by Will Podmore
British military historian Chris Bellamy noted of the first days of the invasion, “German accounts are unanimous about the unexpected strength and savagery of the Soviet resistance across most of the front.”16 Soviet forces inflicted 750,000 casualties on the invaders in the first six months. Von Hardesty and Ilya Grinberg pointed out, “For the VVS [Soviet Air Force] in August 1941, there were signs of resiliency – even renewal. Indeed, the Nazi blitzkrieg had achieved dazzling tactical victories, but in a strategic sense, the enemy had been denied a clear and decisive victory. … The Soviet military – and the VVS – fought desperately, even in the face of enormous losses. The VVS remained severely weakened and disorganized, but it persisted as a viable force.”17
American military historian David Glantz stated, “In addition to slowing and temporarily halting German blitzkrieg war, the prolonged and bloody fight for Smolensk damaged Germany’s vaunted war machine and ultimately contributed to its unprecedented defeat at the gates of Moscow in early December 1941. … rather than trading space for time by accepting defence passively throughout the summer and fall, as some have argued, instead, Stalin and the Soviet Union’s military leadership insisted the Red Army stand and fight whenever and wherever possible. Although this military strategy proved unquestionably costly in terms of lost lives, weaponry, and military equipment, ultimately it helped produce Red Army victories in the Leningrad and Rostov regions in November 1941 and at the gates of Moscow in December 1941. … The military strategy Stalin, the Stavka, and Western Main Direction Command pursued was far more sophisticated than previously believed. … This attrition strategy inflicted far greater damage on Army Group Center than previously thought and ultimately contributed significantly to the Western and Kalinin Front’s victories over Army Group Center in December 1941.”18 Hardesty and Grinberg confirmed, “Moscow – unlike Paris two years before – stopped the advance of Nazi Germany. For the Soviet Union, as well as the Allied cause itself, this was indeed a momentous turning point in the war.”19 As American historian Stephen Ambrose summed up, “The Russians, alone, stemmed the Nazi tide, then began to roll it back.”20
An unprecedented mobilization gave weight to this strategy. American historian Walter S. Dunn, Jr., remarked, “The actual reason the Soviets were able to stop the Germans in late 1941 was an unbelievable mobilization of men and weapons beginning in September 1941, which created a new Red Army. The Soviet formed and sent into combat in a few months more new divisions than the United States formed in the entire war. … Beginning in the summer of 1941, an incredible effort was made not only to form new divisions and other units to replace those destroyed by the Germans, but also to equip them with modern weapons capable of matching German weapons. The herculean effort culminated in the defeat of the German Army at the gates of Moscow, the first defeat inflicted on Germany during World War II.”21 Overy summed up, “The reconstruction of an almost entirely new army on the ruins of the collapse in 1941, one capable of holding its own against the attacker, ranks as the most remarkable achievement of the war.”22
Soviet arms production
Bellamy applauded the Soviet government’s key decision to move 2,593 industrial enterprises, including 1,360 arms factories, to the Volga, Siberia and Central Asia, and to reassemble them between July and November 1941.23 Other historians agreed. Glantz asserted, “this massive relocation and reorganization of heavy industry was an incredible accomplishment of endurance and organization.”24 Hardesty and Grinberg observed, “The ultimate fate of the VVS – as well as the larger Soviet military – would rest on the State Defense Committee’s crucial decision, in early 1941, to evacuate Soviet war industries to the East. The herculean effort to transplant more than 1,500 industrial enterprises beyond the Ural Mountains at the height of the German invasion marks one of the Soviets’ most impressive wartime achievements.”25
During the war, the Soviet Union produced 100,000 tanks, 130,000 aircraft, 800,000 guns and mortars, one billion artillery and mortar shells and bombs, 30 million small arms (including 12 million rifles), 40 billion cartridges and more than 500,000 guns and mortars, all despite the Nazi occupation of the most industrialised part of the country. A better system produced ‘some of the best weapons systems in the world’26 - the T-34 tank, which German tank generals Paul von Kleist and Heinz Guderian called ‘the deadliest tank in the world’, the Katyusha multiple rocket-launcher and the Kalashnikov assault rifle.
American historian Stephen Fritz pointed out, “in 1942 the Soviet Union alone, even without the contributions of Great Britain and the United States, would once again outproduce the Reich in virtually every weapons category. In the key areas of small arms and artillery, the advantage was three to one, while, in tanks, it was a staggering four to one, accentuated by the higher quality of the Soviet T-34.”27 As David Glantz and Jonathan House wrote, “In addition, 1942 witnessed weapons production and force generation for the Red Army like never before – a miracle of industrial output and military might that created the building blocks, especially tanks and mechanized corps, of eventual Soviet victory.”28
British and American lend-lease played a huge part by sending arms, trucks, canned rations, boots, uniforms, radios and other equipment, but did not have a significant impact until 1942. In spring 1943, the US Ambassador, Admiral William Standley, called a press conference to claim that the Soviet press was silent about US aid. The Soviet ambassador in Washington showed Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles a long list of articles from the Soviet press detailing the US aid. Standley resigned in May. Stalin praised lend-lease’s ‘extraordinary contribution’ to Allied victory.29 He said, “Without American production, victory would not have been possible.”30
Allies
A grand alliance against the Axis powers was created. On 12 July 1941, the Anglo-Soviet alliance was signed, guaranteeing mutual assistance and no separate peace. On 18 July, the Soviet Union signed an agreement with the Czech government-in-exile and on 30 July with the Polish government-in-exile. On 2 August, the US-Soviet trade agreement was renewed and the US government sent an official message to the Soviet government stating that “the strengthening of the armed resistance of the Soviet Union … is in the interest of the national defense of the United States.” On 4 December, Poland and the Soviet Union made a Declaration of Friendship and Mutual Assistance.
The Anglo-Soviet and Soviet-American communiqués of June 1942 both declared that in the negotiations ‘complete understanding was reached with regard to the urgent tasks of creating a second front in Europe in 1942’. The US and British governments promised a Second Front before the end of that year. In talks with Molotov, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ‘authorized Mr. Molotov to inform Mr Stalin that we expect the formation of a Second Front this year’.31 Churchill then changed ‘1942’ to ‘1943’. On 10 June 1942, he told the Soviet government, “Finally, and this is most important of all, we are concentrating our maximum efforts on organization and preparation of the large scale invasion of the continent of Europe by the British and American forces in 1943. We do not set any limits for the scale and aims of this campaign, which at the beginning, will be carried out by the British and American forces numbering more than one million men, with the appropriate support of aviation.”32 Mawdsley has commented that the Soviet government was ‘right, too, to accuse Roosevelt and Churchill of bad faith’.33 US General Albert Wedemeyer explained the delay: “The second front, he told [Ambassador Joseph] Davies, should be postponed to maximize the number of Germans and Russians killing each other.”34
On 21 June 1942, Panzer Army Africa, commanded by Colonel-General Erwin Rommel, took Tobruk: 33,000 British troops surrendered to a smaller German force. Rommel pursued British forces into Egypt and engaged the British Eighth Army at El Alamein. On 5 July, Roosevelt cabled Stalin, “The crisis in Egypt with its threat to the supply route to Russia has led Prime Minister Churchill to send me an urgent message asking whether forty A twenty bombers dest
ined for Russia and now in Iraq can be transferred to the battle in Egypt. It is impossible for me to express a judgement on this matter because of limited information here. I am therefore asking that you make the decision in the interest of total war effort.” Stalin replied, “In view of the situation in which the Allied forces find themselves in Egypt I have no objection to forty of the A 20 bombers now in Iraq en route to the USSR being transferred to the Egyptian front.”35 As Churchill said later, “I know of no Government which stands to its obligations, even in its own despite, more solidly than the Russian Soviet Government.”36 The Soviet Union was a better ally to Britain than vice versa.
Collaborators
Back on the eastern front, the Nazis carried out mass murders in all the countries of Eastern Europe that they occupied. They killed an estimated 13.7 million Soviet civilians.37 This total included a quarter of Belarus’s people and 4.1 million Ukrainians, a fifth of the population. American historian Wendy Lower summed up, “In Ukraine’s history of man-made disasters, mostly imposed from the outside, the Nazi occupation stands out as the worst episode.”38 She concluded, “what the Nazis attempted to achieve in the region and how they implemented their imperialistic, criminal policies represented a dramatically different episode in Ukraine’s history, unlike the Stalinist campaigns of the 1930s and the subsequent, relatively relaxed Soviet policies of the postwar period.”39 Berkhoff affirmed, “the Nazi regime in the ‘East’ was driven by the Nazi conviction that Ukraine was, or should become, a clean national minorities’ slate for the German people. … This extreme German nationalism combined with anti-Bolshevism, anti-Semitism, and a racist view of the ‘Russians’, and the results were terror, murder, massacre, and genocide. … never before in the history of Ukraine did so many social and ethnic groups suffer so much during one period.”40
Yet some Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazi occupier. Since the early 1920s, the Abwehr, the German intelligence service, had funded the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists [OUN] and its predecessor, the Ukrainian Military Organization. The OUN proclaimed, “Our system will be horrible for its opponents: terror against the enemy – foreigners and their accomplices.”41 A Nationalist leaflet of 1941 said, “Moscow, Poland, the Hungarians, Jewry are your enemies. Destroy them.”42 OUN leaders admitted that the Ukrainian Insurgent Army [UPA] aimed to ‘exterminate Ukraine’s national minorities’.43 Iaroslav Stets’ko, the OUN’s second in command, said, “We are raising a militia that will assist the extermination of the Jews.” Orthodox Church leaders in the Ukraine condemned ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’. UPA Commander Roman Shukhevych ordered the killing of East Ukrainians ‘on shaky grounds or without any grounds, and contemplated their total extermination, including even OUN or UPA members’.44 Special German units supported by far more numerous units of local collaborationists reduced Ukraine’s Jewish population from 870,000 to 17,000.45
In east Poland, in June 1941, local militias killed 19,655 Jews. Antyk, the Polish Home Army’s propaganda arm, declared in the summer of 1942, when the Nazis were shipping 5-6,000 Warsaw Jews a day to Treblinka, “The extermination of the Jews in Europe by the Germans, which will be the final result of the German-Jewish war, represents from our point of view an undoubtedly favorable development …”46 Polish historian Andrzej Paczkowski noted, “thousands of Jews were handed over to the Germans, and similar numbers were murdered by Poles themselves.”47 Hubert van Tuyll agreed: “The holocaust in eastern Poland could not have been accomplished without the active participation of hundreds of thousands of locals recruited by the Nazis to control and then slaughter Jews in the field.”48
In the Baltic states too, some collaborated with the Nazi invaders. The Lithuanian Activists’ Front and Estonian guerrillas rose against Soviet forces on the first day of the invasion.49 The Estonian Legion in 1944 became part of the new 20th SS Waffen Grenadier Division (First Estonian).50 All too many Latvians joined the 19th SS Waffen Grenadier Division (2nd Latvian).51
These bodies were not just anti-Soviet. They were anti-Semitic, and they killed Jews in what historian Prit Buttar rightly called the Baltic Holocaust.52 Other historians agreed. Andrejs Plakans judged that the Nazi occupiers and their local allies ‘succeeded in turning the first six months of the German occupation (June to December) into the most murderous period in the modern history of the Baltic littoral … the Baltic littoral’s Holocaust’.53 Statiev pointed out, “In the Baltic region, too, the police actively helped the Nazis to exterminate nearly all the Jews. At least 20 Lithuanian, 4 Estonian, and 4 Latvian police battalions participated directly in the Holocaust. … In 1941-1942, German collaborators, scores of whom later joined the anti-Communist resistance, killed many more people in every borderland region except Estonia than did the Soviets throughout the entire period of their struggle against nationalists from 1939 to the 1950s.”54 Statiev summed up, “Each major nationalist group slaughtered or helped the Nazis slaughter far more members of ethnic minorities and local peasants than they killed Soviet soldiers.”55
The post-Soviet Baltic governments tried to deny that their SS Legions committed war crimes, which meant denying the verdicts of the Nuremberg Tribunal. For example, the Estonian government claimed that the Estonian SS legion only engaged in combat operations at the front to defend Estonia’s independence and that it played no part in Nazi war crimes.56 On 18 June 2002, the Riigikogu, the Estonian Parliament, adopted a ‘Declaration on Crimes of the Occupation Regimes’ which tried to equate Estonia’s incorporation into the Soviet Union with the invasion by Nazi Germany and falsely accused the Soviet Union of aggression and genocide. It did not mention that Estonia’s Self-Defence Commando killed all 963 Estonian Jews.57
Early in the war, the Soviet government deported numbers of Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians. Lithuanian historians later noted that the anti-Soviet underground ‘was somewhat impaired by the mass deportations of 14 June 1941’. Franz Stahlecker, commander of Einsatzgruppe A, complained that “it was much harder to stage pogroms in Latvia, mainly because the Soviets had deported the nationalist leaders.”
The Soviet government also had to send away from the front the Tatars, the Chechens and the Ingush, with far more reason than the US government had for interning its Japanese citizens. In 1939, there were 218,000 Crimean Tartars, including about 22,000 men of military age. By 1941, 20,000 Crimean Tartar soldiers had deserted the Red Army. 20,000 of them joined the Nazi forces. There were about 450,000 Chechens and Ingush, including about 40,000-50,000 men of military age. When the Soviet government called up 14,576 men for military service, 13,560 of them deserted.
And by deporting 58,852 Jewish refugees from Poland, the Soviet government saved them from being killed by the Nazis and their allies. As Snyder observed, Soviet deportations ‘preserved Polish Jews from German bullets’.58 Again, in autumn 1944, the Soviet government ordered the deportation of all Poles from western Ukraine and of all Ukrainians from south-eastern Poland. This policy ‘had by autumn 1945 ended the worst era of ethnic cleansing in the Ukrainian-Polish civil war for Galicia’.59
At the Potsdam Conference of August 1945, “the three governments, having considered the question in all its aspects, recognise that the transfer to Germany of German populations, or elements thereof, remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, will have to be undertaken.”60 The Allies saw these transfers as practical measures to prevent future conflicts between nationalities.61 The Hungarian, Polish and Czech governments all carried out the Allies’ decision to expel their German minorities. The Polish authorities told their camp commanders that beating or abusing prisoners was illegal and that anyone doing so would be punished.62
In the extraordinary circumstances of 1945, acts of revenge were understandable, although not justifiable. In particular, revenge rapes by soldiers of the Red Army and of the Polish, US, British and French armies were inexcusable.
Chapter 5
Stalingrad and victory
Stalin
grad, the battle that saved the world
Stalin’s order 227, issued on 28 July 1942, said, “Every commander, soldier and political worker must understand that our resources are not unlimited … To retreat further would mean the ruin of our country and ourselves. Every new scrap of territory we lose will significantly strengthen the enemy and severely weaken our defence of our Motherland. … Not a Step Back! This must now be our chief slogan. We must defend to the last drop every position, every metre of Soviet territory, to cling to every shred of Soviet earth and defend it to the utmost.”1
Lieutenant Anatoly Mereshko said, “Order 227 played a vital part in the battle. It opened the eyes of the army and the people, and showed them the truth of the situation facing the country. It led to the famous slogan at Stalingrad: ‘There is no land for us beyond the Volga.’ We were no longer just fighting for a city. It inspired us to fight for every metre of ground, every bush and river, each little piece of land. Order 227 brought an incredible ferocity to our defence of Stalingrad.”2 Machine gunner Mikhail Kalinykov said, “To be honest with you, there was considerable uncertainty about the fate of the city – whether we could hold it or not. And yet, after Order 227, we felt that we had to hold out at Stalingrad regardless of that uncertainty – somehow, we had to make our stand there. You see, the soil was now precious to us, and we had to defend every metre of it. It was our promise to the Motherland.”3