Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  As for the Luftwaffe, it fielded 1,945 aircraft in support of Barbarossa, 200 less than it had provided for the Battle of France as losses over Britain and in the Balkans and Crete had not yet been made good. Of these, 150 were transport aircraft and eighty the versatile Fieseler 156 Storch STOL (short take-off and landing) liaison machines. The remainder included 510 twin-engined bombers (Do 17s, Ju 88s, He 111s), 290 dive bombers (Ju 87 Stukas*), 440 Bf 109 single- and forty Me 110 twin-engined fighters and 120 reconnaissance aircraft (Ju 86s and Fw 189s).

  The army was well trained in what it had to do. Morale was high after the sweeping victories in Poland and France, and the Luftwaffe was the finest air force in the world at providing close support for ground forces. One good kick at the Soviet door and the whole edifice would come tumbling down. There were, however, weaknesses. The Russian rail gauge was not the same as that in use in Germany, so, even if the Russians did not destroy their railway lines, these could only be used by the Germans after cross-loading. The German army used a wide variety of vehicles, many of them captured, all requiring different spare parts and servicing schedules. The failure to have all the armoured divisions on the same establishment meant that the contents of resupply packets had to vary depending on the division to be supported. And in the infantry divisions, the bulk of the forces to be deployed, the soldiers marched while artillery pieces and all administrative transport at battalion level were horse-drawn, adding a huge burden in forage and in the manpower needed to look after the animals. Apart from the armoured and motorized divisions, the army could move no faster than Napoleon’s Grande Armée in 1812. While the allied contingents were valuable politically, and their manpower could be used to garrison rear areas, the requirement to administer them added to the Germans’ logistic difficulties and there were tensions between them. The Slovaks (two divisions) had to be kept away from the Romanians (four divisions), who in turn could not be placed anywhere near the Hungarians (one division and 160 light tanks), while Austrian members of the Wehrmacht were not entirely convinced that Italy (four divisions) did not still have ambitions in the Austrian Tyrol.

  Furthermore, the Luftwaffe possessed no heavy bombers comparable with those coming into service with the RAF: it could not therefore mount effective raids on rail communications and industrial plants deep within Russia, and it had too few transport aircraft should resupply by road and rail be insufficient. Neither the army nor the air force was ready for a long war, but it was not intended that it should be a long war: armoured and motorized formations would strike deep into Soviet territory, cutting off whole armies and destroying them before they could mount a defence farther back. The campaign would be over in weeks, and there was no need to order winter clothing – indeed, only the Luftwaffe’s Field Marshal Erhard Milch, in charge of procurement, ignored instructions and ordered 800,000 sets of cold-weather clothing to equip the air force officers and men, who he suspected would still be in Russia when the snows came.

  The attack on Russia would be mounted by over 3 million men, 625,000 horses, 600,000 motor vehicles of various types and 3,600 armoured fighting vehicles.38 The army staff calculated that they would take 475,000 casualties (killed, wounded, missing) in the first three months of the war, but the replacement army in Germany was only 385,000 strong and the next call-up, of those born in 1922, was not due until November 1941. This meant that not only could losses not be replaced, but also the units attacking on 22 June could not be relieved and the normal military practice of rotating units in and out of the theatre could not be followed. All this reinforced the need for a short war. If the USSR could be destroyed in six to eight weeks, then large parts of the army could be demobilized and the men released to industry.

  The German forces would be in three army groups. Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb’s Army Group North would strike from East Prussia through the Baltic States towards Leningrad with three panzer, three motorized and twenty infantry divisions; Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Centre would attack north of the Pripet Marshes, mask Brest-Litovsk and take Minsk, Smolensk and, ultimately, Moscow with ten panzer, five motorized and thirty-one infantry divisions; Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group South would push its seven panzer (including one SS panzer), two motorized and thirty-four (including four light, one air-landing, one mountain and four Romanian) divisions from southern Poland, Hungary and Romania through southern Russia and into the Ukraine.* The intention was for the armoured and motorized divisions to cut through the Russian front in great wide pincer movements, joining behind the enemy, holding that ring and preventing the Russian armies from retreating until they were dealt with by the German infantry divisions following up. It was a perfectly sensible and realistic plan.

  Facing the assembling might of the Wehrmacht were four fronts. General Markian Popov’s Northern Front faced Finland and the German army in Norway, and had eighteen rifle and one and a half motorized divisions; Colonel-General Fyodor Kutznetsov’s North-West Front defended the Baltic States and had twenty-eight rifle, three motorized and two horsed cavalry divisions; General Dmitri Pavlov’s Western Front faced the German Army Group Centre and had thirty rifle, twelve tank, two horsed cavalry and one and a half airborne divisions; and Colonel-General Mikhail Kirponos’s South-West Front had forty-five rifle, five motorized and ten horsed cavalry divisions. There were therefore 121 Russian infantry divisions compared to eighty-five German, twelve Russian to twenty German tank divisions and 9.5 Russian to ten German motorized divisions. Behind the Russian front lines were more infantry and armoured reserves and on numbers alone these should have been more than sufficient to hold off an invasion. Quite apart from the difference in technology and training, however, the figures are deceptive. While a Russian division had the same number of battalions as a German – nine – there were 17,000 all ranks in a German infantry division and only 9,600 in a Russian one. A German tank division had 118 tanks, a Russian one 195, but the Russians communicated by flags whereas the Germans were controlled by radio. A German armoured division had 15,500 all ranks compared to 11,000 for the Russian equivalent. The Russian air force, part of the Red Army in 1941 rather than an independent service like the RAF or the Luftwaffe, had around 10,000 aircraft in 1941 with about half serviceable. Many were obsolete, most had no radios and Russia had no radar network. Many of the aircraft had been moved to recently constructed airfields near the new western border, but hard shelters had not yet been constructed and the aircraft sat parked on the strips.

  For the Germans, the logistic support required for the mobile war that they intended to wage was an immense task, the responsibility of the army’s Quartermaster General, General Eugen Müller, and his deputy and eventual successor, Lieutenant-General Edouard Wagner. In broad terms, army groups were to jump off with fourteen days’ supply of ammunition, fuel and rations, which would translate to the infantry soldier carrying four days’ rations on his back and vehicles carrying five days’ fuel in jerricans,* followed up by fuel bowsers. During this time, the quartermaster service would set up and stock depots, with major depots to be no more than 100–200 kilometres behind the front. From these, armies would draw what they needed and the depots would move forward as the army did. As it was known that the Russian railway gauge was not compatible with the German, and as Russian rolling stock would not be captured, or, if it was, it would have been rendered useless, it was decided to convert the Russian lines to German gauge. This would take two weeks and thereafter the engineers would aim to develop the lines to keep up with the advance. In the meantime, 15,000 farm carts complete with horses and drivers were hired in German-controlled Poland.

  Although the army had some reservations about embarking on the Russian war before the one in the West was finally over, and while there was some tinkering by Hitler with the operational plan, the generals and the politicians were generally agreed as to the military objectives. It was when the post-conflict governance of captured areas came to be considered that divergence of op
inion arose. The army’s view was that responsibility for keeping order in territories that it overran lay with it until such time as peacetime conditions had been restored, when it would hand over to civil government agencies. During the period of military control, German military and international law would apply. The German government’s view was that the army was there to destroy the Russian armies and control of captured territory was a matter for the civil power. A directive issued in Hitler’s name on 5 March 1941 and entitled Practice of Jurisdiction in the Barbarossa Zone of Operations and on Special Measures by Army Personnel instructed the army to cooperate with SS agencies, allowed collective punishments to be authorized by a battalion commander or above and, astonishingly, stated that there was no obligation to prosecute Germans for offences against the civilian population except for certain acts of violence, and even then only verdicts which were ‘in line with Leadership’s political intentions’ were to be confirmed.39 Captured political commissars were to be separated from other prisoners and handed over for ‘special treatment’. The Commander-in-Chief of the army did his best to water this down, insisting that military discipline was to be maintained, that action was to be taken against a commissar only if he ‘places himself or intends to place himself against the German Wehrmacht by a specific identifiable action or attitude’, and that officers were to ensure there were to be no arbitrary acts of violence by individuals.

  On 15 March 1941 the army’s Quartermaster General, now Wagner, had discussions with SS Gruppenführer (lieutenant-general) Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SS State Security Service, the Sicherheitsdienst or SD, to establish the demarcation of roles between the army and the SS security police Einsatzgruppen or ‘action groups’ that would move in once the army had pacified the area. Heydrich made no secret of his intention that, as in Poland, his action groups would deal with ‘anti-Reich and anti-German elements in the enemy country behind the fighting troops’.40 These included ‘émigrés, freemasons, Jews, intelligentsia, saboteurs, terrorists, clergy and nobility’, although in Russia the last two groups would not detain the SS long as most had been eliminated by the communists or had fled abroad. The SS were authorized to take ‘executive measures’ against the civilian population. The army had not been happy with the behaviour of the SS in Poland, and Wagner insisted on having it laid down on paper that the SS would discharge their duties outside the army’s zone of control and on their own responsibility. How much Wagner and his staff knew of the intentions of the SS, concealed as they were behind bureaucratic phraseology, is debatable, but he clearly suspected something and tried to ensure that, whatever the SS got up to, the army would not be tainted by it.

  As it was, on 6 June 1941 the ‘Commissar Order’ was issued by NSDAP decree, stating that political commissars were not of combatant status and not entitled to protection under international law. Commissars were to be shot on capture, either by the army if captured in the operational zone or by the SS elsewhere. Both OKW and OKH struggled long and hard to dress up what was unquestionably illegal and immoral as a military necessity by painting commissars and political functionaries as threats to security. The preamble to the order stressed that the enemy could not be expected to behave in accordance with the principles of humanity or international law, and that political commissars could be expected to ‘indulge in hate-filled, cruel and inhuman treatment of those of our men they have taken prisoner’. They were ‘the originators of barbaric Asiatic fighting methods’ and any consideration by the troops for such people on the grounds of international law would be a mistake. When it was promulgated to the army, various commanders took differing views of the order. Some passed it on and supported it, others put it in the pending tray and left it there, others ordered that only commissars actively resisting should be shot and yet others said that such prisoners should be handed over to the SS out of the combat zone.

  In the introduction to his operation order for Panzer Group 4, part of Army Group North, Colonel-General Erich Hoepner wrote:

  The war against Russia is an essential phase in the German nation’s struggle for existence. It is the ancient struggle for the Germanic peoples against Slavdom. The defence of European culture against the Muscovite-Asiatic tide, the repulse of Jewish-Bolshevism. That struggle must have as its aim the shattering of present-day Russia and must therefore be waged with unprecedented hardness. Every combat action must be inspired, in concept and execution, by an iron determination to ensure the merciless, total annihilation of the enemy. In particular there must be no sparing the exponents of the present Russian Bolshevik system.41

  This was strong stuff, although no worse than some of the things Churchill said about the Nazis. Many officers, on the other hand, shared the pragmatic view of Lieutenant-Colonel Henning von Tresckow, on the headquarters staff of Army Group Centre, who wrote:‘If international law is to be infringed, it should be done by the Russians and not by us.’

  Such, however, were the seeds of a situation that would cause all sorts of legal and administrative problems later on, not least in post-war trials: who was in charge once the fighting had moved on, and what exactly was the legal position? Both Germany and Russia had signed the Hague Convention of 1907 but the USSR had declined to recognize the Tsarist signature of the accord and therefore it could be argued that she was not entitled to the convention’s protection. Furthermore, the USSR had not signed the Geneva Convention of 1929 dealing with the treatment of prisoners of war, although both the USSR and Germany had signed the 1921 and 1925 protocols that dealt with the treatment of wounded and sick in time of war and banned the use of chemical and biological weapons. The 1921 document specifically banned collective punishments and reprisals. It would appear therefore that, while neither country was obliged to follow the strict conditions and small print of Hague or Geneva, they were obliged to behave in what most people would consider a reasonable way. Ultimately neither did, the only difference being that the Germans tried to dress up what they did in a cloak of legality, whereas the Russians did not bother.

  Already the SS (Schutzstaffel, literally‘guard detachment’) was a state within a state. Originally formed in 1923 as small groups of bodyguards, meeting stewards and propagandists for the NSDAP, by 1933 the SS had 200,000 members under the leadership of the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler. It rapidly grew and by the russian war 1941 had assumed more and more functions of state, including the Race and Settlement Office, dealing with matters of Aryan descent and decisions as to who was a German and who was not; the secret police;* the Criminal Police; and the management of concentration camps. It had its own intelligence arm, which absorbed the state security organs, and it had expanded into industry, particularly the armaments industry. It had its own armed branch, the Waffen SS, which had been formed in 1939 from various quasi-legal armed groupings. The generals, however, were not prepared to tolerate two armies in the state and so the Waffen SS came under the army for operations, and was integrated into army formations, but retained its own rank structure and training organization. Its units were made up entirely of volunteers and, as the SS grip on industry tightened, it tended to get the most modern weapons. Well trained and highly motivated, the Waffen SS would expand to thirty-eight divisions by 1945. SS divisions were amongst the most effective in the German order of battle, they fought ferociously until the very end and 25 per cent of all the men who served in the Waffen SS were killed. As a very young organization, it lacked staff experience and a number of senior commanders and staff officers were loaned by the army. After the war, the whole of the SS was tarred with the same brush, and, because the concentration camps had been run by the General SS (whose camp guards were mostly men medically unfit or too old for military service), the men of the Waffen SS, who by and large had behaved themselves, at least in the West, and the widows of their dead were denied the pensions to which they were entitled, a wrong not righted until most of them were themselves dead.

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  Between 0300 and 0330 on Sunday, 22 June
1941, depending on the time of first light at different parts of the front, the greatest war ever seen anywhere began. As with the attack on Poland and the Battle of France, it was the Luftwaffe that opened the batting. Sixty-six Soviet air bases were attacked. Most had no hard shelters, aircraft were parked wing-tip to wing-tip on the tarmac or earthen strips and 800 were destroyed on the ground, while another 400 or so were shot down. It was, in modern parlance, a target-rich environment and the Luftwaffe very quickly established air superiority. Then, over a frontage of 1,000 miles, the German army began to move.

  What the Germans were attempting was on a truly massive scale. The USSR covered an area of over 8.5 million square miles: a million square miles more than China and the United States put together and five times the area of the present-day European Union. It was 6,000 miles from its European western border to its Asiatic eastern edge, more than twice as far as the distance from San Francisco to New York. The accounts of German soldiers who served in the Russian war all talk of the vast expanses of un- or under-populated wastes, mile after mile after mile of steppe, forest or, in the winter, snow, often with not a building or an inhabitant to be seen for hours on end. It would soon begin to seem that, however far they drove into Russia, there was still a huge way to go, and that, however many Russians they killed or captured, there were still many more to be dealt with, yet in June 1941 the mood was very different and everything that the German army planned seemed achievable.