There was another side to the picture. We were at the height of our military power. Our equipment had proved its worth during the recent campaigns. Our doctrines were sound, our commanders experienced, and our troops well trained and battle hardened. Military morale was as high as high could be. The homeland, though subjected to a few restrictions and beginning to feel the occasional impact of an English air attack, was solidly behind the forces. And me! Never in history had any ruler enjoyed the trust of his people more than I did. Not before, not after. So much so that, immediately after the invasion started, even the aforementioned Galen praised my war on “Judeo-Bolshevism” and told his flock to pray for my welfare! The exception, if any, were some of my senior generals. These were not the days of Blücher, “Field-Marshal Forward” as he was known, who took the bit between his teeth and marched toward the sound of the guns. Nor those of Moltke Sr. with his calm confidence that, with God on our side, things would turn out well.
The commanders in question had grown up under the Kaiserreich. Like so many other members of the old elite, they ended up looking down on us National Socialists. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they saw us as upstarts who had risen, God only knows how, from the gutter. Most were reactionaries, and few, if any, really shared our world view, let alone were committed to defending and spreading it with the kind of fanaticism which alone can make ideas have any influence at all. Servile as Keitel was, that even applied to him. He saw himself as an officer first; everything else was secondary. As the campaign approached, too many of them developed reservations of one kind or another. Not a few, I was told, read the depressing memoirs of Napoleon’s aide, Armand de Caulaincourt. That is why, in January and again in February 1941, I gathered them and subjected them to what were, in essence, pep talks.
But that was not enough. On 30 March I called 200 of my generals for another speech. I wanted them to understand that Russia was not the West. This was a war between two Weltanschauungen: our National Socialist one and the criminal Judeo-Bolshevik one. It had to be waged accordingly. There was no room for outdated ideas of soldierly honor, no question of sparing the civilian population as much as possible. We were going to exterminate the Bolshevik Army Commissars. They formed the chassis, so to speak, that held the entire gigantic structure together. We were also going to destroy as large a part of the Communist intelligentsia as we could reach. This was no job for our army; that was why I was sending in Himmler and his special security forces. They themselves were to close their hearts to pity and do what had to be done. As to international law, there was no need to worry about it. The Soviet Union had never joined the Geneva Convention. They were going to ignore it, and so would we.
Neither at the time nor later did any of them protest. Not necessarily, I well knew, because they agreed with me. But because they thought, as we Germans say, nicht so heiss gegessen wie gekocht (the broth is not eaten as hot as it is cooked). Almost to a man, they were prepared to provide logistic support to Himmler’s “special” units and to look away while the latter did what had to be done. But in general their motto was, don’t get your hands dirty. Later, when some of them were put on “trial” at Nuremberg, this attitude served most of them well. It enabled them to present themselves as “pure” soldiers while putting the blame on Himmler and me.
In the meantime, the buildup continued. Not only was it the largest in history, but it is likely to remain so in the future, too. We used 17,000 trains—imagine that—to deploy 138 divisions for the operation. Of those 104 were infantry, 19 Panzer, and 15 motorized. We also had 9 security divisions to hold down the occupied territories, 4 to help the Finns in Karelia, and 2 more which served as a general reserve. We had 7,200 cannons and 2,770 aircraft, which formed two-thirds of the Luftwaffe order of battle. The total number of men was just under 3,500,000. The number of vehicles (not motor vehicles, as one source erroneously says), was 600,000.
Not included on the list are 14 excellent Finnish divisions and 13 not-so-excellent Romanian ones. The latter distinguished themselves mainly by committing such excesses against the Jews that even our own men were disgusted. Later, we had Italian, Hungarian, and a few Slovak troops join us as well as a growing number of Waffen SS units. Recruited by Himmler from all over Europe and issued equipment on a priority basis, they fought like the devil. There were some problems, particularly with regard to the weather. But in the end everything was completed on schedule. To disguise our intentions, we spread the rumor that the buildup was meant as a cover for a coming invasion of England. A deception within a deception, one might say. To maintain that illusion, we kept on bombing London almost to the last moment.
At 0300 on 22 June we opened fire all along the 2,500-kilometer-long front. The Russians, it later turned out, had received plenty of warning. Nevertheless, they were somehow taken completely by surprise. After the war, the question how this could have happened became the subject of an entire literature. Was it the shortcomings of their communication system, which prevented them from alerting their formations in time? Was it our deceptive measures? Was it sheer blindness to what was going on? One thing is certain: had we not attacked, they would have attacked us. Not immediately, perhaps, as the Russian historian Viktor Suvorov in his bestselling volume, Icebreaker, claimed. But certainly later in case we showed the slightest sign of weakness. Ours was a preventive war, perhaps even a preemptive one. Certainly, my reasons for launching it were better than those of President Bush Jr. when he invaded Iraq sixty-two years later.
We started by destroying most of their air force on the ground. So unprepared were they that they had not even dispersed their aircraft and concealed them; hence the operation only took a few days. After that, our pilots were free to support the ground forces both behind the front and at it. Our armored and motorized divisions advanced at a speed rarely, if ever, achieved before or since. Behind them came the infantry, marching hell for leather, and behind them again were the supply trains and the railway companies, which worked day and night to convert the Russian system to the one everyone else used.
Passing from north to south, by early September we had surrounded Leningrad. I had decided to starve out the city, not take it by storm. Minsk fell on 3 July and Smolensk, just 400 kilometers from Moscow, three weeks later. The capture of each city, carried out by two successive pincer operations, brought the Red Army huge losses and us, huge numbers of prisoners.
At Smolensk, some 600 kilometers from our starting positions, we were obliged to stop and take stock. We worked day and night, yet we simply could not push the railheads forward fast enough. At this point an argument developed between Halder and myself. As had also happened in the campaign against France, Halder, who up to this moment had usually been on the cautious side, changed his spots. He argued that we should continue straight to Moscow as Napoleon had also done. His reasoning was that Moscow was the one objective the Russians could not retreat from. Therefore, an attack on it would enable us to deliver the Red Amy the coup de grace.
I myself saw things in a different light. Great as our victories up to this point had been, they had not broken the Red Army. Halder himself agreed with that conclusion. The reason was the primitive nature of the opponent. His troops, unlike the Western ones we had met in the previous year, can only be described as a horde of primitive animals. Sullen, totally at the mercy of their commissars, and driven ever forward by vodka and the lash, they just did not know when they were beaten. They went on fighting even when they were surrounded. When that became impossible, they melted away and joined the so-called Partisans.
We were trying to bite off more than we could chew. There was no point in moving forward while our rear was yet insecure. I wanted to reduce the size of our pincer operations. As fate would have it, a magnificent opportunity to do that had just presented itself. On our right, Army Group South had not advanced as fast as we had expected. With Army Group Center stretching farther east than it did, we were able to come at our opponent, Stalin’s old drinking co
mrade Semyon Budyonny, both from the north (Bock) and west (Rundstedt). Doing so would not only destroy the Russian southwestern front but also give us the Ukraine, complete with its industry and grain. The Ukraine in turn would give us access to the Caucasus with its oil.
Halder, as usual, objected. To convince me he had Guderian fly back to East Prussia, where I had my headquarters, and talk to me. Guderian was a relatively junior officer. However, I respected him and let him have his say. When he was done, I answered in a single sentence: My generals, I said, do not know anything about the economic aspects of the war. He saluted, and that was that. Later, Halder berated him for having given way as easily as he did. But Guderian knew, and knew that I knew, that what I had told him was true.
The Battle of Kiev was a huge success. Never in history had a single operation inflicted so many losses on any army. Between dead and prisoners, the toll was around 700,000 men. The booty we took was astronomical. Even so, it turned out that we had underestimated the Russian colossus. Each time we destroyed one of their armies, even army groups, they put another in its place. To be sure, their divisions were not really divisions in our sense of the word. They did not have the commanders—Budyonny, whom Stalin had flown out of the pocket at the last moment, was notable mainly for his enormous mustache. Nor did they have the organization, the cohesion, the training, or the doctrine. But they were there, and the deeper into the country we advanced, the more stubbornly they fought.
This struggle over, our forces, assisted by the Romanians on our extreme right flank, continued their advance to the east. In November they crossed the Mius River and captured Rostov, the key to the Caucasus, after fierce fighting. But here we found a surprise waiting. On 27 November our armored spearheads came under fierce attack from the north. Rundstedt wanted to retreat whereas I prohibited him from doing so. When he disobeyed my orders, I fired him. In his place I put General Walter von Reichenau, one of the few senior army officers who was a National Socialist, heart and soul, and whose anti-Jewish orders were a model of their kind. He, however, claimed that Rundstedt had been right and enlisted Halder to support him. In any case it was too late for me to intervene. So Rostov was lost after some fierce fighting. It was a reverse, but one that we could easily correct in the spring.
For all the magnitude of our operations on this front, the really decisive battle was going on further to the north. It opened in early October, when our railway companies had finally completed converting the necessary tracks. At that point no fewer than three Panzer Groups, two forming part of Army Group Center plus one that had been brought over from the Leningrad front, started a concentric advance on Moscow. The weather was against us; the autumn rains were transforming the entire region into a single sea of mud. Our troops, dragging or pushing their vehicles forward, did not receive even the most elementary supplies. Some of my generals, notably Guderian, tried to describe their sufferings to me as if I did not know them at least as well as they did. Still, the men pushed on, slowly, painfully, making progress and taking prisoners by the hundreds of thousands. In November the ground froze, putting an end to the mud. However, the cold created new problems. Engines would not start as the oil that lubricated their parts froze. It was the engineers’ fault. For years on end I had been telling them to focus on air-cooled engines, but they had refused to listen. Still, our advance continued step by painful step. Early in December some of our forward troops, looking into the distance, could see the spires of the Kremlin.
At that point we were suddenly hit by fresh forces: to wit, eighteen divisions, 1,700 tanks, and 1,500 aircraft Stalin brought up from Siberia in the nick of time. All of them were under the command of General Georgy Zhukov. Zhukov was the scion of simple peasants. As a child, he had been apprenticed to a shoemaker. He was a primitive but rock-hard commander the likes of which I was hard pressed to find among my own senior generals. It was said of him that, when one of his subordinates blundered, he would order the unfortunate man to put his deputy in his place and blow his brains out! In a way, it was all the fault of our dear Japanese allies. First, in April 1941, they had surprised us by signing a nonaggression pact with Russia, thus securing Stalin’s rear in his coming fight with us. Next, they failed to catch a Communist spy, Richard Sorge, who told the Russians that they could indeed rest assured on that account. The attack on Pearl Harbor, by involving them in war against the U.S. and Britain, did the rest.
At the news of the Soviet counterattack many of my generals panicked. They demanded that we quickly build a new front further to the rear before retreating so as to shorten our communications, rebuild our forces, and wait for an opportunity to launch a counteroffensive. I firmly refused. I knew the mentality of the Landser, or simple soldier, better than they did. Once he was permitted to withdraw, there would be no stopping him. That, after all, was what had happened to Napoleon, whose retreat from Moscow, which initially had been quite orderly, turned into a rout. I therefore issued my order “not a step back.” Whatever my commanders said after the war, to this day I have absolutely no doubt that, by doing so, I saved the army from disintegration. But at what a cost in anxiety and “nerves!”
Meanwhile, the Russians were having their own troubles. In early January their advance petered out. Major operations, hampered by the intense cold, came to a virtual halt. In front of Moscow as in the south, the reverse we had suffered was serious but very far from decisive. It was time to take stock. By that time I had rid myself of Brauchitsch. Throughout the campaign he had proved himself useless; come the crisis, his nerves gave way.
I myself took his place as Commander in Chief of the Army. It was an arrangement quite a few of my top people, both officers and civilians, did not like. They repeatedly urged me to appoint someone else or, failing that, to unite all the forces on the eastern front under one commander. They wanted to lighten the superhuman burden I was carrying, they said. But doing so would have put some three quarters of the entire ground forces under the authority of a single man. That was too much for comfort, I should say.
The winter of 1941-42 also brought us some trouble in the Mediterranean. First the English counterattacked and advanced westward, only to have Rommel turn the tables on them and recapture much of the ground he had lost. Tactically, the operations of the “Desert Fox,” as our media called Rommel, were as magnificent as ever. But in view of the small forces involved their strategic significance was minor.
The question of resuming our Russian offensive in the spring apart, my greatest problem was the United States. Strictly speaking, those who claim that Roosevelt was not a Jew may have been right. But he liked Jews and surrounded himself with many members of the “chosen people.” There were so many that his own behavior became typically Jewish. He had never been one of our greatest admirers. Now, having won a third term, he became bolder and bolder. In March 1941 he had Congress enact Lend-Lease, a program that enabled him to provide the English with weapons without the latter having to pay for them. Later, it was extended to Russia as well. In September his navy started escorting England-bound convoys from the U.S. east coast all the way to Iceland. An interesting form of neutrality, I would say.
Throughout the second half of 1941 my admirals, with Raeder and the submarine commander Karl Dönitz at their head, kept pestering me to allow them to attack American shipping. I, however, with the sinking of the Lusitania (1915) in mind, refused even though, by the end of the year, our relations with the U.S. had deteriorated to the point where they fired at our submarines at sight. Roosevelt, it seems, was goading us on, just as he did our Japanese allies. Then came Pearl Harbor—a mighty blow delivered without a declaration of war of which, of course, I fully approved. Japan, we thought, would keep the Americans busy in the Pacific for years to come. Four days later, I in turn declared war on the U.S. Partly because, in practice, we were at war already; and partly because doing so freed our hands and enabled us to fire back at the American warships that were firing at us.
Such was the situation a
t the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942. The strain was tremendous; for months on end, each time I thought of snow, I shuddered. My physical health also suffered. I had severe headaches, and my eyes, which had long suffered from exposure to excessive sunlight, started deteriorating. How I longed to turn my back on military affairs and devote myself to fields more suitable to my nature! If I pulled through, then this was partly thanks to the drugs and injections Morrell administered. And it was partly thanks to my own strong constitution. But these are details. It is not true, as the German historian Andreas Hillgruber and the American one Timothy Snyder, among others, have claimed, that I already recognized that the war was lost. Some, including Fritz Todt, who was now my Minister of Armaments and came to tell me his views, thought so, but they were wrong. Japan was keeping the English and the Americans busy in the Indian and Pacific oceans, respectively, by destroying important naval forces and by capturing many strategic positions. In the Atlantic our submarines, finally unleashed, were having a ball, sinking more English and American vessels than ever. And we still had time until the U.S. could mobilize its full power against us and deploy its full force across the Atlantic. In fact that only happened in mid-1944. Admittedly, English air attacks on our cities were increasing. But they had not yet reached the point where they formed more than a nuisance.
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