Death of a Nation
Page 53
The entire raison d’être behind Stalin’s Five Year Plans had been predicated on his utter certainty of war, a certainty that was underlined by his infamous statement that if the the plans did not succeed in achieving their ambitious aims within a decade ‘we will be annihilated’.(17.1) Stalin’s fears at this point however concerned a concerted effort by Western powers to otherthrow communism in the Soviet Union.
Stalin’s policy of appeasing Hitler in the 1930s has been seen by many historians either as an attempt to buy time, or to lure the Nazi leader into a false sense of security. Stalin notably forbade the communists in Germany to make a common front with the Social Democrats against the Nazis. In material terms, Stalin had in fact supported Hitler’s efforts of rearmament, and even supported Hitler geopolitically. At the crucial moment, Stalin gave Hitler his support with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, knowing full well this freed Hitler’s hand for a war in the West. Marshal Zhukov stated that Stalin was, ‘… convinced that the pact would enable him to wrap Hitler around his little finger… we have tricked Hitler for the moment.’(18) Stalin fully expected Hitler’s war would be a repeat of the First World War, leading to stalemate in the trenches, which would leave the capitalist West and the last redoubts of fascism mutually exhausted. This would subsequently allow the Soviet Union to roll in and expand the ‘Zone of Communism’ unopposed. Many in the West hoped for the same in reverse, that Germany would ‘bleed Bolshevik Russia white’ and the two powers would exhaust each other, allowing them to take advantage of the power vacuum that ensued. They were happy to let the second front wait and let the Soviets do the dying in the war against Hitler’s forces.(19)
Controversy continues over a speech Stalin supposedly made at a secret meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee on 19th August 1939. Stalin is said to have explained the rationale for the soon-to-be-signed Non Aggression Pact with Germany, arguing that it would destabilise the West, adding, ‘Comrades! In the interests of the USSR — the homeland of the workers — get busy, and work so that war may break out between the Reich and the capitalist Anglo-French bloc.’ Stalin made it perfectly clear that he fully understood the pivotal role the Soviet Union would play in any future conflict, stating, ‘If we make a pact of mutual aid with Great Britain and France, Germany will give up Poland and… the war will be averted.’cxcix (20)
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (the Non-Aggression Pact between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia) of 23th August 1939 gave Stalin what he wanted. This included the massive westward expansion of the Soviet Union, which would restore Russia’s pre-First World War imperial borders by the annexation of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Northern Bukovina, Bessarabia; and aggressive war against Poland and Finland, expanding Soviet territory to the magnitude of 426,000 square kilometres. The argument that Stalin was desperate to avoid war and was fearful of Germany is hardly credible. Germany had embarked on a full-scale war in the west, with troops engaged from Norway to the Pyrenees, and was losing the air war with Britain when Molotov arrived in Berlin. During his visit, between 12th and 13th November 1940, Molotov demanded a massive expansion of the Soviet Union’s ‘sphere of influence’, which would include Hungary, Yugoslavia, Greece and most importantly Romania, from which Germany received the bulk of its vital petroleum imports. This can only be viewed as a provocation, and hardly the policy of a nation merely set on a peaceful defensive posture, let alone one that was afraid of Germany. This is hardly surprising when one considers the massive superiority in arms that the Soviet Union had established over Germany by the early summer of 1941. By June 1941, Russia had no less than 24,000 tanks, including 1,861 of the new T-34s. She had 148,000 artillery pieces and 23,245 military aircraft. Much of her equipment was of the latest designs and comparable, if not superior, to German armaments. Overall, on 22nd June 1941, the Red Army possessed a superiority over the Germans of five- to six-fold in tanks and aircraft, and five- to ten-fold, if not more, in artillery pieces. And this was at a time when mass production of modern weaponry in the Soviet Union was just beginning to gear up.(21)
Hitler had foreseen the terrible threat that the Soviet Union posed to Germany and the wider world, but German military intelligence had massively underestimated the industrialisation and rearmament potential of three Soviet ‘Five Year Plans’ in succession. Churchill had seen the danger, only too late, and Roosevelt never saw it at all. Despite the OKW’s awareness of the military build-up along their eastern border, the Germans estimated that the Red Army had 160 to 182 divisions at the outset of war, totally missing the fact that the real number was 375.(22)
Viktor Suvorov, a former Soviet soldier, a member of the Spetsnaz special forces, an Intelligence Officer in the GRU (Foreign Military Intelligence Unit) and historian has made clear from his unique perspective, having lived and worked inside the Soviet military and intelligence apparatus, that there is a mass of evidence, including eye witness statements, reports from the interrogation of high-ranking Russian POWs, and circumstantial evidence to suggest that Stalin had been preparing for war with Germany in 1941–42, and that the Soviet Union had moved from a defensive to an aggressive position in preparing armaments and deployments along its western border. A considerable number of Russian historians support the view that on 11th March 1941 Marshal Timoshenko, General Zhukov and General Vasilevsky gave Stalin the plans he had requested for the invasion of Germany. Documentation in the central archive of the Russian Ministry of Defence (document #16, register #2951, case #241, pages 1–16) bears witness to this, but it has never been fully made public.(23) However, actions do speak louder than words. In May 1941 Stalin called up a further 800,000 reservists to bring the Red Army’s divisional strength close to full combat readiness.
Speaking at the Kremlin on 5th May 1941 at a graduation ceremony for General Staff officers of the military academies, to which countless witness statements attest, and a copy of which still apparently exists in the Presidential archive, Stalin referred to the ‘abandonment of defensive tactics and adoption of a policy of attack operations’. He further stated that, ‘War with Germany is coming whether Germany wants it or not.’ Lieutenant Colonel Laipin, of the 1st Motorised Infantry division, recalled, ‘We had quite generally expected the outbreak of war with Germany, since Stalin, during an officer’s reception on 5th May 1941, in the Kremlin, had said we must constantly expect war and be very well prepared for it.’ First Lieutenant Kurilsy stated that Stalin said, ‘The German Wehrmacht is not invincible. Soviet Russia has better tanks, airplanes, and artillery than Germany, and in greater numbers. We will therefore fight Germany sooner or later.’ Major General Krupennikov commented, ‘Stalin systematically prepared for war with Germany for years, and would have unleashed it in the spring of 1942, at the latest, with a suitable pretext… Stalin’s final goal was the achievement of world domination with the assistance of the old Bolshevik slogans of the “liberation of the workers”.’(24) Stalin followed up his speech with another, on 15th May, to the Chiefs of the General Staff of the Red Army, which called for a plan of aggressive war against Germany. Marshal Zhukov was to draw up the final details of the plan of attack, and this was some time before the first armoured shock forces of the German army deployed on their eastern frontier. The first German units did not go into position till 3rd June 1941.(25)
A speech made by Kalinin, the President of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, to the Komsomol (Young Communist League) on 20th May 1941 took up the same themes of ‘a holy revolutionary war’ against the West and the possibilities to ‘expand Communism’. Considering the nature of repeated murderous purges made against anyone who deviated from Stalin’s line, it is unthinkable that other leading members of the Communist Party could make speeches that were not in tune with his thinking and avowed policy. In a lecture given to the V.I. Lenin Military Academy on 5th June 1941, Kalinin stated, ‘The Germans intend to attack us… We are waiting for it! The sooner they do that, the better, since we will then wring their necks once and for all.’(26)
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There can be little doubt that Stalin and the leadership of the Soviet Union believed a German attack was imminent. The overwhelming sense one gets from reading the statements of the Soviet leadership is that they were possessed of an overwhelming sense of confidence in their abilities to deal the German military a crushing blow, no matter who struck first. Stalin’s much reported disappearance and shock (possibly even a nervous breakdown) in response to the onset of the German invasion can be attributed, not to shock at the invasion, but at the rapid success of German arms. Stalin’s successor, Khrushchev, declared, ‘No one who has the most minimal political understanding can believe that we were surprised by an unexpected and treacherous attack.’ The story of Stalin isolating himself and locking himself in his Dacha after the German invasion is still current, even after the Soviet Union opened up its archives post-1991. Stalin’s office log books show a virtually unbroken string of visits from the day of the invasion throughout the weeks that followed by Molotov, Beria, Timoshenko, Zhukov, Voroshilov and many others, with meetings lasting anywhere from five to twelve hours.(27)
The size and strength of the Soviet divisions that they encountered during Operation Barbarossa astounded the German military. Stalin had ordered the deployment of a further 114 divisions to move towards the western border on 13th June. A German pilot who witnessed the first days of the invasion of the Soviet Union wrote:
… we all had the same thought in our heads — how lucky we were to have struck first. It seemed that the Soviets were feverishly readying the groundwork for an attack against us… If the Russians had completed their preparations, there would have been almost no hope of stopping them… The highway (from) Smolensk (to) Moscow was the target of many raids; it was packed with huge amounts of Russian military, equipment and supplies. Trucks and tanks were lined up one after another almost without any intervals, often in three parallel columns…
The German Panzer Groups III and IV reported the enemy’s strength, in August 1941, as being between 330 and 350 divisions and the Wehrmacht took over 3 million prisoners of war in the first six months of the campaign in Russia.(28)
Does it make a difference whether or not Stalin was preparing for an attack on Germany? It does if one believes that Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union saved Western Europe from being overrun by communism in 1941–42. It does not, however, change the murderously genocidal nature of the war fought by the SS Einsatzgruppen, or the political commissars of the Soviet NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs — a brutal political police force and the Soviet equivalent of the Gestapo). Nor would it have made any difference to the extermination of the Jews of Europe by the Nazis and the implementation of the Holocaust. And so, it is hard to understand why many Western historians continue to refuse to countenance the high probability that Stalin was about to launch an aggressive first strike on Germany, which would not have stopped there,cc particularly when few of the same historians would argue against the notion that war between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany was inevitable. It remains a ‘sacred cow’ to hold the belief that the Germans committed all atrocities and to play down the genocidally murderous and aggressively expansionistic nature of the Soviet Union, because the Soviets were the West’s allies in a war against Nazi Germany. While it is true that the West could not have won the war against Nazi Germany had it not been for the immense sacrifice of the Soviet Union, that is no reason, two-thirds of a century later, to continue to deny the nature of the regime to which the West was allied, not least when more people died in Stalin’s Gulags, at the hands of his NKVD, during the Great Terror and the Ukrainian famines than during Nazi occupation. Authors from Robert Conquest to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn have put Stalin’s bloody death toll at over 60 million. There are still unfortunately those who are all too ready to overlook the fact that Stalin created a bloodbath in the name of socialism, who reject all comparisons between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and talk in terms of Hitler’s crimes as opposed to Stalin’s ‘mistakes’!
WHY HITLER REMAINS FRONT AND CENTRE
History has sought to portray Hitler as a fool or a madman, not least in the world of entertainment. In the 1968 comedy film, The Producers, written by Mel Brooks, a steel helmet-wearing Nazi shoots at his producers after the opening night of Springtime for Hitler and Germany, screaming, ‘You made a fool out of Hitler,’ to which they reply, ‘He didn’t need any help!’ There are countless other examples, from Chaplin in The Great Dictator, to the German comedy film entitled Mein Führer, which have portrayed Hitler as a clown. Mel Brooks argued that the best way to destroy Hitlerism was to poke fun at the man; he has a point. Nevertheless, there is a counter point to this, and an important one: if Hitler and Nazi Germany are simply turned into a caricature, does this teach us anything about one of the most destructive individuals and movements in the history of mankind? Men like Churchill and Hindenburg looked down on Hitler. Establishment men, who detested the rise of lower class ‘mediocrity’ to positions of power in a world where the established elites were being pushed aside. Hindenburg was loath to give the high office of the Chancellorship to a mere ‘Bohemian Corporal — Austria’s revenge for Königgrätz’, and a revolutionary at that. Churchill had an illustrious family history, stretching back to the Duke of Marlbourgh; he was born at Blenheim Palace, one of England’s finest stately homes, and had ridden in the last cavalry charge at Omdurman in the colonial wars in the Sudan. These men despised the likes of Hitler, believing high office should remain the preserve of their own class. Much of the academic establishment has taken a similar view, from the comfort of their ivory towers, deriding Hitler’s lack of education and intellect. But as the German historian, Eberhard Jäckel, wrote in the 1970s, those who seek to deride and distance themselves by ‘putting up derogatory exclamation marks at every turn, have no hope of understanding the phenomena.’(1)
Was it simply Goebbels’ propaganda that made Hitler appealing to the masses? Was that enough to disguise the shortcomings of such a vulgar and shallow little man? If we believe that Hitler was an hysterical imbecile, a virtually illiterate, uneducated, uncultured, charmless, misogynistic, sexually deviant, mono-testicular madman of popular historical and propaganda myth, does that bring us any closer to understanding how this man rose to power and led a nation and an entire Continent into the abyss of the most destructive war in all of history? Is this kind of caricature capable of raising a movement from obscurity to a 9-million strong membership; of raising a nation from utter destitution to world power status, and of taking that nation to war against the most powerful nations on earth, all but snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory? Obviously not; but in an era where even to attribute the man negative greatness can be viewed as highly suspect, or even a crime, it is the caricature that most people are left with.cci
Political correctness and historical myth-making removes Hitler from history altogether. He has become ‘Hitler the terrible’, evil incarnate. Just to mention his name necessitates the raising of 6 million crosses in order to distance yourself from the phenomenon, along with endless prefixes of how evil and incomparable he was, preferably followed by listing your family members who were dedicated communists, resistance fighters, victims of genocide or just upstanding, politically correct totems. In the pantheon of the most evil men in history Hitler stands head and shoulders above them all. His likeness once stood at the entrance of Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors in London. The History Channel has Hitler appear as the Antichrist in one of Nostradamus’s ‘revelations’. All of this removes the man from history and turns him into a supernatural phantom. It attempts to put Hitler and Nazism outside the realms of historical study and fails to allow any sane or reasonable contextualisation of the phenomenon of murderous totalitarianism which predominated in many parts of the world during the twentieth century. Even before the war began, Stalin had murdered more people than Hitler, but his murderous and indiscriminate rampages, against his own people and those in occupied Eastern Europe, whic
h continued until his death in 1953, do not hold our imagination in the same way.ccii Nor do the genocidal atrocities of Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, which cost the lives of over 70 million Chinese, more than the total of all those killed in the Second World War.(2) In his first meeting with Richard Nixon, Mao calmly told the US President that if it ever came to war with the Soviet Union, China could afford to lose 200 million of its citizens. As one historian put it to me during an interview, ‘The East was always barbarous and far away, and as for China, their culture and language are so impenetrable to those in the West that they simply don’t care.’(3)