Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  He promoted Zhukov to a marshal of the Soviet Union on January 18, 1943, the day after the Red Army broke through the German defenses at Stalingrad. Not to be outdone, Stalin assumed the same title in February, when the scent of victory was in the air. The new title embellished his aura as the supreme commander. For the first time, military operations began to be publicly called part of a “Stalinist strategy.” The early defeats were retroactively labeled “planned withdrawals.” The changing tides of war, therefore, were the occasion for refurbishing his image and personality cult, which had been tarnished by the German attack.16

  The military was transformed still more into a professional corps, complete with formal ranks. The political commissars, who had shared command with the military, had been demoted, as we saw earlier. However, even with victory on the horizon, Stalin’s suspicious mind did not relent. On April 16, 1943, the NKVD was reorganized yet again, likely because it had become too big. With Stalin’s eye on “cleansing” the liberated area to the west, it would have to grow larger still. So it was divided into two branches, the People’s Commissariat for State Security (NKGB) and the Main Directorate of State Security (GUGB). Military counterintelligence was taken away from the NKVD and given a new name, SMERSH—the acronym for “Death of Spies.” There was an intensified search for “enemies within,” even with the Germans in retreat. Stalin intended to “cleanse” the areas he liberated, so the Red Army’s advance was closely followed by secret police operations against ethnic groups and whole nationalities that had collaborated with the Nazis or were suspected of being disloyal.17

  The armed forces were subjected to constant surveillance. There were three levels of repression, from the bottom up they were: SMERSH; the military prosecutor; and the military courts-martial.18

  Stalin sounded confident in his radio broadcast on February 23, 1943, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Red Army. He said the country stood at a decisive point and that the army’s victories were its own since the Western Allies had not opened a second front in Europe. He thought Germany was already exhausted and bound to lose.

  As usual he cited Lenin as the infallible guide to what needed to be done: “First, do not be carried away by victory, and do not become conceited; second, consolidate the victory; third, finish off the enemy.” Stalin wanted the enemy hunted down, and he fanned guerrilla warfare behind the lines. His address ended with reminders that the conflict was about patriotism, Communism, and death to the invaders.19

  Roosevelt sent his congratulations: “The Red Army and the Russian people have surely started the Hitler forces on the road to ultimate defeat and have earned the lasting admiration of the people of the United States.”20

  As the Soviets drove out the Germans, they began to find signs of German atrocities. A small concentration camp was discovered toward the end of 1942 near the river Don. Pictures of this and other camps circulated in the Soviet press and fostered anti-German feelings. The Soviets came upon more evidence of barbarities, including the use of a gas van at Krasnodar.21

  The extermination of the Jews, which had been an open secret within Western intelligence and military circles, was now publicized. As early as December 19, 1942, the Allied governments had issued a statement saying the Germans had used gas in places like Belzec and Chelm—the latter may have referred to a town by that name or to the death camp at Chelmno. The New York Times issue carrying the statement also published a shortened version of blunter remarks from the Soviet government. These said that the “extermination” of millions of Jews had already taken place. The Soviets pledged that “neither the ruling Hitlerite clique nor the base executioners of its bloody orders will escape the vengeance of liberated nations.”22

  OPERATION CITADEL AND THE BEGINNING OF THE END

  The Germans were not giving up and counterattacked the Red Army with success at several points. By March 13, 1943, Hitler had issued orders for Operation Citadel, focused on Kursk. There was a bulge in the lines there, and the aim was to smash it. He preferred to wait on a Soviet attack, which he thought would give the Wehrmacht advantages. Stalin accepted the advice of his military and did not follow his instincts to charge ahead.23 From the German perspective, this time the front was to be “only” along a line of 100 miles (150 kilometers) instead of the more than 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) of Operation Barbarossa. After numerous postponements their attack finally went ahead on July 5. Hitler was still hoping, only days before the Allied landing in Sicily, that a victory at Kursk would be “a beacon to the world” of Germany’s continuing prowess.24

  The Soviets were informed by their intelligence service in advance and, just as the Germans were about to attack, opened fire with heavy artillery. The battle for Kursk became the last great offensive Hitler ever ordered in the Soviet Union.25

  Germany’s vaunted new tanks, the Panther and the Porsche-powered Tiger, failed to live up to expectations. Soviet tanks remained superior, and Soviet generals, who learned their tactics the hard way from the Germans, proved equal to the task. The Red Army General Staff prepared heavily fortified bridgeheads “to bleed the attacking German groupings dry, and then shift to a general offensive.”26

  Kursk was one of the greatest tank battles in history. When the German ranks started to thin and the offensive bogged down, the Soviets opened an all-out attack. In despair Hitler called off the operation after little more than a week. Allied landings in Sicily on July 10, followed by a collapse of Mussolini’s regime soon after, meant that the Germans had to send divisions to Italy to hold the line. The full implications of a multifront war had become only too evident.

  For years the Soviets tried to cover up the extent of their losses, but newly opened archives—which still leave room for debate—reveal the staggering figures. At Kursk they suffered 177, 847 casualties; at Orel, 429, 890; and in the last great chapter of this confrontation, 255, 566. What the Soviets call “irrevocable” (as opposed to “medical”) losses may be taken to mean deaths—not mentioned at all as such in the figures. Accordingly, in the three areas of the battle for Kursk the Red Army suffered a total of 254, 447 deaths. Although the German numbers were horrific as well, usually given at around one-third of the Soviet losses in men and equipment, the great difference was that the Red Army had significant and growing reserves.27

  German generals would grudgingly agree with General Warlimont, who was in Hitler’s headquarters. Looking back he said: “Citadel was more than a lost battle; it handed the Russians the initiative we never recovered right up to the end of the war.”28

  HITLER’S APOCALYPTIC VISIONS AND ACCELERATION OF THE WAR ON THE JEWS

  Hitler met with the leaders of the countries allied with him in April 1943. All felt the imminence of defeat. In the early part of the month, Mussolini proposed he try for peace with the USSR, in the belief that an agreement would free up troops needed against the Americans and the British. Whereas Mussolini was more interested in surviving, Hitler was adamant that the greater enemy was in the east. As defeat appeared on the horizon, he grew more obsessed than ever with stamping out “Jewish Bolshevism.”

  Hitler visited with Mussolini for four days at a castle hideaway near Salzburg. He told Goebbels later he convinced the Italian dictator that he could not be rescued by concluding peace with Stalin; there were only two possibilities, to have “victory with us or to die.”29

  During the other April meetings Hitler held either near Salzburg or in the Berghof in Bavaria, he came down hard on those, like Marshal Antonescu of Romania, who had put out peace feelers to the Allies. He took to task those leaders he held uncooperative in delivering “their” Jews to the Nazi death machine. Notable on that count was King Boris of Bulgaria and Admiral Horthy of Hungary. In March 1944, in response to attempts to negotiate with the Allies, Hitler finally invaded Hungary. As we have seen, the tragedy of the Hungarian Jews swiftly followed. In Bulgaria, King Boris agreed to everything, but no sooner had he left Hitler’s immediate presence than he changed his mind. By and lar
ge the Bulgarian Jewish community survived the war, largely because the people and especially the metropolitans of the Orthodox Church would not consent to Nazi plans.

  In March and April 1943, as victory was slipping away, Hitler renewed his call to Europe for a struggle against “Jewish Bolshevism.” It so happened that the burial ground of Polish officers murdered by the Soviets in 1939 was discovered at Katyn at this time. Goebbels thought twelve thousand bodies were found in the forest near Smolensk. Hitler ordered him to shift the “Jewish question” to the forefront of the propaganda agenda, to expose the “Jews in the Kremlin,” and to “sharpen” anti-Semitic propaganda. Goebbels told Hitler on May 10 that anti-Semitism was already taking up 70 to 80 percent of the Nazis’ foreign radio broadcasts. They hoped that transmitting such messages to England would cause a split between the people and the government, but that was pure fantasy.30

  THE BATTLE OF “IDEAS”

  Hitler talked with the Reich leaders and gauleiters on May 7, when he returned to Berlin for the funeral of the Party veteran Viktor Lutze, the head of the SA who was killed in an automobile crash. His address at noon to the leadership of the Party, including the SA, SS, and Hitler Youth, focused on the sacrifices of the Nazi movement in the war.

  He underlined the great difference between Nazi Germany and the West. He said it would have been easy to beat them because the Third Reich was based on an ideology (Weltanschauung) and their states were not. That gave the Germans an enormous “spiritual” advantage, which they took east with them. The problem was the Soviets also had an ideology—if a “false” one.

  Stalin had other advantages, Hitler said, that they had overlooked. The purges of the Red Army in the 1930s did not weaken it, but had eliminated all defeatists, a result Hitler envied. He admired Stalin for putting political commissars next to the officers in the army, thereby making sure that the armed forces were constantly reminded of the ideals they were fighting for. That was why, he thought, the Red Army fought with such bitter determination. Although he said there was no opposition in Germany, he believed there was too much grumbling: “Bolshevism had recognized this danger and got rid of it, so that it can direct its complete strength at the enemy.”

  He also spoke of the “spiritual basis of the struggle against the Soviet Union.” Just as anti-Semitism was used in the Nazi rise to power, it now had to become “the central element” in the war against Stalin. He wanted a unified Europe, which Germany alone could build, notwithstanding problems he saw with his allies—particularly Horthy in Hungary, who did not take anti-Semitism seriously enough.

  Hitler wondered “whether the white man really could maintain his superiority in the long run against the massive reservoirs of people in the East,” by which he meant also the Far East and Japan. But even in Europe the eastern part would inevitably try to conquer the rest, and Germany had to introduce the “necessary security measures.” The “present anti-Semitic propaganda,” he said, had to hammer home the message that “Eastern Bolshevism” as well as “Western plutocracy” was led and dominated by Jews. “The Jews must be banished from Europe. That is the ceterum censeo [unquestioned certainty] that we in the political conflict have above all to repeat over and over in this war.”

  As he saw it, there was no possibility for a compromise peace. He extrapolated from earlier experiences: just as the Nazis had to beat the Communists in Germany to attain power, now the Soviet Communists would have to be crushed. Goebbels quoted him as saying he had no fear of a revolution in Germany, because the “Jewish leaders for such a thing were absent.”31

  Hitler still refused to say the unutterable: that he had ordered Himmler to carry out the mass murder of the Jews. He spoke of their fate in the future tense. Everyone in his entourage knew they were never to mention this delicate matter, but the reason for this great silence remains to be explained. When, in late June 1943, Baldur von Schirach—then gauleiter of Vienna—and his wife, Henriette, visited Hitler at the Berghof, she decided to tell him about what she had witnessed recently in Amsterdam. Jewish women were brutally handled by the SS as a prelude to their deportation. The SS even offered her some valuables taken from the Jews. Hitler was infuriated when Frau Schirach brought up the matter, and the couple left in disgrace.32

  He was hardly going to show sympathy for the Jews. His anti-Semitic convictions were by then an integral part of his being. He and Goebbels had long been convinced by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and now spent fruitless hours trying to figure out how their knowledge of the supposed international conspiracy could be turned to political advantage. Hitler regarded it as his “historical mission” to cast out the Jews, and even losing the war would not save them. He told Goebbels the Jews “believe they are on the verge of a world victory,” but that would be denied them, and instead they would experience “world downfall.”33

  It was in keeping with the dual military and ideological mission that he spent so much time talking about the Jews in April and May 1943, when the battlefront situation was in crisis. By that time, Allied bombing of German cities had become a nightly event. The world was coming down around the heads of those living in the embattled Third Reich.34Hitler was concerned about Mussolini’s increasingly untenable situation in Italy. The problem there, as he said to military leaders, was that Mussolini “has Jews everywhere. He can’t get rid of them, because the clerics are suddenly protecting the Jews… just as it was during the revolution of 1918 in our country.”35

  He kept rerunning his warped narrative of the traumatic year 1918 and highlighting the alleged role of the Jews whenever the war took a turn against Germany. When Mussolini fell from power on July 25, for Hitler the culprits were obvious: “No one is behind the new regime except the Jews and the rabble who draw attention to themselves in Rome.”36

  WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING

  Given that Hitler and other Nazi leaders identified the destruction of the Jews as a vital war aim, the pursuit of the “final solution” continued with as much determination as the war on the battlefield. Although millions had been murdered already, the Nazi killing machine moved toward destroying all the Jews still alive.

  In the General Government, the administrative district created as a holding ground for Jews and other groups despised by the Nazis, thousands were still in ghettos in the districts of Warsaw, Lublin, and Galicia. The official aim at this point was not to murder all Jews, but those not essential to war production. Thirty percent of the Galician Jews were still alive, but with the Red Army driving ethnic Germans from eastern Ukraine, Himmler’s problem was how to make space for them. The answer was to begin killing off the Jews in the ghettos.37

  In January 1943, Himmler traveled to Warsaw, the largest ghetto of all, to press the deportations. The capital of former Poland, with a population of over one million, had been the largest center of Jewish life in Europe. There were 375,000 Jews in Warsaw in 1939, but that number grew when more were forced off the land and into the larger cities, where by December they had to wear the yellow star. On November 16, 1940, the Warsaw ghetto was sealed, and behind its walls close to a half million were slowly starved to death.38

  Despite all the self-help measures they could organize, some forty-three thousand died inside the ghetto in 1941. Rumors of impending doom circulated from April of the next year, when Jews heard about the deportations of other ghettos. The worst fears were realized, and on July 22, 1942, Adam Czerniakow, chairman of the Jewish Council, was informed by the Germans that “all the Jews irrespective of sex and age, with certain exceptions, will be deported to the East.” He was told there would be a daily quota of six thousand.39

  Czerniakow was warned that for the moment his wife was free, but if deportations were impeded in any way, she would be arrested. The next day the Jewish Council in fact was ordered to assemble 9,000. The psychological burden was too much for Czerniakow, who committed suicide. His death did not slow the deportations in the least. The leaders of the community felt that perhaps 60,000 would be transp
orted, not the entire remaining 380,000, and so thought that resistance might make things worse.40

  The voices of reason were proven to be wrong. Chaim Kaplan, the head of a Hebrew school in Warsaw, described in detail the daily agonies the Jews had to endure. He admitted that what he was witnessing was beyond his powers to convey. His diary recorded for August 2, 1942:

  Jewish Warsaw is in its death throes. A whole community is going to its death! The appalling events follow one another so abundantly that it is beyond the power of a writer of impressions to collect, arrange, and classify them; particularly when he himself is caught in their vise—fearful of his own fate for the next hour, scheduled for deportation, tormented by hunger, his whole being filled with the fear and dread which accompanies the expulsion.

  And let this be known: From the beginning of the world, since the time when man first had dominion over another man to do him harm, there has never been so cruel and barbaric an expulsion as this one. From hour to hour, even from minute to minute, Jewish Warsaw is being demolished and destroyed, reduced and decreased. Since the day the exile was decreed, ruin and destruction, exile and wandering, bereave-ment and widowhood have befallen us in all their fury….

  We have no information about the fate of those who have been expelled. When one falls into the hands of the Nazis he falls into the abyss. The very fact that the deportees make no contact with their families bodes evil. Nothing that is related—and many things are related—is based on exact information.41