‘When the Germans finished the runway they let the grass grow and grazed cattle on it. It looked more like pasture than an airfield. White clover on the runway provided good grazing. The hangars were constructed by driving tree trunks into the ground. Hanging over this was wire or a green net overlaid with foliage. As leaves dried out they were replaced with fresh.’
Over 100 airfields and 50 dispersal strips had been built in Poland alone as part of the eastern build-up. Both Szcepanink and his friend Dominik Strug, looking on, were under no illusions. ‘Everybody knew, they knew,’ both said, ‘that this was preparation for war against Russia.’(6)
By early June, Oberleutnant Siegfried Knappe’s artillery battery had arrived in East Prussia. Exercising around Prostken near the Russian border, Knappe and the other battery commanders were invited to conduct a map study to ‘determine the best positions for our guns in the event of an attack on Russia’. Their battalion commander insisted it be done ‘carefully’. The existence of the Russo-German Non-Aggression Pact was cited in response, but they were reassured, ‘it is just an exercise.’ The positions were duly determined. Thereupon the battery commanders were ordered to send work details of soldiers dressed in civilian clothes to load 300 rounds of ammunition onto carts and transport them to their assigned gun positions. ‘Your men are to look like farmers doing farm work, and your ammunition is to be camouflaged after you unload it,’ instructed their battalion commander. The realisation sank in. One of the battery commanders asked: ‘When are we going to invade, Major?’ This caused acute embarrassment to their battalion commander, obviously labouring under security constraints. ‘It is a purely hypothetical situation. But we have to make it look as real as possible,’ he said. Civilian clothes were borrowed from local farm families and the ammunition concealed under brushwood in the reconnoitred positions.(7)
Tanks moved up under the cover of darkness. The forward elements of the 1st Panzer Division departed its garrison at Zinthen near Königsberg on 17 June. They were ordered to march only by night. Officer reconnaissance teams dressed as civilian hunters and farmers went forward to inspect the former German-Lithuanian border closely. Once the division was complete in its assembly areas, further movement by armoured vehicles was forbidden.(8) Schütze Albrecht Linsen, living in a hidden encampment near Wladowa on the high west bank of the River Bug, recalled that ‘any activity outside barracks was regulated by strict orders on camouflage’; duties were conducted under cover of trees. Routine continued, not enthusiastically ‘but with growing tension’.(9) There was collective awareness of impending events, but as yet no precise direction. Gerhard Görtz, another infantryman, speculated:
‘We ourselves became aware around 20 June that war against the Russians was a possibility. There was a feeling in the air. No fires were allowed, and one could not walk about with torches or cause any noise. At least something was fairly clear – we were shortly to embark on a campaign!’(10)
Affectionate letters from home reflected even greater unawareness of what was happening. One wife wrote to her husband Heinz:
‘Are you on a big exercise? You poor tramp. Oh well, hopefully things will soon get started so that the peace, long awaited, will finally come, when we can be man and wife, or better still, Daddy and Mummy.’(11)
At midday on 21 June Gefreiter Erich Kuby, a signaller, confided to his diary: ‘I am on duty and little is going on.’ His newspaper Die Frankfurter Zeitung, although only a week old, had nothing new to say. Kuby had surmised what might happen, but nothing had been confirmed. Interestingly, the padre had begun to conduct services that same afternoon.(12)
‘Forget the concept of comradeship’
Eleven months before, General Franz Halder, the German Army Chief of Staff, had hastily jotted down the essence of a high level conference conducted by Adolf Hitler at the Berghof. The invasion of Britain appeared improbable. ‘To all intents and purposes the war is won,’ Halder wrote. Factors that Britain may have hoped would change the situation needed to be eliminated. Such hope could only be provided by Russia and the United States. Remove Russia and ‘Britain’s last hope would be shattered’. Mastery of Europe and the Balkans was the issue. The elimination of Russia would remove the United States too, because Japan’s power in the Far East would increase tremendously as a result. Halder scrawled an interim conclusion: ‘Decision: Russia’s destruction must therefore be made a part of the struggle. Spring 1941.’(1)
Hitler’s decision to invade Russia was not purely, or indeed primarily, motivated by his desire to knock Britain out of the war. Ideological considerations were the imperative powering conflict. These had been outlined in rambling and turgid form in Mein Kampf as early as 1925. Beneath the street dialogue terminology, of which Hitler was an acknowledged master, was a sinister causal chain that could only result in war against the Soviet Union. Race was the basic determinant of human civilisation. At one end of the spectrum stood the German nation, the embodiment and bastion of the Aryan race. At the lower end were the Jews, a parasitic and degenerative influence that threatened to destroy civilisation. German supremacy would be achieved first by destroying domestic political enemies and then by foreign conquest, eliminating the victors of World War 1. To reach their full potential, Aryan Germans needed to expand the geographic bounds of the Reich into the east, gaining Lebensraum (living space). The eventual aim was to create a German Empire from the Urals to Gibraltar, free of Jews, in which the Untermenschen (sub-human races) like Slavs would be subjected to Helot-like serfdom.
By 1941 a substantial portion of the German population, including much of the officer corps, fully subscribed to this philosophical conception. Halder took notes at a two and a half hour meeting of some 200 high ranking officers and generals in the Führer’s office in Berlin during which ‘colonial tasks’, once the east had been subjugated, were discussed. Russia would be broken up: northern Russia to Finland, with protectorates established in the Baltic states, Ukraine and White Russia. Halder noted:
‘Clash of two ideologies. We must forget the concept of comradeship between soldiers. A communist is no comrade before or after the battle. This is a war of extermination… We do not wage war to preserve the enemy.’
He recorded a series of brutal, yet hardly debated, directives under the precursor, ‘This war will be very different from the war in the West.’ The war against Russia would involve ‘extermination of the Bolshevist commissars and the communist intelligentsia’.
The principles the staff officers were enjoined to embrace were to be reflected in future high command directives. ‘Commanders,’ Halder wrote, ‘must make the sacrifice of overcoming their personal scruples.’(2) Many did.
Generalfeldmarschall von Brauchitsch, the German Army Commander-in-Chief, released a series of directives two months later to the rest of the Wehrmacht, defining their freedom of action in the coming war. The Treatment of Enemy Inhabitants in the ‘Barbarossa’ Operational Zone, released in May, was secret, and could only be communicated to officers. In essence it directed ‘pacification’ measures against any resistance in newly occupied areas, ‘which was to be eradicated promptly, severely and with maximum force’. Troops were given the ‘duty and right’ to ‘liquidate’ irregulars and saboteurs ‘in battle, or shoot them on the run’. Collective reprisals would be exacted from villages where resistance occurred. The infamous Commissar Order of 6 June was preceded by the introduction that ‘in a war against Bolshevism, handling the enemy according to humane rules or the Principles of International Law is not applicable’. Communists were not to be treated as conventional PoWs, ‘they are hitherto, whether in battle or found conducting resistance, in principle, to be shot immediately’. They were identified to soldiers as wearing a special badge ‘with a red star with an embossed golden hammer and sickle, worn on the arm’.(3)
The Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) and Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH) were issuing decrees that dispensed with Germany’s international and legal obligations. These were
military directives, not SS orders. Senior generals – including Erich von Manstein, Walther von Reichenau and General Erich Hoepner – issued parallel directives. Hoepner reminded his troops in the Panzergruppe 4 that, ‘it is the old battle of the Germans against the Slav people, of the defence of the European culture against Muscovite-Asiatic inundation, and the repulse of Jewish Bolshevism’. No quarter was to be given in the coming pitiless battle:
‘The objective of this battle must be the demolition of present-day Russia and must therefore be conducted with unprecedented severity. Every military action must be guided in planning and execution by an iron resolution to exterminate the enemy remorselessly and totally. In particular, no adherents to the contemporary Russian Bolshevik system are to be spared.’(4)
There were soldiers, particularly those educated since Hitler came to power, who accepted this Nazi Weltanschauung conception of world order. To these men, the signing of the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact with an implacable ideological foe, made good sense, despite philosophical reservations. The Führer had shown himself to be a wily foreign policy opportunist, negating the need to conduct a war on two fronts, unlike the catastrophic example of 1914–18. The Wochenschau newsreel, seen in German cinemas, showing Ribbentrop’s historic flight to Moscow to sign the pact, exudes the same atmospheric quality to audiences as Chamberlain’s waving a piece of paper for peace following his flight to Munich the year before. It appeared that Adolf Hitler had an almost visionary grip on world events. ‘The Führer has it in hand,’ was a simplistic and comforting notion for soldiers unschooled and politically naïve so far as world events were concerned. In common-sense terms there appeared no need to attack the Soviet Union.
German-Russian diplomatic relations since 1918 were very much characterised by national self-interest, often clouding the ideological divide. Both nations defeated in World War 1 resented the presence of the emerging Polish state. Secret military exchanges, even before the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922, enabled German firms, via a bogus company established in Berlin, to manufacture aeroplanes, submarines and weapons of all kinds, including tanks and poison gas, on Russian territory. The Reichswehr had no intention of turning a benign eye to a German communist presence despite this assistance, which was aimed partly to influence it. Communism was brutally suppressed in Weimar Germany. The rise of the Nazi party increased the ideological divide and links were severed. Self-interest reversed the trend in the need for an accommodation desired by both Hitler and Stalin in August 1939. Even apart from the diplomatic and military aspects, the Soviet Union exported substantial amounts of raw materials and agricultural produce to Germany under the pact’s protocol. Quantities of grain, oil derivatives, phosphate, cotton, timber, flax, manganese ore and platinum were regularly despatched. Germany was also dependent upon transit rights through Russia for the import of India rubber and soya. By 22 June some 1,000,000 tons of mineral oil had been delivered.(5) Sonderführer Theo Scharf with the 97th Infantry Division, forming part of Army Group South, observed:
‘There was obviously a vast concentration of troops in progress toward the 1939 demarcation line between Germany and the USSR. Discussions, speculations and bets were rife. On the one hand it seemed obvious that something was going to happen with the Soviets. On the other hand oil tank trains rolled continuously westward, past us, from the oil fields on the Soviet side.’
There appeared little point to invasion rumours despite obvious visual substance. Scharf ruefully admits, ‘I still owe some long vanished Leutnant a bottle of champagne for my wager that we would never attack the USSR.’(6)
Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov visited Adolf Hitler in Berlin in mid-November 1940, an event given much fanfare and some prominence in German public newsreels. The public would have felt less comforted if they had been aware of the real issues. One month before the visit, planning for ‘Otto’ (later redesignated ‘Barbarossa’) was well under way. Halder exuberantly noted that Russia’s calculation that it would profit from Germany’s war with Britain ‘went wrong’:
‘We are now at her border with 40 divisions, and will have one hundred divisions later on. Russia would bite on granite; but it is unlikely that she would deliberately pick a quarrel with us.’
‘Russia is ruled by men with horse sense,’ he scrawled as Hitler commented on the likely substance of future Russian resistance.(7) Molotov was a ruthless diplomat of Bismarckian proportions. Romania and Hungary had joined the Axis, leading Molotov to believe that Germany was violating the spirit of the August 1939 pact. The German Tripartite Pact Alliance with Italy and Japan, although aimed allegedly at the United States and Britain, did not convince Russia. Not surprisingly, and contrary to media coverage, the visit was a disaster for German-Soviet relations. Paul Schmidt, Hitler’s personal interpreter, described the vitriolic dialogue hidden from public view, claiming that Molotov:
‘…was blunt in his remarks and did not spare Hitler at all. Very uncompromising, hardly smiling at all, reminding me of my mathematics teacher, with hostile spectacles, looking at his pupil Hitler and saying: “Well, is our agreement last year still valid?”
‘Hitler, who thought it was a mistranslation, said, “Of course – why not?” Molotov said: “Yes, I asked this question because of the Finns. You are on very friendly relations with the Finns. You invite people from Finland to Germany, you send them missions there, and the Finns are a very dangerous people. They undermine our security and we will have to do something about that.”
‘Whereupon Hitler exploded and said, “I understand you very well. You want to wage war against Finland and this is quite out of the question. Listen – do you hear me – impossible! Because my supplies of iron, nickel and other important raw materials will be cut.”’
Schmidt concluded: ‘it was a very tough, almost heavyweight championship, in political discussion.’(8) Whatever the public perception, there appeared little holding the two ideologies together except for short-term national self-interest. Both countries mistrusted each other. Hitler and his dinner guests greatly relished the tale carried by his physician, Dr Karl Brandt, that Molotov’s Soviet Foreign Ministry staff had all plates and silverware boiled before use, for fear of German germs.(9) But public perception was important, if only in deception terms. Halder scrawled a note after the meeting: ‘Result: constructive note; Russia has no intention of breaking with us. Impression of rest of the world.’(10) The weekly transmission of the German Wochenschau relayed the type of message cinema audiences in Germany wanted to hear:
‘The Berlin discussions were transacted in an atmosphere of joint trust and led to mutual understanding in all important questions of interest to Germany and the Soviet Union.’(11)
‘The Führer has got it all in hand’
Soldiers in the divisions gathering in the east were not totally insensitive to a gradual deterioration of relations. One Leutnant wrote home in early March:
‘Do you know what I have picked up? That now for the first time since we have had closer relations with Russia, the Russians have not been represented in the Leipziger Messe [International Industrial Exhibition]. Last autumn and summer he held all the cards, big style, in Leipzig and the Königsberg Baltic Sea Messe also. And when you follow the foreign press statements over our invasion of Bulgaria, you would have noticed that this time Moscow was not included. Now we’re negotiating with the Turks to get into Syria where the Tommies have got one of their strongest armies. And do you think the Russians are going to keep quiet? That will be the day!’
Despite all these ‘interesting developments’ the junior officer concluded ‘there is no use in cracking our heads over it, the main point is inescapable. Final Victory will be ours.’(1) Another soldier confided in a similar letter the same month:
‘A Russian General, in a drunken state, stressed that Poland had been trampled over in 18 days, it would take eight days to do us! [ie Germany] That’s what one is able to say in the Mess today! Well and good, we are not so well inf
ormed about Russia (terrain, army, barracks, airfields, etc) as we were over Poland, Holland, Belgium and France, and now over England. Anyway, not to worry, the Führer has got it all in hand.’
This certainly appeared to be the case according to observations by rank and file. A whole communications network had developed pointing eastwards. ‘Barbarossa’, the code name for the envisaged invasion of Russia, was planned with typical Teutonic precision. 2,500 trains transporting the first echelon to the east had already been despatched by 14 March. The build-up continued inexorably: 17 divisions and headquarters moved from Germany and the West between 8 April and 20 May. Nine further divisions went over the following 10 days. Between 3 and 23 June, 12 Panzer and 12 Panzergrenadier divisions were moved from the interior of Germany from the west and south-east. The total was to rise to some 120 divisions on the eve of ‘Barbarossa’. ‘The imposing vastness of the spaces in which our troops are now assembling cannot fail but strike a deep impression,’ wrote Halder on 9 June. ‘By its very nature it puts an end to the doctrine of defeatism.’(3) Hauptmann Alexander Stahlberg, a Panzer officer, commented:
War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 Page 2