The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  A dense network of roads would be constructed, he went on, ‘studded along their whole length with German towns’, and around these towns ‘our colonists will settle’. Colonists of German blood would come from all over Western Europe and even America. There would be twenty million of them by the 1960s, while Russian towns would be allowed to ‘fall to pieces’.164

  ‘In a hundred years,’ Hitler declared, ‘our language will be the language of Europe.’ It was not least for this reason that he had replaced Gothic lettering with Roman lettering in all official correspondence and publications in the autumn of 1940.165 Some months later, he returned to his vision for the new German east. New railways would have to be built to ensure ‘rapid communication’ between major centres all the way to Constantinople:

  I envisage through-trains covering the distances at an average speed of two hundred kilometres an hour, and our present rolling-stock is obviously unsuitable for the purpose. Larger carriages will be required - probably double-deckers, which will give the passengers on the upper deck an opportunity of admiring the landscape. This will presumably entail the construction of a very much broader-gauge permanent way than that at present in use, and the number of lines must be doubled in order to be able to cope with any intensification of traffic . . . This alone will enable us to realise our plans for the exploitation of the Eastern territories.166

  The new railway system would be augmented by an equally ambitious network of six-lane motorways. ‘Of what importance will the thousand-kilometre stretch to the Crimea be,’ he asked, ‘when we can cover it at eighty kilometres an hour along the motorway and do the whole distance easily in two days!’ He envisaged a time when it would be possible to go ‘from Klagenfurt to Trondheim and from Hamburg to the Crimea along a Reich Motorway’.167

  As this scenario developed, Russian society would be left far behind. ‘In comparison with Russia,’ he declared, ‘even Poland looked like a civilised country.’168 The Germans would show ‘no remorse’ towards the indigenous inhabitants. ‘We’re not going to play at children’s nurses; we’re absolutely without obligations as far as these people are concerned. ’ They would not be provided with medical or educational facilities; not only would they be denied inoculation and other preventive measures, but they should be persuaded that vaccinations were positively dangerous to their health.169 Eventually Russian society, these views implied, would wither away and disappear, along with other Slavic societies in Belarus, the Ukraine and Poland. In a hundred years’ time, the Slavic population of Eastern Europe would have been replaced by ‘millions of German peasants’ living on the land.170 What this would mean in more concrete terms was already clear by the beginning of 1941. The aim of the war against the Soviet Union, SS chief Heinrich Himmler told SS leaders at the Wewelsburg Castle in January 1941, was to reduce the Slavic population by 30 million, a figure that was later repeated by other Nazi leaders, including Hermann Göring, who told the Italian Foreign Minister Ciano on 15 November 1941: ‘This year, 20-30 million people in Russia will starve.’171 The 30 million, not just Russians but also other inhabitants of the Soviet Union in areas controlled by the Germans, were to die of hunger, then, and not over the long term, but almost immediately. Soviet cities, many of them created by Stalin’s brutal forced industrialization in the 1930, were to be starved out of existence, while practically the entire food production of the conquered areas was to be used to feed the invading German armies and maintain nutritional standards at home, so that the malnourishment and starvation that (Hitler believed) had played such a baleful part in the collapse of the German home front in the First World War would not be repeated in the Second. This ‘hunger plan’ was developed above all by Herbert Backe, the State Secretary in the Agriculture Ministry, a hardline Nazi who had worked with Reich Agriculture Minister Richard Walther Darre’, the leading Nazi ideologue of the peasantry, for many years and was on good personal terms with Heydrich. But it was also agreed by General Georg Thomas, the leading arms procurement figure in the central administration of the armed forces. Meeting with General Thomas on 2 May 1941, the State Secretaries of the relevant ministries agreed that the armed forces would have to live off the resources of the conquered lands in the east, and concluded that ‘without doubt, umpteen million people will starve if what is necessary for us is taken out of the country’.172

  These ideas found concrete expression in the so-called ‘General Plan for the East’, which Himmler commissioned from the office of the Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of the German Race on 21 June 1941. The first version of the plan was handed to Himmler on 15 July 1941 by Professor Konrad Meyer, the academic expert in the office who specialized in settlement policy. After a good deal of discussion and further refinement, it was finalized in May 1942, approved by Hitler, and formally adopted by the Reich Security Head Office in July 1942. The General Plan for the East, now the official policy of the Third Reich, proposed to remove between 80 and 8 5 per cent of the Polish population, 64 per cent of the Ukrainian and 75 per cent of the Belarussian, expelling them further east or allowing them to perish from disease and malnutrition. Not counting the Jewish population of these areas, the Plan thus envisaged the forcible uprooting of at least 31 million people from their homes, in what would no doubt be a murderously violent process of dispossession; some estimates, taking into account projected population increases, put the number at no fewer than 45 million. Not only the Polish territories incorporated into Germany, but also the General Government, Latvia and Estonia and indeed the greater part of East-Central Europe would become completely German within twenty years. The space vacated by the Slavs would be occupied by 10 million Germans. The borders of Germany would in effect be extended a thousand kilometres to the east.173

  Himmler and the SS presented this as the resumption and completion of what they saw as the civilizing mission of the Crusading Teutonic Knights of the Middle Ages. But it was to be a mission updated and modernized to suit the conditions of the twentieth century. The new German settlers, Meyer proclaimed, would not be hidebound traditionalists but progressive farmers, equipped with the latest machinery, dedicated to creating an agricultural wonderland that would keep the new, vastly extended Germany well fed and supplied. They would own farms much like those of the Reich Entailed Farmers back home.174 A third of them would be retired SS officers, providing an ideological and military underpinning to the whole enterprise. And they would be joined by labourers from the overcrowded peasant regions of the German south-west, since native labour would no longer be available. The Plan took into account Hitler’s vision of large, modern towns and industrial centres linked by advanced means of communication, too: it aimed at a farming population little more than a third of the total in the new regions of German settlement. Meyer put the total investment required to realize the Plan at no less than 40 billion Reichsmarks, a sum Himmler revised upwards to 67 billion, equivalent to two-thirds of Germany’s Gross Domestic Product in 1941, or half a million Reichsmarks for every square kilometre of the newly settled regions. This gigantic sum would be raised from a variety of sources: the state budget, SS funds, local authorities, the railways and the private sector. The ambition of the Plan was simply staggering. It proposed destruction on a scale never before contemplated in human history.175

  The invasion of the Soviet Union would transfer to a vastly bigger area the brutal and murderous policies that had already been implemented in Poland since the beginning of the war: ethnic deportation and resettlement, population transfer, Germanization, cultural genocide and the reduction of the Slavic population by expropriation, starvation and disease. But it was to be even more radical than the occupation of Poland. Hitler, the Nazis and most of the leading generals saw Poles as little more than Slavic subhumans, but they saw the Soviet Union as a threat, since its Slav inhabitants were led by what they regarded as ruthless and cunning leaders of the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ world conspiracy to undermine the German race and German civilization. While he had nothing
but contempt for the Poles and their leaders, Hitler repeatedly expressed his personal admiration for Stalin, ‘one of the most extraordinary figures in world history’, as he called him in July 1941.176 ‘Stalin, too,’ Hitler told his dinner companions a year later, ‘must command our unconditional respect. In his own way he is a hell of a fellow! He knows his models, Genghiz Khan and the others, very well . . .’177 ‘Stalin,’ said Hitler on another occasion, ‘is half beast, half giant . . . If we had given him another ten years, Europe would have been swept away, as it was at the time of the Huns.’178 Thus, Hitler told army chiefs on 17 March 1941, ‘The intelligentsia deployed by Stalin must be annihilated.’179 Just as the Polish intelligentsia had been killed, now the same fate was to befall its Soviet counterpart. On 30 March 1941 Hitler elaborated on this view in a speech the essential points of which were noted down by General Halder. The coming war would be no ordinary war: ‘Struggle of two world-views against one another. Annihilatory judgement against Bolshevism, it’s the same as asocial criminality. Communism tremendous danger for the future. We must abandon the standpoint of soldierly comradeship. The Communist is first and last no comrade. This is a war of annihilation.’180 Political commissars in the Red Army in particular were to be treated not as soldiers but as criminals and dealt with accordingly. Hitler demanded the ‘annihilation of the Bolshevik commissars and the Communist intelligentsia . . . The conflict, ’ he warned, ‘will be very different from the conflict in the west.’181

  III

  On 19 May 1941, guidelines issued to the troops for the invasion demanded ‘ruthless and energetic action against Bolshevik agitators, irregulars, saboteurs, Jews and total elimination of all active and passive resistance’.182 The inclusion of ‘Jews’ as a separate category in this list was of enormous significance. Here was the German army being given licence, in effect, to kill Jews wherever it encountered them, on the assumption that all of them were part of the Bolshevik resistance. The conquest of Poland had already demonstrated the murderous and often sadistic violence regular German troops would visit on ‘Eastern Jews’. The invasion of the Soviet Union was to reproduce this violence on a vastly larger scale. The inclusion of the deliberate murder of prisoners in the invasion plan was underlined on 6 June 1941, when Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, head of the Combined Armed Forces Supreme Command, issued an order that all political commissars in the Red Army, whom he characterized as the ‘originators of barbaric, Asiatic methods of fighting’, were to be shot immediately on capture.183

  By the time of the invasion, the kind of doubts that had assailed senior officers like Johannes Blaskowitz in Poland had long since been quelled. None of the generals raised any open objections to Hitler’s orders. The traditional anti-Communism and antisemitism of the officer corps had been augmented by years of incessant Nazi propaganda and indoctrination. The experience of Poland had hardened them to the idea that Slavs and Jews were to be repressed in the most brutal manner possible. Only a very few, such as Field Marshal Fedor von Bock or Lieutenant-Colonel Henning von Tresckow, quietly instructed their officers to ignore the order to kill commissars and civilians as incompatible with international law or dangerous to discipline, or both. The vast majority of the generals transmitted the orders further down the line.184 Already on 27 March 1941, before Hitler’s speech, Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, Commander-in-Chief of the Army, had issued an instruction that the troops ‘must be clear about the fact that the conflict is being fought between one race and another, and proceed with the necessary rigour’.185 The soldiers were instructed accordingly, in a propaganda effort of considerable dimensions that included the inevitable reference to ‘the struggle against World Jewry, which [is striving] to arouse all the peoples of the world against Germany’.186 The normal rules were set aside. Officers were not just officers but also leaders in a racial struggle against ‘Jewish Bolshevism’. As General Erich Hoepner wrote in the marching orders for his troops on 2 May 1941:

  The war against Russia is a fundamental part of the German people’s struggle for existence. It is the old struggle of the Germans against the Slavs, the defence of European culture against the Muscovite, Asiatic deluge, the defence against Jewish Bolshevism. This struggle must aim to smash the Russia of today into rubble, and as a consequence it must be carried out with unprecedented harshness.187

  Similar orders were issued by a variety of other generals as well, including Walter von Reichenau, Erich von Manstein and Karl-Heinrich von Sẗlpnagel (later a member of the military resistance).188

  Discussions between the Army Quartermaster-General Horst Wagner and SS Security Service chief Reinhard Heydrich resulted in a military order issued on 28 April 1941 giving the SS the power to act on its own initiative in carrying out the Commissar Order and similar ‘security’ tasks behind the lines. Four SS Security Service Task Forces, A, B, C and D, numbering 600 to 1,000 men apiece, were set up to follow the army into Russia in four zones running from north to south. Behind them came smaller groups of SS and police. Finally, in areas well behind the front line placed under civilian control, battalions of SS soldiers were to provide for ‘security’. The police units consisted of 23 battalions with 420 officers and 11,640 men, selected from volunteer applicants and subjected to ideological training by the SS. Most of them were in their thirties, older than the average soldier. A substantial number of the officers had been Free Corps soldiers in the violent years of the early Weimar Republic. Many of them were long-term policemen, drawn from the decidedly right-wing ‘Order Police’, formed in the Weimar Republic to deal with civil unrest, mostly from paramilitaries on the left. Some of the men were Nazi brownshirts or ethnic-German ‘self-protection’ militiamen from Poland. A small number of the battalions were drawn from police reservists. All were volunteers, carefully screened by the SS and subjected to a process of indoctrination that included a heavy dose of antisemitism. They were specially selected for service in the Soviet Union. Most of them were recruited from the lower middle class; it was assumed that the Order Police members had small businesses which their wives could carry on in their absence. From the middle of May 1941 they were put into training at the Border Police School in Pretzsch, near Leipzig, where they were subjected to ideological training that would amply reinforce their existing prejudices against Slavs and Jews. These were, therefore, despite claims to the contrary by later historians, neither ‘ordinary men’ nor ‘ordinary Germans’.189

  On 2 July 1941 the Task Forces and police battalions were told to execute all Communist functionaries, people’s commissars, ‘Jews in party or state positions’ and ‘other radical elements (saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins, agitators, etc.)’.190 The order to shoot only one particular category of Jews seemed at first sight to signal a more restricted approach than the one the army had been ordered to take. It directed the Task Forces’ attention in the first place to those identified by Hitler as the Communist intelligentsia and the Jewish elite, two categories which he and Heydrich and most other leading Nazis as well as many army generals considered to be more or less identical. And it targeted only men, much as was initially the case in Serbia. However, women and children were not explicitly ruled out. Moreover, the identification of Jews with Communists was encouraged not only by years of antisemitic propaganda but also by the fact that Jews were indeed the largest single national group in key parts of the Soviet elite, including the secret police, a fact that had never been hidden from general view. All of them without exception, at least until the Nazi invasion and its accompanying antisemitic atrocities, had long since repudiated their Jewish ethnic and religious background. They identified completely with the supranational, secular ideology of Bolshevism. Beyond this, the inclusion of ill-defined categories such as ‘propagandists’ and ‘agitators’ was an open invitation to kill all male Jews, since Nazi ideology considered in principle that all Jewish men fell into these groups. Finally, the treatment of the Jewish population of Poland not only by the SS but also by the army strongly sug
gested that the Task Forces and police battalions would from the beginning not be too choosy about which Jews they shot, or how many.191

  IV

  By the early hours of 22 June 1941, the months of planning were finally over. At 3.15 in the morning, just before dawn on the shortest night of the year, a huge artillery barrage opened up along a front stretching more than a thousand miles southwards from the Baltic. More than 3 million German soldiers, with another half a million troops from Romania and other allied countries, crossed the Soviet border at numerous points from the Finnish border in the north all the way down to the Black Sea hinterland in the south. They were equipped with 3,600 tanks, 600,000 motor vehicles and 700,000 field guns and other artillery. Some 2,700 aircraft, more than half the entire strength of the German air force, had been assembled behind the lines. As the first motorized ground assaults began, 500 bombers, 270 dive-bombers and 480 fighter planes flew overhead and onwards, to wreak destruction on Soviet military airfields. This was the largest invading force assembled in the whole of human history to this point. The military aim was to trap and destroy the Soviet armies in a massive series of encircling movements, pinning them back against the line of the rivers Dnieper and Dvina, some 500 kilometres from the invasion point.192 On the first day alone, German air strikes against 66 Soviet airfields destroyed more than 1,200 Soviet aircraft, almost all of them before they had had a chance to take off. Within the first week the German air force had damaged over 4,000 Soviet planes beyond repair. Bombing raids were also carried out on a range of major cities from Bialystok to Tallinn, Kiev to Riga. With the command of the skies assured, the three main army groups pushed forward with their tanks, supported by dive-bombers and followed up by fast-moving infantry, smashing through the Red Army defences, and inflicting huge losses on the ill-prepared Soviet troops. In the first week of the invasion, Army Group Centre broke decisively through Soviet defences, encircling the Red Army troops in a series of battles. It had already taken 600,000 prisoners by the end of the second week in July. By this time, more than 3,000 Soviet artillery pieces and 6,000 tanks had been captured or destroyed, or simply abandoned by the troops. 89 out of 164 divisions in the Red Army had been put out of action. German forces took Smolensk and pushed on towards Moscow. Army Group North seized Latvia, Lithuania and much of Estonia and advanced on Leningrad (St Petersburg). Army Group South was driving towards Kiev, overrunning the agricultural and industrial regions of the Ukraine. Finnish troops, aided by German units, cut off the port of Murmansk and made towards Leningrad from the north, while German and Romanian troops entered Bessarabia in the far south.193