‘In June there came an order which clearly showed us what to expect. Every soldier, from simple private to commanding officer, had to learn the Cyrillic alphabet. Everyone had to be capable of reading Russian signposts and Russian maps. That told us something – but had not Hitler and Stalin ceremoniously signed a non-aggression pact less than two years ago? Had not Hitler received Molotov in November of the previous year, to discuss – it had filtered through later – the partition of the British Empire?’(4)
Leutnant F. W. Christians was convinced the forthcoming mission was to secure the oil wells at Baku against possible British attack. As they would, therefore, because of the pact, be passing through ‘friendly territory’, he packed his extra summer dress uniform and cavalry sabre.(5) ‘There were some rumours around we were perhaps going through Russia to Pakistan,’ declared Eduard Janke, a Krad Schütze (motorcycle soldier) in the 2nd SS Division ‘Das Reich’. Nobody knew.
‘There were calls for German help but these were rumours, nobody believed it was fact. We asked the platoon commanders: “So where are we off to?” – “No idea,” was the response.’(6)
‘Where are we going?’ asked Götz Hrt-Reger with a Panzer reconnaissance unit. ‘To Turkey? To Persia? To Africa?’ There were no answers. The vehicles continued to motor on eastwards. ‘We knew nothing when we started out,’ he said. They reached Berlin, but still carried on.(7) Possibilities began to emerge as they entered East Prussia. Stahlberg’s unit, the 12th Panzer Division, began to assemble in the forests at Suwalki in the same province. ‘The closer we came to the Russian frontier, the more densely the regiments massed. The numbers of troops mustering exceeded anything we had seen before.’(8) Comprehension began to dawn collectively. Gerner Hälsmann’s regiment ‘assembled in an area 70–80km west of Warsaw. We were there for about four weeks and trained intensively,’ he remarked. ‘Before then we had received small dictionaries – small books, to learn a little Russian. I hardly did any,’ he said, ‘except to learn “Ruki wjerch!” – hands up!’(9)
All along the Russo-German demarcation line in Poland troops began to be increasingly aware of the imminence of a massive new campaign. ‘So many troops are about here,’ wrote home one Gefreiter as early as April, ‘who share a like fate to ours, and their numbers still increase daily.’ Another commented, ‘You couldn’t be bored here because the roads are overflowing with the military. What are the next few days going to bring?’ Hopefully some improvement, because he declared with some exasperation:
‘whether it’s going to amount to yet another war within the year? I am just about fed up with the war, and would rather do something else as spend yet another year gadding about in uniform.’(10)
Planning for ‘Barbarossa’ occurred selectively, initially on a strict ‘need to know’ basis. Hitler declared his intention on 31 July 1940, after which preparations started. Major Karl Wilhelm Thilo, a young staff officer working in the operations section of OKH, recorded in his diary how on 21 September OKH in Fontainebleau declared:
‘On the order of the Führer, Russia is to be photographed from the air up to 300km beyond its borders; preparations for invasion. I myself have to work on a mission for the German Military Attaché in Moscow to reconnoitre routes and communications for three spearheads.’
Eleven days later Thilo recorded that the German Military Attaché on Russian autumn manoeuvres ‘states that everyone there is expecting war against Germany in 1941; after England it will be Russia’s turn’.(11) General Günther Blumentritt, the Fourth Army Chief of Staff, commented that neither the commander – Generalfeldmarschall von Kluge – nor his staff received any indication of a possible war with Russia until January 1941.(12) Planning then continued apace, unabated until the execution in June. Halder had by the end of the same month encapsulated the mission: ‘Commit all available units’ (he foresaw 144 divisions on 29 January) and ‘crush Russia in a rapid campaign.’ He noted the main imperatives shaping the execution. ‘Space’ stretching to the Dnieper – the initial phase line – was the equivalent in distance from Luxembourg to the mouth of the Loire. ‘Speed. No Stop!’ Halder noted. The dependency would be on motorised transport, not railways. ‘Increased motorisation’ must result compared to the French campaign of 1940; he foresaw the need to create 33 mobile units.(13)
During spring 1941 more and more divisions were moved to the east and preparations intensified as the skeleton staffs of the senior commands began to establish themselves in situ. ‘A strange atmosphere prevailed during these months,’ commented General Blumentritt. Many of the senior staff officers had fought as junior commanders in Russia in 1914–18 ‘and we knew what to expect,’ he declared.
‘There was uneasiness both among the staff officers and in the divisions. On the other hand duty demanded precise and detailed work. All books and maps concerning Russia soon disappeared from the bookshops.’(14)
Evidence of this precision has survived in contemporary documentation and maps relating to the operation. Atlases were produced with special wallet editions showing distances to Moscow, highlighting Red Army barracks, industrial installations, rail networks, power, hospitals and local government. Tactical information indicating terrain ‘going’, temperatures, snowfall, incidence of mist and other meteorological details was given in tabular and map form. Painstaking preparation including photograph albums even showed which buildings were to be demolished in Moscow, while booklets mapping towns in White Russia showed a sinister yellow line, highlighting the main through-routes to Moscow.(15) Blumentritt observed:
‘In particular, Napoleon’s 1812 campaign was the subject of much study. Kluge read General de Caulaincourt’s account of that campaign with the greatest attention: it revealed the difficulties of fighting, and even living in Russia… we knew that we would soon be following in Napoleon’s footsteps.’
Two historical invasions had penetrated the depth and vastness of Russia: Charles XII of Sweden, defeated at Poltava in 1709, and Napoleon’s invasion of 1812. The latter was of particular interest because it took the proposed German direct route to Smolensk. Accounts of these campaigns were read avidly. ‘I remember that Kluge’s desk at his Warsaw headquarters was usually laden with such publications,’(16) remarked the Fourth Army Chief of Staff. Previous invasions had been defeated by long marches, shortages of supplies, tenacious resistance by the inhabitants and the awful Russian winter. They were food for thought and prompted foreboding. Nisbet Bain had written in 1895 of the severity of the Russian winter of 1708 that fatally weakened Charles XII’s Swedish Army, where ‘in the vast open steppes of the Ukraine… birds dropped down dead from the trees and wine and spirits froze into solid masses of ice.’ Hilaire Belloc described the change of weather experienced by French sentries in 1812 in terms of being stalked by a living beast:
‘What they felt as the night advanced was a new thing to them… a thing no Westerner among them had yet known – the winter advancing from out of Asia, from the frozen steppes… It came through the thick fog like something sentient… Men talk of having breathed that night an air itself freezing, and of having felt the rasp of that air so that they could only breathe through the coverings over the mouth.’(17)
Many of the German officers who had fought in Russia during World War 1, now commanding formations, had cause to ponder their first-hand experience of the tenacity of the Russian soldier.
German planners, however, believed that potential historical similarities were outweighed by the technological and ideological differences applying now. German racist beliefs, fundamental to the ‘Barbarossa’ conception, spawned miscalculations. The capacity of resistance of the Soviet Union, its population and industrial potential was measured in Slav sub-human terms. All that was required according to Hitler was to ‘kick in the door and the whole regime would collapse like a house of cards’. ‘The Russian is inferior,’ noted Halder recording a Führer conference on 5 December 1940, and ‘the Army lacks leadership’. A short Blitzkrieg campaign was sure
to succeed: ‘when the Russian Army is battered once, the final disaster is unavoidable,’ he predicted.(18)
Hitler’s previous respect for the Red Army had mellowed following its disastrous performance in the Russo-Finnish war of 1939. There was awareness of the inner turmoil Stalin’s purges had visited on the Soviet officer corps. Intelligence pointed to the shortage of experienced commanding officers. German attachés graded the Russian higher officer corps as ‘decidedly bad’, a ‘depressing impression’ and that ‘compared with 1933 [the] picture is strikingly negative. It will take Russia 20 years to reach her old level.’(19) Few military observers had been impressed, furthermore, by the Red Army’s recent annexation of eastern Poland in concert with the Wehrmacht in 1939. A young artillery NCO taking part in the ‘farewell’ parade from Brest-Litovsk on 22 September that year commented upon the motorised procession that paraded before General Guderian and a Russian brigadier-general, remarking:
‘The Soviets made a right poor impression. The vehicles, above all the tanks, were – I must say – a collection of oily junk.’(20)
Planning for Operation ‘Barbarossa’ tended, as a result, to concentrate on operational aspects, with less regard paid to the logistic effort required to sustain the three massive spearheads envisaged. Generalleutnant Paulus co-ordinated the effort from September 1940. It was anticipated the Soviets would defend along a line of the Dnieper–Berezina–Polotsk, north of Riga in the Baltic states. Three German army groups were formed to pierce it: one to the south and two to the north of the Pripet Marshes lying between them. Hitler’s primary objectives were economic, allied to a general desire to trap and swiftly destroy the Red Army in the west of Russia, before it could escape. Lebensraum dictated the need to annex the rich Ukrainian grainlands and the industrial area of the Donets basin, and eventually the Caucasian oil fields. Von Brauchitsch, the Commander-in-Chief, and his Chief of Staff, Halder, were motivated by an operational imperative: destroy the Red Army; economic prizes would follow.
Army Group Centre, some 51 divisions strong, commanded by Generalfeldmarschall von Bock, provided the Schwerpunkt (main point of effort). As the most powerful of the two army groups north of the Pripet Marshes, its task was to encircle the enemy west of the upper Dnieper and Dvina near Minsk, thereby preventing an eastward escape. Apart from strong infantry forces, it contained the bulk of the mobile formations: nine Panzer, six motorised and one cavalry divisions forming Panzergruppen 3 and 2 under Generals Hoth and Guderian. Army Group North, a much smaller formation of 26 divisions commanded by Generalfeldmarschall von Leeb, was to attack Leningrad, link up with the Finns and eliminate all Russian forces from the Baltic. Its Panzer spearhead of three Panzer and two motorised divisions forming Panzergruppe 4 was commanded by General Hoepner. Army Group South’s 40 divisions, commanded by Generalfeldmarschall von Rundstedt, supported by 14 Romanian divisions and a Hungarian corps, was to attack out of Poland, supported by the five Panzer and two motorised divisions of Panzergruppe 1, led by General von Kleist. Its aim was to cut off enemy forces east of Kiev. Some 22 divisions, including two Panzer, were held in reserve across the front. The bulk of the armies, despite the inclusion of the mobile Panzer-gruppen, consisted of infantry. Armoured spearheads were expected to dictate the pace, otherwise they would advance at the same speed as Napoleon’s infantry almost 130 years before.
There appears to have been only a loose connection between logistic and operational planning. Hitler’s perception of Jewish-Bolshevik decadence led to generalisations concerning Soviet vulnerabilities and weaknesses. By November 1940 German logisticians were calculating they could at best case supply German forces within a zone approximately 600km east of the start-line. Yet strategic planners were setting objectives up to 1,750km beyond the frontier, and anticipating only six to 17 weeks to attain them. The planners and the Führer were expecting the norms achieved by the Blitzkrieg campaigns conducted in Poland, the Low Countries and France. The German soldier appeared capable of anything and had, indeed, already demonstrated so. Failure was a remote and as yet untested experience. Hitler confidently announced, ‘when “Barbarossa” is launched, the world will hold its breath.’
Tomorrow ‘we are to fight against World Bolshevism’
‘All the preparations indicated an attack against the Soviet Union,’ declared Schütze Walter Stoll, an infantryman. ‘We could hardly believe it, but the facts made the whole issue indisputable.’ It was not a welcome prospect. ‘We always retained the faint hope that it would not come to this,’ he said. Officers had been summoned to an early morning conference on 21 June. Such activity normally preceded something special. It did.
‘At 14.00 hours the whole company paraded. Leutnant Helmstedt, the company commander, grim-faced, stepped forward. He read the Führer’s proclamation to the Wehrmacht – now we knew the reason for all those secret preparations over the previous weeks.’(1)
Unteroffizier Helmut Kollakowsky, another infantryman, received the news in similar fashion.
‘In the late evening our platoons collected in barns and we were told: “the next day we are to fight against World Bolshevism”. Personally, I was totally astonished, it came completely out of the blue, because the treaty between Russia and Germany had always been in my mind. My enduring memory on my last home leave was of the Wochenschau [equivalent of Pathe-Newsreel] I had seen, reporting the treaty was settled. I could not imagine that now we would fight against the Soviet Union.’(2)
Although suspected by enquiring minds, the announcement of the impending invasion caused universal surprise among the rank and file. ‘One could say we were completely floored,’ confessed Lothar Fromm, an artillery forward observation officer. ‘We were – and I must emphasise again – surprised and in no way prepared.’(3) Siegfried Lauerwasser, attached to a Luftwaffe unit moving up to his assembly area by train, was not informed. ‘We had no idea where we were going,’ he said, and tried to work it out by peering through the train window. ‘Then at a station the sign was in Polish.’ That night they reached their destination: brand-new 100-man barracks. A photo-intelligence officer guided them to their quarters. Once Lauerwasser and his comrades were gathered together, the officer, unable to contain himself, confided:
‘I’m not supposed to tell you boys, but at 04.00 it starts! [Es geht los!] We were shocked. What will happen to us? Then with dawn came the realisation there will be an attack and an invasion of Russia – and what emotions we had!’(4)
‘We learned that the attack, Operation “Barbarossa”, was on, only a few hours before it started,’ commented Eduard Janke, with the 2nd SS Division ‘Das Reich’, ‘and that in a few hours we would be off.’(5)
Knowledge of the decision was in many ways a relief. Uncertainty itself engendered nervousness. ‘The long wait is a real burden,’ complained a Gefreiter, ‘to which we have all been sentenced.’
‘Let’s get on with it’ was the pervasive emotion. The sooner the war got going again, the earlier it would finish. ‘When will the next battle come?’ wrote the same NCO. Letters home reflected such nervous anticipation. ‘We live each day and hour with tension,’ another wrote.
‘I can tell you much later. A lot of it will be incomprehensible. Hours waiting make the nerves taut, but it will eventually contribute to the victorious finale! And that one certainly wants to see pass us by as soon as possible.’(6)
Many, perhaps the majority, simply viewed the decision with equanimity. They were soldiers after all. Officers and NCOs were confident and combat experienced. Some chose not to reflect and took it in their stride. Previous campaigns had been short, sharp and successful. ‘We were all strongly convinced that this war would also not last long,’ declared Gefreiter Erich Schütkowsky, a Gebirgsjäger (mountain infantryman).
‘Personally, I already had a funny feeling as we cast our eye over large unfolded Russian maps, and Napoleon’s fate came to mind. But these thoughts were soon banished with time. We had already experienced momentous successes, so nobo
dy at this stage was contemplating defeat.’(7)
‘Why are you losing hope that all this will not be over quickly?’ enquired one Gefreiter in response to home mail. ‘Once the thing with the Russians is in the bag, my hopes will be rising ever more.’(8) Hauptsturmführer Klinter, a company commander in the 3rd SS Division ‘Totenkopf’, reacted with mild surprise to the announcement, and with a casual acceptance typical of many soldiers’ reactions to world political events. ‘The war with Russia will begin early morning at 04.00 hours,’ he declared, adding laconically ‘with Russia?… against Russia.’ He would simply get on with it. ‘It took a while before it had sunk in, and then we thought it through.’ There had been numerous previous examples when the Führer’s political and military perceptions had been proved correct. His fatalistic acceptance was typical of an SS soldier: ‘there was no room then for doubts or thoughts.’(9) Optimism and quiet resignation generally followed the initial surprise. Benno Zeiser, under training as a driver in a transport unit far from the front, voiced the type of idealistic fervour easily conjured up in the rear.
War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 Page 3