The terror was not limited to military scapegoats. On July 20 Stalin authorized Beria to organize special sections in the NKVD to purge unreliable elements from military units and to investigate ruthlessly all soldiers who escaped from German captivity or encirclement. True to Stalin's instructions, the NKVD rounded up suspected rumour-mongers and defeatists, who in a fresh wave of lawlessness were either shot or exiled to the camps.18 The worst atrocities were perpetrated in the areas vacated by the Red Army. In occupied Poland, the Baltic states and the Ukraine the NKVD indulged in a panic-stricken orgy of killing. Uncertain what to do with their prisoners, they began to murder them randomly in the first days of the German assault. There was no longer any system to restrain them. The NKVD guards killed anyone in their hands, even common criminals or those pending trial. When the prisons were opened up after the Soviet retreat there were scenes of indescribable horror. Bodies had been savagely mutilated; hundreds of prisoners had been tortured to death rather than dispatched with the usual bullet in the back of the head. In one incident in the Ukraine the NKVD dynamited two cells filled with women prisoners. In another prison the floor was strewn with the tongues, ears and eyes of the dead prisoners. The horrors almost defy explanation. What happened in the first few days of the war was very different from the calculated killings in Katyn and elsewhere. The NKVD guards seem to have been convulsed by a spasm of retributive violence induced by fear, desperation and rage. Racism cannot be discounted, for when the advancing Germans put Soviet prisoners of war and Poles together in the same railway cars, they sometimes found, on arrival at prison camp, that the Poles had been murdered on the way.19
Where the NKVD had time, prisoners were marched east under escort on what quickly turned into death marches. A column of 2,000 prisoners from the Wilno area was forced to march for six days before reaching a railhead, from which trains were to take them to camps further east. They were given only one meal, on the first day, and water only in sips after that. Hundreds died of exhaustion; others were shot or kicked to death as they fell behind the column. Since the death rate was so high on the marches, it is difficult to understand why the prisoners were not simply killed like all the rest. Few seem to have survived the war. In these western areas of the Soviet Union, so recently incorporated into the state, and in the Ukraine, the victim of Stalin's brutality during the collectivization drive, there were genuine opponents of the regime. When German forces poured into the region they were hailed by much of the population as liberators. For many of them the last experience of Soviet occupation was the sight of straggling columns of prisoners stumbling east and the seizure by retreating troops of anything that could be carried or driven along. Almost half the cattle of Ukrainian collective farms were herded back to Soviet-held territory. Some 50,000 factories, most of them small workshops, were dismantled and shipped east as part of a vast programme of industrial evacuation and relocation. There were few families that had not been touched by the attention of the NKVD in the western non-Russian areas for at least a decade prior to the German invasion. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to confuse anti-Soviet sentiment with enthusiasm for German rule. Many Ukrainians and Poles reacted with understandable caution to their new rulers. As one observer put it, the Germans had ‘not come to Ukraine to do good’.20
In the first weeks of ‘liberation’ a power vacuum opened up in the conquered areas that was rapidly filled with local nationalists or fascists. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), founded in 1929 and based largely in Poland, sent some 8,000 of its 20,000 activists into the Soviet Ukraine with the German forces. They split up into small units of ten to fifteen and fanned out into the region to spread the gospel of Ukrainian national revival. The OUN distrusted the Germans. Their ambition was nothing less than a Ukrainian homeland, independent of both Russia and Germany. That distrust was not misplaced. By the end of August German occupation authorities ordered the first crackdown on local nationalism. In the Baltic states, Soviet-occupied Poland, Belorussia and Ukraine, all those elements deemed to be hostile to German interests, including nationalists of all kinds, were rounded up by the SS Einsatzgruppen and either executed or imprisoned.21 That summer the first trainloads of emaciated, terrorized workers arrived in Germany, part of an army of more than 7 million workers seized from the areas of German conquest. The local populations were soon made aware that they had simply exchanged despotisms. In October 1941 Field Marshal von Reichenau ordered that no effort should be made to put out fires started by retreating Soviet forces. The destruction of buildings was part of the German ‘fight of annihilation’ against Bolshevism.22
The German plans for the conquered East began to take shape months before the attack in June. They closely reflected the fate of Germany's share of Poland, where the political and intellectual élite had been wiped out in mass killings in the early months of occupation and Polish territory either earmarked for crude Germanization or placed under the rule of Nazi satraps. The Polish population was regarded simply as a resource to exploit for its labour power. Any manifestation of Polish nationality and culture was officially stamped out, though it lingered on in a twilight world of dissent. The war against the Soviet Union was defined by Hitler as a Vernichtungskrieg, a war of destruction. The Soviet Union neatly encapsulated, in his view, all the major enemies of German, and European, civilization – Jews, Bolsheviks and Slavdom. This was a war to the death between two different world systems, not simply a struggle for power and territory. Whatever the practical strategic arguments for invasion in 1941, Hitler did not disguise the fact that the conflict was ideologically driven. For here was the unavoidable contest between barbarism and civilization anticipated in his thoughts on war in 1936.
The army and the SS – Heinrich Himmler's élite party paramilitary organization – were given joint responsibility for eliminating the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ menace. In the so-called Commissar Order issued in June 1941 the armed forces were instructed to root out Communists and Jewish intellectuals among Red Army prisoners. The SS Einsatzgruppen had the job of eliminating all Communists, officials and intellectuals. Their fate was death. The German armed forces alone are said to have executed an estimated 600,000 Soviet prisoners during the war. In May 1941 the chief of Hitler's Supreme Headquarters, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, issued guidelines for the troops to be ‘ruthless and energetic’ in their attacks on Bolsheviks and Jews. Early in the campaign the Einsatzgruppen began the mass executions of male Jews aged 17 to 45, as instructed. Soon older men and boys were added to the list. Beginning in August women and children were also rounded up for slaughter, some of them cases denounced or handed over by native anti-Semites in the Baltic states or the Ukraine. The remaining population was to be used as a virtual slave-labour force, ruled by Nazi imperial governors. At a meeting on 16 July 1941, Hitler outlined his own view of the East: ‘Occupy it, administer it, exploit it.’23
By mid-July Hitler was riding high on a wave of scarcely credible military triumph. Operation Barbarossa had worked like clockwork. The plan, elaborated more than six months before, was to strike a series of heavy blows against Soviet forces on the long western border, followed by encirclement and annihilation. Rapid pursuit was ordered to prevent Soviet forces from falling back in good order and regrouping. German forces were divided in four: a small Norwegian command based in occupied Norway and three larger Army Groups, North, Centre and South. Each Army Group was supported by an air fleet. Army Group Centre got a half share of the German armoured divisions, two Panzer groups out of four. It was to launch a vast encircling movement towards Minsk, with the ultimate axis of attack towards Moscow. The northern Army Group was pointed at Leningrad; the southern armies were to converge on the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. Germany's mobile and armoured divisions spearheaded the attack, though most of the army moved by foot or horse. The aim was to secure through surprise and speed the main axes of attack with the mobile units. The rest of the army would follow through, cleaning up pockets of resistance and strength
ening the German front line.
When the German armed forces sprang forward on June 22 they met only slight resistance. Border guards in many cases fought bravely, sometimes literally to the last round and the last man. The great fortress at Brest-Litovsk, right on the frontier, succeeded in holding out until July 12, its defenders fighting to a standstill. German paratroopers trained for special operations infiltrated behind Soviet lines, cutting communications, seizing bridges and adding to the general confusion. Some Soviet commands could establish contact neither with headquarters nor with the units they were supposed to be controlling. Sheer ignorance about the current military situation was a major factor explaining the disorganized Soviet response. The widespread destruction of Soviet air power made air reconnaissance nearly impossible and meant that forward troops got no respite from the continuous German air bombardment. The Red Army deployed nine mechanized corps in the first two days of the battle, but problems in supplying fuel and ammunition rendered Soviet tank warfare ineffective. Some 90 per cent of the army's tank strength was lost in the first weeks of the war.24
By June 26 Army Group North had crossed Lithuania, and was deep into Latvia. After pausing for the infantry to catch up, the armoured formations rushed forward to reach the Luga River, only sixty miles from Leningrad. Army Group Centre under Field Marshal Fedor von Bock drove in two massive pincers towards Minsk. Pavlov's attempt to counter-attack was swept aside, with high casualties. By June 29 German armies had reached Minsk. In their net they caught over 400,000 Soviet soldiers, in this first of the great battles of encirclement. The Panzer corps simply repeated the manoeuvre as they moved on to Smolensk, the last major city before Moscow, which they took on July 16. Timoshenko was sent to command the Western Front and save Smolensk after Stalin assumed the job of Commissar of Defence. Timoshenko improvised a defence using reserve divisions intended as a strategic counter-offensive force. The long, extended flanks of the German attacking force were subjected to a series of fierce assaults. Short of ammunition and supplies, with troops weakened from forced marches through the Russian heat, with few tanks and a great many horses, Timoshenko nevertheless succeeded in slowing the German advance and imposing a fearful level of casualties on an army that had conquered all of continental Europe for the loss of 50,000 men. Eighty miles south-west of Smolensk Zhukov even succeeded in inflicting a local defeat on German forces in the Yelnya salient. On September 6 forces of the Reserve Front retook the battered town in savage fighting but were prevented by the shortage of tanks and vehicles from exploiting their victory.
The actions around Smolensk showed both the strengths and the weaknesses of Soviet forces. Soldiers fought with an extraordinary ferocity and bravery. They inflicted casualties at a high rate and in the early battles often refused to take prisoners. Captured Germans were murdered and mutilated, sometimes ritually – Soviet troops had been told to expect no better from the enemy. It was not Soviet propaganda but the German army chief of staff who observed that ‘Everywhere, the Russians fight to the last man. They capitulate only occasionally.’25 When they ran out of bullets and shells – as was all too often the case in the early stages of the war – they fought with knives or bayonets. Horsemen charged with sabres drawn. Soviet forces soon came to believe that German soldiers disliked fighting away from the support of aircraft and tanks. ‘Bayonet charges,’ wrote General Rokossovsky, whose forces stood astride the road from Smolensk to Moscow, ‘are dreaded by the Germans and they always avoid them. When they counter-attack they shoot without aiming.’26
Soviet soldiers were also adept at concealment. Hiding in trees and undergrowth, in grassland or in swamp, infantrymen could maintain a chilling silence while the enemy marched past them entirely oblivious to their presence. German patrols took to placing non-smokers in front because they were more likely to be able to smell the tell-tale scent of the enemy – the coarse tobacco, sweat, even cheap perfume, swabbed on to keep away lice. The ability to blend into the landscape, summer or winter, was exploited by the Red Army to the full in the later years of war.27
The savage fighting held up but could not halt the German armies. Soviet forces lacked basic military equipment. The standard rifle dated from Tsarist days and was not generally replaced by automatic weapons until 1944. Radio communications were rudimentary and radios in short supply. Radar was not generally available. Tanks, even the most modern T-34 and KV-1 tanks, were short of supplies and fuel and were attacked repeatedly by German aircraft, which had local air superiority. Though brave, Red Army soldiers were tactically inept, often absurdly so. Officers were trained to undertake only frontal assaults, even across open terrain. A German account of Soviet counter-attacks on a German strong point on the approach to Kiev exemplifies both Soviet persistence and Soviet ineptitude. The attack began with an artillery barrage that fell behind the German emplacement, causing no damage. Then from a thousand yards distant, a hundred yards or so separating each line, wave after wave of infantrymen rose up out of the grass and with bayonets fixed tramped towards the German lines. The first line was mowed down almost to a man by machine-gun fire; the second was hit but was able to reform. Then the men ran towards the German guns, shouting in unison. They moved more slowly when they reached the piles of dead, stepping over or between them. Officers on horseback bullied them on and were shot by German snipers. The attack faltered and broke, then was repeated, using the same methods, four more times, each time without success. German machine-gunners found that their guns became too hot for them to touch. ‘The fury of the attacks,’ the report continued, ‘had exhausted and numbed us completely… a sense of depression settled upon us. What we were now engaged in would be a long, bitter and hard-fought war.’28
In 1941 the two opposing sides made war in very different ways. Both the Soviet and the German armed forces were committed from strategic tradition to the offensive. But in the summer of 1941 it was German forces who were on the offensive, forcing the Red Army to wage an unaccustomed war of defence, for which there had been almost no systematic preparation. The German armed forces were structured to maximize the offensive posture. The spearhead of the invasion force was provided by nineteen Panzer (armoured) divisions and fifteen divisions of motorized infantry. Each of the latter was a self-contained fighting unit, with its own complement of tanks, motorized infantry in trucks and armoured carriers and on motorbikes, engineers, artillery and anti-aircraft batteries. They were designed to move fast – at some points in the summer of 1941 they covered thirty to forty kilometres in a day – and to strike with irresistible force at an enemy front line. Once that line was fractured armoured forces could pour through and push on past the enemy infantry, which could be mopped up by the slower, horse-drawn infantry divisions trailing in their wake. For Barbarossa there were 119 of them, less heavily armed than the Panzer formations and far less mobile. Most of the army's 600,000 vehicles were with the armoured spearhead; the infantry were followed, like Napoleon's Grande Armée, by horse and cart. For all its modernity, the German army went into its war against the Soviet Union with 700,000 horses.29
Above the mobile core of Hitler's army was the German air force, 2,770 modern aircraft, including 1,085 bombers and dive-bombers and 920 fighters. The air forces were divided into four air fleets, each with a complement of bomber, fighter and reconnaissance aircraft. Army Group Centre, pointed towards Moscow, had the bulk of the air force, 1,500 planes. The air fleets were designed to give direct support to the ground forces, seeking out enemy strong points and artillery sites, columns of troops and vehicles and supply dumps and trains. The longer-range bombers were used for attacks on cities in the path of the approaching armies. The swift advance in June and July brought the capital within range. The bombing of Moscow began on July 21. During the war an estimated 500,000 Soviet citizens died from German bomb attacks, more than ten times the number who died in the London Blitz. The 700 reconnaissance aircraft played a vital role in giving the advancing army a clear picture of what lay ahead of them.
The whole system was held together by radio communications, which proved to be central to German success. On the ground, tank liaison officers rode with the armoured columns as they moved across the battlefield, directing aircraft overhead to targets on the ground. The whole offensive movement depended on speed and organizational flexibility, and on supplies and reserves keeping pace with the attacking force.
The Soviet dispositions to meet the German attack could not have been worse. The defensive belts were not finished; the reserve army was only just being formed; above all the concentration of forces in the southern zone allowed the weight of the German attack in the north to punch a giant gap in the Soviet front, then swing forces south to eliminate the threat to their flank from Soviet armies that could not be fully deployed. The defensive weaknesses were compounded with the poor state of organization and preparation in Soviet armoured and air formations. Unlike the German Panzer armies, the Soviet tanks and vehicles were organized in unwieldy mechanized corps, with large numbers of tanks spread out along the front to support the infantry armies. Armoured divisions were widely scattered, lacked effective communications, were badly under strength and were equipped mainly with obsolete vehicles. Their function was not clearly defined. Force concentration, the great German strength, was impossible under these conditions. The same was true of Soviet air power. Large though the Soviet air forces were, outnumbering German aircraft by three to one, their planes were mostly obsolete. New aircraft entering service in 1941 came in dribs and drabs, and Soviet pilots had little time to be trained on them. Most aircraft were parcelled out, like the tanks along the front line, in direct support of individual ground armies. A strategic reserve existed behind the front line, directly controlled from the Stavka, but its exact role remained unclear. Soviet air tactics were rudimentary. Few Soviet aircraft had radios, leaving them dependent on close formation flying. Fighters flew three abreast in a fixed line, easy prey for German pilots, who flew in loose vertical formation, using air-to-air communication to help each other. The slow Soviet bombers flew close together at a set height of 8,000 feet and were shot down like migrating geese.30
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