The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

by Frankopan, Peter

  But there was another model that Hitler regularly referred to as well, with which he saw parallels and to which he looked for inspiration: the United States. Germany needed to do what the European settlers in the New World had done to the native Americans, Hitler told Alfred Rosenberg, the newly appointed Reichsminister for the Occupied Eastern Territories: the local population had to be driven back – or exterminated. The Volga, he proclaimed, would be Germany’s Mississippi, that is to say, a frontier between the civilised world and the chaos beyond. The peoples who had settled the Great Plains in America in the nineteenth century, he said, would surely flock to settle in the east. Germans, Dutch, Scandinavians and also, he predicted confidently, Americans themselves would find their futures and their rewards in a new land of opportunity.7 A new world order was going to emerge thanks to the fields of Ukraine and southern Russia that stretched far into the east. It was the end of the American dream, Hitler declared: ‘Europe – and no longer America – will be the land of unlimited possibilities.’8

  His excitement was not just based on prospects held by the belt of land above the Black and Caspian Seas, for signs everywhere pointed to a dramatic shift in Germany’s favour. One part of the German pincer was travelling towards the heart of the world from the north, while the other was coming from the south through North Africa and the Middle East. A succession of lightning victories in the deserts of North Africa in 1941 had brought Rommel and the Afrika Korps within striking distance of Egypt and thus close to taking control of the critical Suez canal, just as Barbarossa got under way. The collapse of France, meanwhile, had opened up possibilities for the Luftwaffe to use the airbases that the French had established in Syria and the Levant after the First World War settlements, to extend Germany’s reach further still.

  The fate of the world hung by the most slender of threads. The key question, it seemed, turned on the timing of the invasion of the Soviet Union and whether Stalin could be taken by surprise. It was crucial to launch the attack after the harvest had been sown but before it was collected, so that German troops could benefit as they advanced into Russia. Negotiations with Moscow in 1940 had already led to shipments from the Soviet Union to Germany of a million tons of grain, nearly the same amount of petroleum and considerable quantities of iron ore and manganese. Once delivery had been taken of a further enormous consignment in May 1941, the moment was nigh.9

  Alarmed by German troops massing in the east in the early summer of 1941, Marshal Timoshenko, Commissar of Defence, and General Georgi Zhukov confronted Stalin with a proposal to launch a pre-emptive attack, followed by an advance that would lead to an assault on Warsaw, northern Poland and part of Prussia. According to two closely matching accounts, Stalin dismissed the plan out of hand. ‘Have you gone mad?’ he apparently asked angrily. ‘Do you want to provoke the Germans?’ Then he turned to Timoshenko: ‘Look everyone . . . Timoshenko is healthy and he has a large head; but his brain is evidently tiny.’ Then the threat: ‘If you provoke the Germans on the border, if you move forces without our permission, then bear in mind that heads will roll.’ With that, he turned, walked out and slammed the door behind him.10

  It was not that Stalin did not believe Hitler would attack, just that he thought he would not dare to do so yet. In fact, the reason why Stalin had personally overseen trade with the Nazi administration had been to keep a close eye on the Germans while the Soviet army was rapidly rebuilt and modernised. He was so confident he still held all the cards that even when intelligence reports were received from agents in Berlin, Rome and even Tokyo – in addition to warnings and signs from embassies in Moscow – that an attack was imminent, he simply dismissed them.11 His scathing attitude was perfectly summed up by his reaction to a report from a spy within the German air force headquarters just five days before the invasion was launched. ‘You can tell your “source” . . . to go fuck his mother,’ he scrawled. ‘This is not a “source”,’ he wrote, ‘it’s someone spreading disinformation.’12

  Not all of those around Stalin were as blasé as the Soviet leader. German troop movements in early June led some to argue that the Red Army should be moved into defensive positions. ‘We have a non-aggression pact with Germany,’ Stalin replied incredulously. ‘Germany is tied up with war in the West and I am sure that Hitler will not dare to create a second front by attacking the Soviet Union. Hitler is not such a fool and realises that the Soviet Union is not Poland or France, and not even England.’13

  By 21 June, it was obvious that something serious was afoot. Sweden’s ambassador to Moscow, Vilhelm Assarsson, thought there were two options: either he was about to have a front-row seat at an epic confrontation between the ‘Third Reich and the Soviet Empire’ with extraordinarily wide-ranging consequences, or the Germans were about to issue a set of demands regarding ‘the Ukraine and the Baku oilwells’. If the latter, he mused, he might just be witnessing ‘the greatest case of blackmail in world history’.14

  Hours later, it became clear it was not a game of bluff. At 3.45 a.m. on 22 June 1941, Stalin was woken by a phone call from General Zhukov who told him that the frontiers had been breached in all sectors and that the Soviet Union was under attack. At first, Stalin refused to believe what was happening, concluding that it was a gambit by Hitler, aimed at strong-arming a settlement of some kind, probably regarding trade. Only slowly did it dawn on him that this was a fight to the death. Numb from shock, he slumped into a catatonic state, leaving it to Molotov to make public announcements. ‘An act of treachery, unprecedented in the history of civilised nations, has taken place,’ Molotov announced gravely on the television and on the radio. But have no doubts: ‘the enemy will be crushed and victory will be ours’. There was no mention of the fact that the Soviet Union had been dancing with the devil and now the time had come to pay up.15

  The German advance was relentless and devastating – even though the invading force was neither as well prepared nor as well equipped as has often been presumed.16 In a matter of days, Minsk had fallen and 400,000 Soviet soldiers were encircled and trapped. Brest-Litovsk was cut off, its defenders quickly deprived of supplies but not always of hope: as one young soldier scratched into a wall on 20 July 1941, ‘I am dying, but do not surrender. Farewell motherland.’17

  By this time, Stalin had begun to understand the magnitude of what was happening. On 3 July, he gave a radio speech that talked of the German invasion as a matter of ‘life and death for the peoples of the USSR’. He informed listeners that the invaders wanted to restore ‘tsarism’ and the ‘rule of landlords’. Closer to the mark was his claim that the attackers intended to obtain ‘slaves’ for German princes and barons.18 This was more or less correct – as long as princes and barons meant Nazi party officials and German industrialists: it would not be long before forced labour became commonplace for captured Soviet soldiers and the local population. In due course, more than 13 million people were used to build roads, to farm fields or to work in factories both for the Nazi regime directly and for private German companies – many of which remain in business today. Slavery had returned to Europe.19

  Over the summer of 1941, the Germans seemed all but unstoppable. By September, Kiev fell after a siege that saw more than half a million Soviet soldiers captured. A few weeks later, the three battle groups that acted as spears plunging into the heart of Russia had reached Kalinin, Tula and Borodino – where Napoleon’s invasion had faltered in 1812. Still the Germans continued to cut through the defences. By October, Moscow was teetering. Such was the anxiety that plans were made to evacuate the leadership to Kuibyshev, old Samara, more than 600 miles to the east of Moscow on a bend of the Volga as it flows towards the Caspian. Lenin’s body was removed from Red Square and put into storage. Preparations were made for Stalin to leave the city, only for the Russian leader to change his mind at the last minute and decide to stay: according to some reports, his train’s engine was running and his bodyguards were on the platform ready to go.20

  By November, Rostov-on-Don ha
d fallen, the final point before the Caucasus. At the end of the month, the 3rd and 4th Panzergruppe were within twenty miles of Moscow. On 1 December, a reconnaissance unit of motorcyclists was just five miles from the capital.21 Hitler was euphoric. The plan to decapitate the Soviet Union by knocking out Leningrad and Moscow in the north had been central to securing the ‘surplus’ zone in the south in the long term, and the plan seemed to be on track. Two months after the attack had started, as the Russian lines were being rolled back, he spoke with excitement about the future. ‘The Ukraine, and then the Volga basin, will one day be the granaries of Europe. We shall reap much more than what actually grows from the soil,’ he said in August 1941. ‘If one day Sweden declines to supply us with any more iron,’ he went on, ‘that’s alright. We’ll get it from Russia.’22

  In the meantime, construction and technical teams moved eastwards behind the army. In September 1941, a convoy of the newly created Sonderkommando R (Special Command Russia) set out from Berlin for Ukraine, with the aim of establishing a workable infrastructure in newly conquered territories. Made up of field kitchens, mobile offices, repair shops and police transmitters in more than a hundred vehicles, its job was to enable what one historian has called ‘the most radical colonisation campaign in the history of European conquest and empire building’.23

  When they reached Odessa, on the Black Sea, the officers in charge – a motley collection of under-achievers, draft-dodgers and misfits – set about occupying the finest residences for their headquarters and busied themselves with establishing the sorts of institutions that bore the unequivocal statement of long-term plans: libraries, record collections, lecture halls and cinemas to show triumphalist German films.24

  The invasion seemed to have been an unmitigated success. Almost the entire area earmarked for sending resources back to Germany had been conquered in less than six months. Leningrad and Moscow had not yet fallen, but it seemed a matter of time before both surrendered. Elsewhere too the signs seemed promising. Although an uprising in Iraq had been put down by a hastily assembled British force that requisitioned buses from the streets of Haifa and drove east to suppress the revolt, there seemed to be grounds for thinking that Germany’s new friends in the oil-rich lands south of the Caspian Sea would soon come good.25

  By the time of the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler had already given his formal blessing to the idea of Arab independence, and had written to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem to express solidarity, praising the Arabs as an ancient civilisation and as one that had common enemies with Germany in the British and the Jews.26 The cultivation of ties in the Muslim world went so far that one German academic penned a sycophantic eulogy that among other things praised Saudi Arabia as ‘The Third Reich in Wahhabi style’.27

  From Britain’s point of view, then, things looked desperate. Disaster had been avoided in Iraq by a hair’s breadth, noted General Wavell, commander-in-chief in India, and it was vital that steps were taken to protect Iran, where it was touch and go whether German influence might be extended. ‘It is essential to the defence of India’, he wrote to Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the summer of 1941, ‘that Germans should be cleared out of Iran now. Failure to do so will lead to a repetition of events which in Iraq were only just countered in time.’28

  Wavell was right to be concerned about Iran, where German propaganda had been relentless since the start of the war. In the summer of 1941, reported one American correspondent, bookstalls in Teheran were covered with copies of the magazine Signal, one of Goebbels’s mouthpieces, while cinemas showing films like Sieg im Westen (Victory in the West) that celebrated German victories in France and western Europe in epic style were packed.29

  Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union was also rapturously received in Iran. According to some reports, crowds gathered in Sepah Square in central Teheran to cheer news of the fall to the Wehrmacht of one Soviet city after another.30 The problem was that ‘Iranians generally are delighted at the German attack on their ancient enemy Russia,’ as Sir Reader Bullard, the British ambassador, informed London in the days following the invasion.31

  Pro-German sympathies were widespread in the army and in the bazaar, declared the distinguished Persian scholar Ann Lambton, after being asked for her views on the developing situation. Feelings ran particularly high among ‘younger officials [who] tend to be pro-German and to hope for a German victory’.32 The British military attaché held much the same opinion, contrasting the positive local impression of Germany with the negative views about Britain. ‘There is as yet only a small number [of people] who would be at all likely to support the British cause if the Germans were to reach Persia, whereas it may be anticipated that the Germans would find considerable active support.’33 This view was shared by the German ambassador in Teheran, Erwin Ettel, who reported to Berlin that a British attack would face ‘resolute military resistance’, and would result in the Shah appealing formally for help from Germany.34

  The anxiety that Iran might throw its lot in with Hitler was exacerbated by the knowledge that resistance was crumbling as the Germans advanced east. Such was their progress that General Auchinleck, until recently commander-in-chief, India and now appointed to head Middle East Command, was briefed that Hitler’s troops would reach the Caucasus by the middle of August 1941.35 From Britain’s point of view, this was a disaster. The Germans were in desperate need of oil. If they took control of the supplies in Baku and the Caucasus, that would be bad enough. What was worse, noted Leopold Amery, Secretary of State for India, was that they would then be ‘pretty close’ to the oilfields in Iran and Iraq and would doubtless make ‘every kind of mischief’.36 In other words, not only did it look as though Germany could find a solution for its Achilles heel of not having reliable access to oil to fuel its ships, planes, tanks and other vehicles, but it might compromise Britain’s ability to sustain the war effort. It was vital, General Auchinleck concluded, to develop a plan – named Operation Countenance – to defend the belt stretching from Palestine to Basra and to the Iranian oilfields.37

  Iran’s importance was magnified by its strategic location. Although Stalin had previously cut a deal with Hitler in 1939, the German invasion of the Soviet Union two years later had turned the latter into an unlikely ally for the British and their friends. It was announced in Washington, therefore, that ‘the Government of the United States has decided to give all economic assistance practicable for the purpose of strengthening the Soviet Union in its struggle against armed aggression’.38 This was coupled with private assurances given to Stalin by the American ambassador in Moscow that the US was determined ‘“all out” to beat Hitler’ and was prepared to do whatever it took to make this happen.39

  The problem was how to get armaments and matériel to the Soviet Union. Shipping to ports in the Arctic Circle was logistically difficult and, in the middle of winter, treacherous. The lack of suitable harbours, other than Vladivostok in the east, meanwhile, was no less problematic, not least because of Japan’s dominance in this part of the Pacific. The solution was obvious: to take control of Iran. This would prevent local German agents and sympathisers gaining a foothold at a crucial moment, would better enable the protection of natural resources the Allies could ill afford to lose and would provide the best chance of co-ordinating efforts to hinder and halt the relentless drive east of the Wehrmacht.

  While this suited the Allies’ war ends, it also promised longer-term rewards for the British and the Soviets respectively; occupying the country would give each what they had long coveted in terms of political influence, economic resources and strategic value. Exciting opportunities had been thrown up by Hitler’s decision to turn on his former ally in Moscow.

  In July 1941, Teheran was occupied by British troops, who were soon joined by Soviet soldiers. Differences were put to one side in order to promote mutual interests in a region of profound strategic and economic importance. There was much celebration when British and Soviet troops met at Qazvin, in the north of the coun
try, where they swapped stories and cigarettes. The foreign correspondents who met up with the Soviet army soon found themselves being treated to vodka and toasting the alliance by drinking to the health of Stalin, then Churchill, then Molotov, then Roosevelt, and then the same again in the same order. ‘At the end of thirty toasts in neat vodka,’ wrote one American journalist who was present, ‘half the correspondents were under the table. The Russians continued drinking.’40

  When the Shah dithered over issuing an ultimatum to expel German citizens with immediate effect, the British began to broadcast reports over the radio on the new BBC Persian Radio Service that (falsely) accused the Shah of removing the crown jewels from the capital, of using forced labour in his own business interests and of using Teheran’s water supply to irrigate his private gardens – criticisms that already circulated widely according to Reader Bullard in his memoirs.41

  The Shah prevaricated in the face of British demands, complaining to President Roosevelt about ‘acts of aggression’ and decrying the threat to ‘international justice and the right of peoples to liberty’. This was all very well, replied the President, but the Shah should bear in mind that ‘it is certain that movements of conquest by Germany will continue and will extend beyond Europe to Asia, Africa and even the Americas’. Persia, in other words, was dicing with disaster by contemplating good relations with Hitler.42 In the end, the British took matters into their own hands and forced the abdication of Reza Khan, who was by now considered a liability, and his replacement by his son, Mohammed Reza, an immaculately turned-out playboy with a love for French crime novels, fast cars and even faster women.43

  To many Iranians, such outside interference was intolerable. In November 1941, mobs were gathering to shout ‘Long Live Hitler!’ and ‘Down with the Russians and the British!’, to show their disgust for how the fate of the country was being decided by soldiers who were seen as an occupying force.44 This was not Iran’s war; the disputes and military conflict of the Second World War had nothing to do with inhabitants of towns like Teheran and Isfahan, who looked on agog as their country was caught up in the struggle between European powers. These views counted for nothing.