Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  FAILURE OF THE BLITZKRIEG AGAINST THE USSR

  German formations got within eighteen miles of Moscow, and according to some reports a few may have gotten closer than that. Nevertheless, by December 5 battle commanders felt there was no option but to withdraw because their forward positions were too exposed. At almost the same moment the Red Army launched a surprise attack that broke through the weak lines, just as Bock had predicted. Nearly all German military leaders agreed that retreat was necessary, but Hitler would not hear of it. On December 1 he sacked Rundstedt, commander of Army Group South, for suggesting that in the face of an enveloping attack in great strength by the Red Army, some of his forces take up defensive positions. Hitler was adamant about holding the line and not retreating. Rundstedt said he could not comply with that order, which should be changed or he be relieved of his post. A very agitated Hitler dismissed him at once, but that was not the only expression of his displeasure, for on December 19 he forced out Commander in Chief Walther von Brauchitsch and took over the position himself. On December 17, Bock turned over his command (for health reasons), and Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, in charge of Army Group North (Leningrad), asked to be relieved on January 15, 1942. Even the best of leaders, like Erwin Rommel in Africa, were at the very same time put under fierce pressure, as the presumably unstoppable Wehrmacht was reaching the end of its resources in practically all theaters.32

  The Germans still thought they could win, even though the Red Army was not just holding on but attacking again and again. Hitler and his “realistic” military experts were convinced of the superiority of their own troops and leaders, and of their ability to finish the job. They were still sure the enemy was about to collapse. To judge by letters from the front, this was a view held by many ordinary soldiers as well, at least in the early going; some hoped—in August 1941—the best Soviet troops had already been defeated.33

  The image of the shaky Red Army was colored by the Nazi hatred of Bolshevism and the Slavs. Anti-Semitism played a key role, as the Jews were commonly blamed for creating Bolshevism. Prejudice got the better of Hitler’s rational calculations, and the same went for many of his top military men.

  In Berlin on November 29, Hitler told Goebbels how “positive” he felt about the eastern front, even though there were some minor retreats. The weather was slowing progress, but he expected more victories and to move closer to Moscow, so it would be wrong to conclude, he said, that the war had reached a stalemate.34

  The situation on the eastern front was in fact deteriorating. Hitler had scheduled an address to the nation, and on December 11 he repeated how Germany had been forced to attack the Soviet Union to stop its plans for the conquest of Europe. Germany was now the leader of a coalition of European forces, and he named all the allied nations, though without mentioning how small their contributions—a fact well known to the public. He said the broad participation in the east had given the war “in the truest sense of the word the character of a European crusade.”

  The most important part of the speech was the verbal assault on the United States. He emphasized that the people of both countries had nothing against each other and traced the worsening relations to the Jews who supposedly surrounded and used President Roosevelt for their own purposes. They wanted to create a “Jewish paradise” of the kind German soldiers were seeing with their own eyes in the Soviet Union. He charged the Jews with wanting to “destroy one state after the next.” He was going to support Japan, not because it was an ally, but because it was coming down to a question of life or death.

  Indeed Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7 without even informing Hitler. Nevertheless, on December 11 he declared war on the United States, a move not called for by the treaty with Japan. He would have preferred a Japanese invasion of the far eastern Soviet Union, which would have brought immediate relief to German troops. But the entry of Japan into the war was viewed as helpful, since it drew British and American forces away from Europe. However, he underestimated American economic and military capacity, above all the will of the people, just as he had failed to appreciate the strength of the Soviets.35

  Hitler told Goebbels that the war situation in the Soviet Union ruled out further battles, particularly major attacks. He was talking about the spring of the next year as better suited for the renewed offensive. Both men admitted their worry about the heavy Soviet tanks, against which the Germans had no defense. Even when German anti-aircraft guns were used and hit one of these Soviet tanks, it was considered a “lucky shot” when the shell stopped the tank. On the other hand, they regarded Japan’s attack as a stroke of luck. Hitler remained optimistic and convinced of victory—although his dissatisfaction with his generals was palpable.

  The picture at home, as reported in detail by the SD, was “fairly gray.” The letters from the front, so encouraging initially, were now having a negative effect.36 There was no denying that Barbarossa had failed and the Wehrmacht, not the Red Army, was close to being shattered. The Germans had lost 918,000 killed, wounded, captured, or missing in action. That was 28.7 percent of the 3.2 million involved in the operation. The losses were so grave that it would be correct to conclude that the Wehrmacht never recovered. The Red Army suffered even higher casualties, but it could draw on the arsenal of the United States and now was buoyed up by the probability that it was only a matter of time before the U.S. armed forces would be heading for Europe.37

  29

  WAR AGAINST THE JEWS: DEATH SQUADS IN THE EAST

  In the propaganda buildup to the war against the Soviet Union and thereafter, the German press hammered home the message that Jews were linked with the Bolshevism of the Russian Revolution and with Stalin’s Communist regime, and especially with his terror.1 Long before the attack on the USSR began—as we have seen in detail—Jews were high on the list of those to be singled out and persecuted in Poland in 1939, in Western Europe in 1940, and in Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941. During Operation Barbarossa, however, the murder campaign broke all previous constraints.

  In the first stages of the war against the Soviet Union, the main killers of the Jews were the Einsatzgruppen (EGr). Heydrich had organized similar squads for the invasion of Poland, but the attack was now aimed at the homeland of Bolshevism and was intended to be far more radical. Initially he established three Einsatzgruppen (EGr A, B, and C), one each for Army Groups North, Center, and South. Eventually another (D) was added for the Romanian front and elsewhere. These relatively small units—containing fewer than three thousand members in all—were divided into commandos. They were led by highly educated men—many of them with university degrees, some with doctorates. After the war, the psychiatrists, jurists, and others who interviewed them were struck by their “normality.”2

  It is important to keep in mind that Hitler saw Germany as engaged simultaneously in two interrelated wars: one against the Bolsheviks to eliminate them and gain lebensraum, the other against the Jews, portrayed as the power holders or wire-pullers behind the scenes. From the Nazi perspective, the Wehrmacht’s battlefront actions against the Red Army and the Einsatzgruppen’s murder of the Jews were two parts of the same mission, namely to wipe out “Jewish Bolshevism” and create a racially pure Germanic utopia.

  THE EINSATZGRUPPEN, OR DEATH SQUADS, IN THE EAST

  On June 17, 1941, Heydrich told leaders of the Einsatzgruppen that the “immediate” goal was “political pacification” behind the advancing troops, and the “final” goal was the “economic pacification” of the area. They were to follow the orders and instructions as given to the Wehrmacht with respect to executing designated groups like the commissars in the Red Army. On July 2, in a note that survives, he repeated some of what he had said to these leaders immediately before they left for the front. They were to execute “all functionaries of the Comintern (as in general all Communist professional politicians); the senior, middle-level, and radical lower functionaries of the Party, the central committees, the district and regional committees; people�
�s commissars; Jews in the Party and in official positions; assorted radical elements (saboteurs, propaganda people, snipers, those who commit violence against the state, rowdies, and so on).”3

  He added that “no hindrances were to be placed in the way of… self-purging efforts of anti-Communist or also anti-Jewish circles in the new areas to be occupied.” These efforts were to be assisted “without leaving any traces.” They were given a license to kill practically anyone involved in “Jewish Bolshevism.”

  On July 25, 1941, Himmler ordered the creation of local police units to aid and abet the relatively limited number of Germans in the police and SS at his disposal. By the end of 1941 there were twenty-six local police battalions, and some 33,000 men enlisted in “protective teams,” or Schutzmannschaften. Within a year 300,000 of these indigenous police were working for the Germans. In sum there can be no doubt the Nazis had sufficient forces on the ground to carry out the ambitious “ethnic cleansing” operations they had in mind.4 By the end of 1941, alongside the Einsatzgruppen, German security divisions, and SS units, there were German order police battalions in the east. The mass murder of the Jews, though led by Himmler and Heydrich of the SS, involved thousands of “ordinary men” in the sense they were not even in the Nazi Party, much less in the SS.5

  There were vicious attacks against the Jews throughout the “liberated” area. Some local people, for all kinds of reasons, from desire for personal gain to hooliganism, began to ask as soon as they learned the Germans were coming: “Is it permitted to kill the Jews?” This behavior, reinforced by what the invaders said, was anchored in “an entrenched narrative of alleged Jewish collaboration with the Soviets in 1939.”6

  The Soviets had ruled areas like eastern Poland and the Baltic States for twenty months (from September 1939 to June 1941). Occupation meant terror, repression, murder, and the deportation of thousands. When the Nazis arrived, the myth of Jewish sympathy for the Communists was already full-blown. In the small town of Jedwabne, Poland, local Communist sympathizers were killed as soon as the Soviets left, but so were those whom villagers remembered as having welcomed the Soviets when they arrived in 1939.7

  The tragedy of this one town was a microcosm of the region and of the times. On July 10, within days of the German arrival, the non-Jews in Jedwabne took it upon themselves to murder all the Jews, fifteen or sixteen hundred people, with little or no prodding from the invaders.8

  As the German forces passed through, and follow-up operations commenced, some people were reluctant to get involved in actions against the Jews. Others were enthusiastic. Franz Walter Stahlecker, leader of Einsatzgruppe A in the Baltic area, reported (for the period up to October 15, 1941) that it was “surprisingly not simple” to incite larger pogroms in Lithuania. He had to get partisans involved, and in several days, beginning in the night of June 25–26, they burned down synagogues and killed thirty-eight hundred Jews in Kaunas. In Latvia (particularly Riga) it was “much more difficult” to start similar pogroms—said to be explicable because the Soviets had murdered the entire national ruling class. Efforts paid off when the Latvian deputy police and others burned synagogues and killed around four hundred Jews. “As far as possible” films were taken of the murders of “Jews and Communists” carried out by the people of Kaunas and Riga—presumably for propaganda purposes. In Lithuania and Latvia, Stahlecker tried first to recruit those whose family members had been murdered or deported by the Soviets. In Estonia, with its small Jewish community, he said it was not possible to incite pogroms at all, but the Estonians had killed particularly hated Communists.

  He noted under the heading “Other Security-Police Work” the murder of chronically ill psychiatric patients—to this point, 748 people. This form of euthanasia (as in Poland earlier) fitted perfectly into the ethnic-cleansing mission.

  Stahlecker concluded that it would be impossible to fulfill the orders given prior to Operation Barbarossa—which he interpreted as the “widest possible elimination of Jews”—by way of pogroms. At the end of his report, he provided a table of those executed, with the breakdown as follows: In Lithuania, 81,171 people had been killed, 860 of them Communists, while the vast majority (80, 311) were Jews. In Latvia, the figure was 31, 868, with 1,843 of those murdered listed as Communists. In Estonia, 474 Jews were shot, somewhat fewer than the 684 Communists. In Byelorussia, all 7,620 people murdered were Jews.

  Stahlecker said Jews in larger cities (like Kaunas and Riga) were put in ghettos. These would turn out to be merely holding areas; eventually most Jews there were killed as well. He even noted that the Einsatzkommando led the exhumation of the bodies of “Bolshevik victims,” had them identified, and used the stories for propaganda purposes. There was an ongoing search for Communists and partisans.9 We should note that this is merely one of an entire series of similar such reports.10

  The onslaught against the Jews was directed at first primarily, but not exclusively, at Jewish men. This point generally held for all the Einsatzgruppen. The order to expand the killing to women and children reached different death squads at various times already in July and August 1941. In addition, entire Jewish communities were wiped out.

  Hitler signed no order for the murder of the Jews, or at least no document has survived. It would not have been his inclination to issue a written order. His standard operating procedure was to wait for the opportune moment and then pass on his “wish,” as he would have done in this case, to Heydrich or Himmler.

  We know that Hitler certainly knew about and approved the murders. Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo, telegraphed the Einsatzgruppen on August 1, 1941, that “the führer is to be kept continually informed” about the killing operations. The Wehrmacht (OKW), including Field Marshal Keitel and the quartermaster general, and other leading figures of the regime like Bormann, Ribbentrop, and Goebbels also wanted to be kept in the know.11

  In the summer of 1941 one of the worst crimes committed by Einsatzgruppe B was in and around Minsk. Their reports talked of eliminating entire subsections of people, like the “Jewish-Bolshevik leadership class,” and soon even went beyond that. When the Einsatzgruppe arrived, they began killing around two hundred people a day, most labeled “Bolshevik functionaries, agents, criminals, Asians, and so on.” Other cities in the area such as Smolensk were “combed through for members of the Jewish intelligentsia.”12 By mid-November, Einsatzgruppe B reported the liquidation of 45,467 since the beginning of Barbarossa.13 As of March 31, 1943, according to their own records, they killed 142, 359.14

  The activities of these death squads were frequently aided and abetted by the Wehrmacht, many of whose leaders propagated the idea of a war of annihilation against the “Jewish-Bolshevik complex.” Even units like Panzer Group 4 were told on the eve of the war that it was the “defence of European culture” against “Jewish Bolshevism.” On July 30 the then commander of the Seventeenth Army, Karl Heinrich von Stülpnagel, ordered “selective” reprisals, not simply against the native Ukrainian population, but especially against “Jewish and Communist people.”

  Walther von Reichenau, commander of the Sixth Army, issued an order on August 10, 1941, mentioning the “necessary executions of criminal, Bolshevistic, mostly Jewish elements” that would be carried out by the organs of Reichsführer-SS Himmler. On September 12, Keitel fired up the troops with an order stating that “the struggle against Bolshevism demands ruthless and energetic, rigorous action above all against the Jews, the main carriers of Bolshevism.”15

  On October 10, Reichenau summarized the tasks ahead as follows: “The essential goal of the campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevik system is the complete destruction of its power instruments and the eradication of the Asiatic influence on the European cultural sphere.” He added that “therefore the soldier must have a complete understanding for the necessity of the harsh, but just atonement of Jewish sub-humanity. This has the further goal of nipping in the bud rebellions in the rear of the Wehrmacht which, as experience shows, are always plotted by the Jews
.”16

  Five days later Hermann Hoth, subsequently commander of the Seventeenth Army, mentioned in an order how “two spiritually unbridgeable conceptions are fighting each other: German sense of honor and race, and a soldierly tradition of many centuries, against an Asiatic mode of thinking and primitive instincts, whipped up by a small number of mostly Jewish intellectuals.”17

  On the whole the Wehrmacht and Einsatzgruppen worked well together. Although in Poland in 1939 some commanders had objected to the activities of the SS behind the lines, there were no repeat performances in Barbarossa. There were numerous cases in which units of the Wehrmacht killed Jews, excesses that represented the “anti-Semitic attitude and behavior of a more or less large part of the front troops.” For example, in Pinsk at the beginning of August 1941, members of the SS Cavalry Regiment 2 drove thousands of Jews into the streets and shot them. The soldiers of 293 Infantry Division witnessed and discussed this incident. According to a member of that unit, “By no means did everyone, but certainly most of his comrades agreed with what happened.”18

  RESPONSE OF THE TROOPS TO RACE WAR IN THE EAST

  An army of millions cannot be driven by a single idea, but is influenced by countless factors. It would seem, however, that many soldiers were psychologically receptive to messages of hate against Bolsheviks, and particularly Jews. As we have seen, in the early days of the war the Wehrmacht became widely involved in “the practice of systematically victimizing Jews and Communists.”19