Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  Our task is to set up, as soon as possible, and with a minimum of military force, Socialist state structures that are subject to us. These tasks are so complex that one cannot expect an army to perform them.29

  Jodl called his staff to make the revisions Hitler requested. Army administration of the conquered area was to be minimal, with Reich commissars given most of the job. Himmler was to be consulted about whether the SS should be employed in the army’s theater of operations, and Jodl thought it was a good idea to give the SS that job because of the “need to render all Bolshevik chiefs and commissars harmless.”30

  Hitler’s views found their way into the directives issued on March 13, 1941, by the OKW for Barbarossa. These spelled out that Himmler was given “special tasks on the führer’s instruction” arising “from the final struggle between two opposing political systems.” In the context of these tasks Himmler was “to act independently and on his own responsibility.”31

  Hitler reminded Quartermaster General Eduard Wagner and Reinhard Heydrich of the SS on March 17 that the Soviet Union was to be dismembered. Wagner reached agreement with Heydrich, even though in the armed forces it was common knowledge what the SS units had done during the invasion of Poland in 1939. Wagner issued draft orders on March 26 stating that the security police and SD would have special missions behind the lines, would “act on their own responsibility,” and were empowered to take “executive decisions” with regard to the civilian population. This order already opened the door for cooperation between the SS and the Wehrmacht, also with regard to dealing with Communists and Jews.32

  Hitler thought that the Byelorussians would welcome Germany “with open arms,” but was less sure about Ukraine and the Don Cossacks. Finland would get parts of northern Russia, while Germany would take the Baltic States. He was going to be particularly ruthless with the ruling elite the Germans found in place.

  We must build republics insulated against Stalin’s influence. The intelligentsia created by Stalin must be exterminated [vernichtet werden]. The power apparatus of the Russian Empire [the Soviet Union] must be smashed. In Great Russia we must use the most brutal force. The ideological ties holding the Russian people together have not yet become strong, and the nation would collapse once the functionaries are eliminated. The Caucasus will be ceded eventually to Turkey, but first must be exploited by us.33

  The Wehrmacht General Staff raised no objections to these ideological goals. Moreover, Field Marshal Brauchitsch told commanders at Zossen on March 27: “The troops have to realize that this struggle is being waged by one race against another and proceed with the necessary harshness.”34

  On March 30, Hitler spoke to his generals for two and a half hours. He reiterated the debatable strategic point that dealing with Russia would end Britain’s hopes. He turned to the conflict between Nazism and Communism. General Halder wrote down the remarks, sensing how important they were to an understanding of the war to come:

  Clash of two ideologies: Crushing denunciation of Bolshevism, identified with asocial criminality. Communism poses an enormous danger for our future. We must forget the notion of comradeship between soldiers. A Communist is no comrade, neither before nor after the battle. This is a war of extermination. If we do not understand this, we shall still beat the enemy, but thirty years later we will again be fighting the Communist adversary. We are not waging war to preserve the enemy.

  Future political image Russia: Northern Russia goes to Finland. [Germany’s] Protectorates: Baltic states, Ukraine, Belorussia.

  War against Russia: Extermination of the Bolshevik commissars and the Communist intelligentsia. The new states must be socialist, but must not have intellectual classes of their own. We must prevent the formation of a new intellectual class. A primitive socialist intelligentsia is all that is needed. We must struggle against the poison of disintegration. This is no job for military courts. The individual troop commanders must become aware of the issues at stake and be leaders in this fight. The troops must fight back with those same methods used to attack them. Commissars and GPU men [Soviet secret police] are criminals and must be dealt with as such. This need not mean that the troops should get out of control. Rather the commander must give orders that reflect the common feelings of his men.

  Embody in a High Command of the Army [OKH] order: This war will be very different from the war in the west. In the east, harshness today means lenience in the future. Commanders must be prepared to sacrifice their personal scruples.35

  Eliminating “Jewish Bolshevism” could mean getting rid of Communist leaders, and perhaps even Party members, but did not yet spell out the extermination of all Jews in Europe.

  The assembled officers were apparently comfortable with Hitler’s assertion that international law and military traditions should not be applied to the war against “Jewish Bolshevism.” As one account concludes, Hitler thus succeeded in “maneuvering the army, beyond its strictly military tasks, into a war of annihilation against an ideology [Communism] and its followers, for which the EGr [action groups] in particular were earmarked.” The next morning some officers expressed concerns, mainly with the exclusion of the courts-martial, which they thought might lead to discipline problems.36

  On May 2 conversations were held by state secretaries about the food situation. In the “third year of the war,” which was presumably 1941, it was agreed that the “entire Wehrmacht” had to be fed from Russia. The brutal calculation that followed was that “x-million people will doubtlessly starve if we take what is necessary for ourselves from the countryside.”37 This hunger plan was given Hitler’s blessing (but not his signature) and was widely discussed among the top ranks of the Wehrmacht and the bureaucracy. The problem was viewed as straightforward: the German people had to eat, a priority to keep up morale; Western Europe also had to be fed for political reasons; German troops would have to “live off the land;” and with the disruptions caused by war, there would be a shortfall.

  According to what became official thinking on the plan, an estimated thirty million Soviet people, mostly city dwellers, would have to be starved to death. Although there was no written order for the destruction of these people, all kinds of options were heard, including shipping them to Siberia. Given how the Germans knew the Soviet transportation system could not cope with such a huge movement of people, “deportation” was a cover for what would be wholesale destruction.38

  Thus a plan for the greatest deliberately created famine in world history came into existence. It was concocted primarily by Herbert Backe, soon to be minister of agriculture, but involved and was known to many leading civilian and military figures. The plan proved to be “impractical” because it was impossible to keep so many people away from food; the only groups they managed to starve on any scale were Jews in ghettos and Soviet prisoners of war behind barbed wire. The cruel audacity of the hunger plan and the failure of its creators to anticipate the desperate measures of the starving victims suggest the genocidal mentality of the invaders on the eve of Barbarossa. Numerous German leaders made no secret of what was planned, and Hermann Göring, to mention one of many examples, told the Italian foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, in November 1941—without a hint of concern—that within a year twenty to thirty million people would starve in Russia. The impression was that it would not be such a bad thing, for certain nations had to be reduced.39

  Himmler had already commissioned a “resettlement” plan of his own, and work had been going ahead on what became known as General Plan East. He found the first versions not far-reaching enough, even though they envisaged that of the forty-five million or so people living in the area between Russia and Germany, no fewer than thirty-one million were “racially undesirable” and would be sent to Siberia in the decades following the war. Some experts calculated precisely how many trainloads would be involved. Those who remained in the west would work as slaves for the ten million German settlers in the area. The plan specified the percentages of people to be “deported”: all Jews,
80 to 85 percent of the Poles, 75 percent of the Byelorussians, and 64 percent of the western Ukrainians. Given these numbers, this plan called for nothing less than serial genocides.40

  There were numerous other such plans. Not just the top Nazis but experts and professors from many fields drew up blueprints of their own for the German “Garden of Eden” in the east.41

  INSPIRING THE TROOPS WITH HATRED FOR THE ENEMY

  Hitler’s negative views of the population in the east were shared by leading figures in the Wehrmacht and reflected in guidelines issued for the coming campaign. A draft document was discussed by the OKW on May 6 concerning “the treatment of enemy civilians and indictable offenses of members of the Wehrmacht against enemy civilians in the operational area of operation ‘Barbarossa.’”

  The guidelines indicated that, unlike the experience in Western Europe, German troops would “encounter an especially dangerous element from the civilian population disruptive of all order, the carriers of the Jewish-Bolshevik worldview.” Such people would use their “weapon of disintegration” treacherously wherever possible, so it was “the right and duty” of the troops to take all necessary steps. This ideological preface to the guidelines was used to abandon all international rules of law. It meant that “punishable actions committed by members of the army out of indignation over atrocities or over disruptive activities of exponents of the Jewish-Bolshevik system” were not to be prosecuted unless the general discipline of the troops was thought to be endangered.42

  On May 13, Field Marshal Keitel issued a decree building on a revised version of this draft. In cases where Germans were shot at and the perpetrator could not be identified, officers were permitted to order collective reprisals. Felonies by troops against civilians did not have to be prosecuted. In deciding whether to lay charges, the judicial authority should recall “that the collapse in 1918, the subsequent sufferings of the German people, and the struggle of National Socialism with the countless blood sacrifices of the movement were primarily due to Bolshevik influence and no German had forgotten that.”43

  General Eugen Müller, who had worked on some of these drafts, told General Staff officers and army judges that the battle ahead would be like a return of ancient times when one foe lay dead on the ground and the other was victorious. He declared that the population’s right of self-defense, recognized by the Hague Convention on land warfare of 1907, did not hold for the Soviet Union. In his view the concept of a “guerrilla” (Freischärler) included “agitators, distributors of leaflets, saboteurs,” and anyone who would not follow German orders. Punishment should be immediate. Müller was one among many senior officers who spoke along these lines.44

  On May 24, Brauchitsch forwarded the decree (with minor quibbles) on the treatment of the civilian population to the officers preparing for the coming attack. The commander in chief of the Army Group Center, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, wrote in his diary that this measure “was so worded that it virtually gives every soldier the right to shoot, from in front or from behind, at any Russian he takes to be—or claims that he takes to be—a guerrilla.” Bock’s worry was that the discipline of the troops would be adversely affected, but he had no objections in principle.45

  On June 4 the “Guidelines for the Behavior of the Troops in Russia” was distributed to troop commanders down the line. The new guidelines were prefaced by the same ideological justification: “Bolshevism is the deadly enemy of the National Socialist German people. This disintegrative worldview and its carriers constitute Germany’s enemies and must be fought. This battle demands ruthless and energetic measures against Bolshevik agitators, guerrillas, saboteurs, Jews, and complete elimination of any active or passive resistance.”46

  Building on these guidelines, the “Commissar Order” was issued on June 6 under the heading “Treatment of Political Commissars.” It went as follows:

  In the struggle against Bolshevism, we must not assume that the enemy’s conduct will be based on principles of humanity or international law. In particular, hate-inspired, cruel, and inhumane treatment of prisoners of war can be expected from all grades of political commissar who are the leaders of the real resistance.

  The troops must be made aware that: (1) In this battle with these elements it is false to show consideration or to act in accordance with international law. That endangers our own security and the rapid pacification of the conquered areas; (2) the originators of barbaric and Asiatic methods of war are the political commissars. Therefore they have to be dealt with immediately and with maximum severity. When in battle or resistance these persons are to be shot immediately.47

  Officers at the OKW and OKH were aware that the order to shoot commissars “was an infringement of international law.”48 Some troops would inevitably become involved in war crimes insofar as they selected out members of the Red Army they thought were “commissars” and shot them. Halder knew the consequences, but added laconically in his diary that the troops “must do their part in the ideological struggle of the eastern campaign.”49

  The Commissar Order and the guidelines on the treatment of civilians were all the more remarkable in that they were formulated by the conservative officer corps—including its judicial branch. There was no mention here of the radical SS, who were not involved but were gearing up in their own way for the war that loomed.

  The explanation offered for why the officer corps fell into line with Hitler, as given recently by Germany’s Research Institute for Military History, runs as follows: There was a “substantial measure of agreement on ideological questions,” an amalgamation of anti-Semitism, anti-Slavism, and anti-Communism. The officer corps shared with Hitler and leaders of the Nazi Party the view that the war in 1918 had been lost only through a “stab in the back” by Marxists, Jews, and others. They were convinced that extreme steps had to be taken to ensure history did not repeat itself. No doubt many in the military were also swept along by the tide of Hitler’s easy victories and had become true believers in him and, to a shocking extent, also in his ideas. Like him they wanted Germany to attain great-power status and to gain the needed territory and resources in the east. “Many officers therefore accepted Hitler’s suggestion on March 30, 1941, and regarded themselves as leaders in the struggle against a hostile ideology, against ‘Jewish Bolshevism.’” Thus “the called-for unity of militarism and National Socialism became reality to a high degree.”50

  The affinity of ideas between Hitler and his leading generals can be seen in statements made by a wide range of officers before the battle even began, and so cannot be explained by the heat of the moment or the brutalization of warfare. The following operations order of Armored Group 4 from General Erich Hoepner was issued even before the Commissar Order and the guidelines on treating the civilian population. It shows how many different officers transformed Hitler’s ideological statements into concrete orders. On May 2, Hoepner had this to say about the coming clash with the Reds:

  The war against Russia is an essential phase in the German nation’s struggle for existence. It is the ancient struggle of the Germanic peoples against Slavdom, the defense of European culture against the Muscovite-Asiatic tide, the repulse of Jewish Bolshevism. That struggle must have as its aim the shattering of present-day Russia and therefore be waged with unprecedented hardness. Every combat action must be inspired, in concept and execution, by an iron determination to ensure the merciless, total annihilation of the enemy. In particular, there must be no sparing the exponents of the present Russian Bolshevik system.51

  The precise number of civilians who were about to die, commissars who would be shot, and prisoners of war who would be murdered or allowed to die remains difficult to ascertain. The scope of the catastrophe was calculated in broad terms, and it was clear that it would be unlike anything seen in history before.

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  WAR AGAINST THE COMMUNISTS: OPERATION BARBAROSSA

  Operation Barbarossa gathered the largest attack force in European history. It deployed just over three mi
llion German troops, together with some half million from allied countries. The attackers used 3,350 tanks and 600,000 motor vehicles, but their continued reliance on horses (with 625,000 used in the invasion) revealed that this was not quite the mythical “all-mechanized” attack often supposed. The aim was another blitzkrieg, a lightning war to knock out the enemy quickly. Hitler’s great anxiety was that the Red Army might escape capture, but of its defeat he had no doubt.1

  On June 22, 1941, between 3: 05 and 3: 30 a.m., as the German war diary noted matter-of-factly, the “surprise attack” began. Using some twenty-five hundred aircraft, the Luftwaffe took on a Soviet air force at least three times as large but caught many planes on the ground. Soviet pilots who got into the air initially proved no match for the more experienced enemy, so that in the first week the Soviets lost thousands of aircraft and the Germans established air superiority. Indeed, by mid-afternoon on June 25, Halder stated that the “enemy air force is completely out of the picture after the very high initial losses (reports speak of 2,000).”2

  Ordinary German citizens reacted to the first news with a mixture of shock, consternation, and lack of understanding. Within a week reports on public opinion suggested a return of confidence. News from the front and letters home, however, indicated that they were dealing with a tough-minded opponent who was allegedly mistreating German prisoners.3 The Red Army was taken by surprise, but had deployed along the border an estimated 2.9 million men. They had three or four times as many tanks, artillery pieces, and aircraft as the invaders. They used faulty tactics that made it easy for the Germans to drive ahead at full speed. In places the Red Army fought back ferociously, but it took staggering losses.4