minorities. In the Jasenovac camp system alone, more than 20,000 Jews are thought to have perished. Death was due above all to disease and malnutrition, but Ustashe militia, egged on by some Franciscan friars, frequently beat inmates to death with hammers in night-long sessions of mass murder. At the Loborgrad camp, 1,500 Jewish women were subjected to repeated rape by the commander and his staff. When typhus broke out in the camp at Stara Gradiska, the chief administrator sent sufferers to the disease-free camp at Djakovo so the inmates there could be infected too. On 24 July 1941, the curate of Udbina wrote: ‘Up to now, my brothers, we have been working for our religion with the cross and the breviary, but the time has come when we shall work with a revolver and a rifle.’120 The head of the Catholic Church in Croatia, Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac, a bitter opponent of Orthodox ‘schismatics’, declared that the hand of God was at work in the removal of the Serbian Orthodox yoke. Paveli’ was even granted a private audience with the Pope on 18 May 1941. Eventually, however, Stepinac was moved to protest against forced conversions that were all too obviously achieved through terror, though his condemnation of the killings did not come until 1942, when Father Filipovi’, who had led murder squads at Jasenovac, was expelled from the Franciscan order. By 1943 Stepinac was condemning the registration and deportation to extermination camps of the remaining Croatian Jews. But this was all rather late in the day. By this time, probably about 30,000 Jews had been killed, along with most of the country’s Gypsies (many of whom died working in inhuman conditions on the Sava dike construction project), while the best estimates put the number of Serb victims at around 300,000. Such was the horror generated above all in Italy by these massacres, as reports of the atrocities were publicized by the thousands of Serbian and Jewish refugees who crossed the border into Dalmatia, that the Italian army began to move on to Croatian territory, declaring that it would protect any minorities it found there. But it was too late for most. In the longer term, the Croatian genocide created memories of deep and lasting bitterness among the Serbs. It still had not been forgotten by the time Serbia and Croatia eventually regained their independence after the collapse of the postwar Yugoslav state, in the 1990s.121

  IV

  The half-hearted nature of Hitler’s preparations for the seaborne invasion of Britain reflected not least the fact that already before the end of July 1940 his mind was turning to a plan far closer to his heart: the conquest of Russia. This had been at the very centre of Hitler’s thinking since the early 1920s. Already in his autobiographical political tract My Struggle he had declared in uncompromising terms the necessity of acquiring ‘living-space’ for the Germans in Eastern Europe. He had repeated this in numerous addresses to his military staff, most notably on 3 February 1933, when he had explicitly promised the army chiefs that he would launch a war to Germanize Eastern Europe some time in the future.122 Meeting the chiefs of the armed forces towards the end of July 1940, Hitler said that it was time to begin planning for this event. Eighty to 100 divisions would be needed to crush the Red Army. It would be child’s play in comparison to the invasion of France.123 In fact, the army had already carried out feasibility studies and concluded that an invasion was not practicable before the following spring. Further studies were prepared with a view to launching an attack in May 1941.

  The prospect of a war on two fronts did not alarm Hitler. France had been eliminated, Britain seemed close to collapse. As for the Red Army, it had been decimated by Stalin’s purges, and it had proved hopelessly incompetent in the war with Finland. Slavs in any case were subhumans incapable of putting up serious resistance to a superior race. Bolshevism only made them weaker. Hitler regarded it as a tool of the world Jewish conspiracy, which had succeeded in enslaving the Slavs and bending them to its will. There were, of course, many reasons why this view was little more than a fantasy, not the least of them being the fact that Stalin was himself antisemitic and had dismissed his Foreign Minister, Litvinov, in 1939, among other things because he was a Jew. Still, thought Hitler, if the racially superior Western European nations had been crushed so easily, then what chance did the Slavs stand? ‘The Russians are inferior,’ Hitler told Brauchitsch and Halder on 5 December 1940. ‘The army is leaderless.’ The German armed forces would require no more than four or five months to crush the Soviet Union.124

  Aside from the ideological primacy of ‘living-space’ there were also pragmatic reasons for attacking the Soviet Union. Throughout 1940 and the first half of 1941, the Third Reich depended heavily on supplies from Eastern Europe. The non-aggression pact signed between Ribbentrop and the Soviet Foreign Minister, Molotov, on 24 August 1939 was still in force at this time, of course.125 Indeed, on 12 November 1940 Molotov himself arrived in Berlin at Hitler’s invitation to discuss future co-operation. On 10 January 1941 the Soviet Union signed a new trade agreement which doubled the quantity of grain exports from the Ukraine to the Third Reich, thus ironically convincing Hitler, if he needed convincing, that the Soviet Union possessed almost limitless supplies of foodstuffs, which would be essential for the further conduct of the war and the general future of the Third Reich. Stalin’s concessions to German trade demands thus did little or nothing to affect the timing of the German invasion.126

  Whatever the Soviets might offer, Hitler had no intention of abandoning his plans. On 18 December 1940 he ordered the armed forces to be ready to crush the Soviet Union in a rapid campaign to begin the following spring. His comparative haste was not least a consequence of his failure to defeat Britain. By 1942, he thought, the USA might well have entered the war on the Allied side. Defeating the Soviets would put Germany in a strong position to deal with the Americans. It would encourage Japan to come into the war against America by eliminating a major threat to Japan’s west. And it would isolate the British still further and perhaps finally force them to the negotiating table. This was indeed the primary initial reason for launching the invasion in 1941. ‘But if Russia is smashed,’ Hitler told his generals on 31 July 1940, ‘it is the end of any hopes that might move England still to hope for a change in the situation.’127 ‘The gentlemen in England aren’t stupid, you know,’ he told Field Marshal Fedor von Bock in early January 1941. ‘They’ll realize there’s no purpose for them carrying on the war when Russia has been beaten and eliminated from it.’128 Moreover, he added some weeks later, it was necessary to launch the invasion before Britain was defeated; if it came afterwards, the German people would not support it. The code name for the invasion, supplied by Hitler himself, was ‘Operation Barbarossa’, named after Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor and German crusader in the twelfth century.129

  As plans became more detailed, the number of divisions to be used in the invasion fluctuated but was eventually set at around 200. The Red Army forces arrayed against the invaders were of a roughly comparable size, but in the minds of Hitler and his military leaders they were far inferior in quality. To be sure, in terms of equipment, the Red Army in the combat zone far outgunned its opponents, with nearly three times as many artillery pieces and the same advantage in tanks. Even in the air, Soviet forces had a strong numerical superiority, with twice as many combat aircraft as the Germans and their allies. But many of these machines were obsolescent, new tank models and new artillery pieces were not yet being produced in any numbers, and Stalin’s purges of the 1930s had seriously affected aircraft and munition
s production managers and designers, military commanders and senior air force officers.130 Moreover, German preparations were thorough. Elated by the success of the armoured divisions in the invasion of France, Hitler ordered arms production to focus on tanks. The number of panzer divisions in the German army doubled between the summer of 1940 and the summer of 1941, backed by a corresponding increase in the number of half-track vehicles with which to move the divisions of highly mobile infantry swiftly in behind the tanks to press home the advantage. German arms production in the year before the invasion of the Soviet Union really did concentrate on providing the means to fight a classic war of lightning movement, as it had not done before the invasion of France. To back this up, production was switched from ammunition, of which there were now plentiful supplies, to machine-guns and field artillery. Despite continued bureaucratic infighting between different procurement and economic management agencies under the control of Fritz Todt, Georg Thomas and Hermann G̈ring, the arms industry of the Third Reich did therefore operate with some effectiveness in the run-up to Operation Barbarossa.131

  Over the first half of 1941, railway and other communications in German-occupied Poland were improved, and supplies stockpiled in the border area. Strategic plans finally envisaged cutting off and destroying Soviet forces on the border and advancing rapidly to a line from Archangel to Astrakhan. In the north, Finland, bitterly resentful at the loss of territory to the Soviet Union at the end of the ‘Winter War’ in 1940, agreed to mobilize its sixteen-division army, newly organized and provided with the latest German equipment, though its objectives went no further than the recovery of the lost territory.132 In the south, Romania supplied eighteen divisions to the invading forces.133 Romanian troops were joined by a small force of Hungarians, but the two forces had to be kept apart because of the poor relations between the two countries. Most of the Hungarian forces’ equipment was obsolete, the rifles used by the infantry frequently jammed, they had only 190 tanks, which were also out of date, and six of the ten ‘Alpine’ battalions that joined in the invasion of Russia were mounted on bicycles. Far more important was the fact that Hungary was rapidly becoming an important source of petroleum oil for the Germans, until by the middle of the war it was the second-most important supplier after Romania.134 The participation of the Hungarians was not least the consequence of the anxiety of the Hungarian ruler Admiral Mikl’s H’rthy that the Romanians would steal a march on him and get back some of the territory they had lost to Hungary in 1940. In similar fashion, the participation of the German client state of Slovakia, which sent two divisions intended mainly to provide security behind the front, was intended to gain German goodwill in the face of further Hungarian demands on its territory. By contrast, Mussolini’s contribution of 60,000 Italian troops did not take part in the invasion itself, and was made in the vague hope that the Germans would look favourably on Italian aspirations in the postwar peace settlement. 45,000 anti-Communist Spanish volunteers went to join the fray on the Leningrad front, inspired by ideological commitment and sanctioned by Franco as a gesture of gratitude to Hitler for his help in the fighting that had brought him to power. The volunteers cannot have been amused when they were greeted on their arrival by a German air force band mistakenly playing the national anthem of the Republicans, their defeated opponents in the Civil War.135