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The document is a book titled 'BARBAROSSA: The Russian-German Conflict 1941-45' by Alan Clark, detailing the military engagements between Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II. It covers various aspects of the conflict, including strategic decisions, battles, and the decline of the Wehrmacht. The book is structured into multiple sections, each focusing on different phases of the war, from the initial invasion to the eventual downfall of Nazi Germany.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)

237 views498 pages

OceanofPDF - Com Barbarossa - Alan Clark

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BARBAROSSA

The Russian-German Conflict 1941-45

by ALAN CLARK
When BARBAROSSA begins, the world will hold its breath.
HITLER, OKW CONFERENCE MINUTES, 3RD FEBRUARY, 1941

A SIGNET BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY

For my father

Copyright © 1965 by ALAN CLARK

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without

permission. For information address William Morrow & Company, Inc.,
425 Park Avenue South, New York, Now York 10016.

Published as a SIGNET BOOK

by arrangement with William Morrow & Company, Inc.,
who have authorized this softcover edition.
A hardcover edition is available from William Morrow & Company, Inc.
FIRST PRINTING, FEBRUARY, 1966

CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
LIST OF MAPS AND CHARTS
PREFACE

BOOK I | The "Eastern Marshals"

3 The Clash of Arms

4 The First Crisis

5 The Lötzen Decision

6 Leningrad: Hypothesis and Reality

7 Slaughter in the Ukraine

9 The Battle of Moscow

11 The Wehrmacht at High Tide

12 Verdun on the Volga

13 The Entombment of the 6th Army

14 The Advent of General von Manstein

BOOK III | Zitadelle

16 The "Consolidation Period"

17 The Greatest Tank Battle in History

20 Eastern Europe Changes Hands

22 The Fall of Berlin

BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOTE ON SOURCES

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1 The Ukraine, July 1941
2, 3 Smolensk area, August 1941
4 Stalingrad, August 1942
5, 6 Mozhaisk, January 1942
7, 8 Stalingrad 1942
9 Fighting, April 1943
10 Cavalry attack
11 Crossing the Dnieper, late 1944
12 A rocket battery in action
13 Entering Kreuz, 30th January, 1945
14 Street fighting in Germany

Unless otherwise credited, all photographs are from the Imperial War
Museum, London, by permission.

LIST OF MAPS AND CHARTS

The Eastern Front on 22nd June, 1941
The Dnieper Crossings and the Battles of Smolensk and Roslavl
Leningrad
Budënny in the Ukraine (Uman and Kiev)
Moscow. The Battles of Vyazma-Bryansk
Moscow. Disposition of the Siberians and Zhukov's Counteroffensive
The Russian Defeat at Kharkov
German Plans for 1942
The Approaches to Stalingrad
Street Fighting
The Stalingrad Encirclement
The "Miracle of the Donetz"
The Death Ride of the Fourth Panzer Army
Retreat in South Russia and Collapse in the Balkans
The Last German Offensive

Charts:
Power and Personalities in the Third Reich
Order of Battle of the German Armies, 22nd June, 1941
Disposition of the Soviet Armies, 22nd June, 1941
Commanders and Dispositions of Opposing Forces in Spring, 1944
PREFACE
This book is devoted to the greatest and longest land battle which mankind has ever fought. Its outcome recast the
world balance of power and completed the destruction of the old Europe, which World War I had begun. Its victor
emerged as the only power capable of challenging—perhaps even defeating—the United States in those very fields
of technology and material power in which the New World had become accustomed to pre-eminence.

The subject, taken as a whole, has been neglected by historians. The Soviet authorities have lately begun to release
their own official histories, but these, while lavish with minor detail, remain tantalisingly silent at certain points of
crisis, and there is no official material comparable to that which the British and United States authorities allow to
students of their campaigns. The scale of such other works as exist is often very small, or else it consists of
personal memoirs, and is subject to the limitations of viewpoint and objectivity that are inseparable from this form.

Neither side has produced anything truly impartial. The Germans, who were defeated, have evolved a variety of
excuses. With the passage of time these have become formalised under two distinct heads—inferiority of numbers
and material, and the frustrations arising from Hitler's continual interference with his generals. Yet this study will
show, I hope, that there were occasions when neither of these excuses had validity. The Russians, although their
official accounts are, in the main, clear and factual, have their reservations. In common with other authoritarian
regimes, the Soviets have reputations that must not be disturbed and mythology to cherish.

This book has its heroes, although they fall in with the classic tradition more easily than with the clear-cut "good"
and "bad" categories of modern Western society.

Foremost must come the ordinary Russian soldier; abominably led, inadequately trained, poorly equipped, he
changed the course of history by his courage and tenacity in the first year of fighting. There are individuals, too,
who deserve an honourable mention. General Guderian, whom I have criticised for his impulsiveness and
disobedience in the opening battles, emerges in the last years of the war as the one man who might have saved the
Eastern front and who applied himself almost singlehanded to that end. And there is poor General Vlasov, one of
the ablest commanders in the Red Army, betrayed by his superiors, swimming against the tide of history with his
plans for an army of "Russians against Stalin." And General Chuikov, directing the hopeless energies of the
Stalingrad garrison by candlelight in the Tsaritsa bunker, and three years later destined personally to accept the
surrender of Berlin.

Finally, if it is not premature to do so, I have tried to suggest a reassessment of Hitler's military ability. His
capacity for mastering detail, his sense of history, his retentive memory, his strategic vision—all these had flaws,
but considered in the cold light of objective military history, they were brilliant nonetheless. The Eastern
campaign, above all, was his affair, and his violent and magnetic personality dominated its course, even in defeat.
Since the war Hitler has been a convenient repository for all the mistakes and miscalculations of German military
policy. But a study of events in the East will show that occasions when Hitler was right and the General Staff
wrong are far more numerous than the apologists of the German Army allow.

Seduction by personalities is at the same time the peril and the delight of the military historian, who should by
right confine himself to the field of battle, the outline of armament, logistics, and deployment. But in the
assessment of the campaign in the East, which was in truth a war between two absolute monarchies, the interplay
of personal rivalries is often of critical importance. Human frailties—greed and ambition, fear and cruelty—can be
seen acting directly on the conduct of operations.

Conversely, unless the book were to be intolerably long, many battles of only secondary importance to a strategic
evaluation of the campaign have had to be omitted. I have tried to isolate four points of crisis—Moscow in the
winter of 1941, Stalingrad, the Kursk offensive of 1943, and the last struggles on the Oder at the beginning of 1945
—and hung the narrative around them. This has meant that some sectors of the war, such as the Crimea, the later
stages of the siege of Leningrad, and the Caucasian campaign of 1942 are not described in detail. Nor does the
development of the book unfold at the same pace as the passage of time. For nearly one third of its length is
devoted to the summer and autumn of 1941, when every day was critical, less than two chapters to the wearisome
German retreat across European Russia in 1944.
From this study is one left with any general conclusions? I believe the answer is yes, but they are not of a kind
from which we in the West can derive much comfort. It does seem that the Russians could have won the war on
their own, or at least fought the Germans to a standstill, without any help from the West. Such relief as they
derived from our participation—the distraction of a few enemy units, the supply of a large quantity of material—
was marginal, not critical. That is to say, it affected the duration but not the outcome of the struggle. It is true that
once the Allies had landed in Normandy the drawing-off of reserves assumed critical proportions. But the threat,
much less the reality, of a "second front" became a factor only after the real crisis in the East had passed.

It is often asked, could not the Germans have won the war if they had not made certain mistakes?

The general answer, I believe, is that the Russians, too, made mistakes. Which is the more absurd—to allow, with
the wisdom of hindsight, an immaculate German campaign against a Russian resistance still plagued by those
blunders and follies that arose in the heat and urgency of battle, or to correct both and to reset the board in an
atmosphere of complete fantasy, with each side making the correct move like a chess text, when "white must win"?

I have discussed the question of sources at the head of the Bibliography, but there are some acknowledgments that
I should like to make here. Although I have said that taken as a whole, the period has been neglected by historians,
there are major works dealing with certain of its aspects, and from these I have drawn freely, both as to material
and inspiration.

Sir John Wheeler-Bennett's classic on the German Army in politics could never be out of my mind; and Mr.
Alexander Dallin's penetrating study, German Rule in Russia, is an essential backdrop to any serious work on the
subject; no one who is concerned with the dark complexities of the Allgemeine and the Waffen SS can afford to do
without Mr. Gerald Reitlinger's authoritative study, nor can any book that touches on the last days in Berlin avoid
standing in the debt of Professor Trevor-Roper's masterly description of that dramatic period.

I should like to pay tribute to Colonel Leyderrey of the Swiss Army, Who was the first to tackle the complexities
of the Eastern front records, and to express my thanks to Captain B. H. Liddell Hart for help both from his files
and his memory. Colonel Diem of the German Army and Colonel Vinnikov, the Soviet Military Attaché in
London, have been of particular help in providing documents and material, and Virginia Kyro of William Morrow
and Company has served beyond the call of duty as the tireless editor of this book. The Historical Section of the
University of Pennsylvania was kind enough to supply me with microfilm of the transcripts of the Führer
conferences. I should also like to express my gratitude to the librarian and staff of the Imperial War Museum in
London.

Alan Clark
Bratton-Clovelly
July 1964

BOOK I | The "Eastern Marshals"

. . . That's what we have army corps commanding generals for. What is lacking at the top level [i.e., Hitler] is the
confidence in the executive commands which is one of the most essential features of a command organisation, and
that is because it [i.e., he] fails to grasp the coordinating force that comes from the common schooling and
education of an officer corps.
Halder, 3rd July, 1941

The majority of them are out to make their careers, in the lowest sense.
Hassell

Appoint a Commander in Chief . . . What would be the use? Even I cannot get the field marshals to obey me!
Hitler to Manstein, January 1944

For the convenience of the reader, the Appendices beginning on page 508 contain A Chronology of Developments
in the Eastern Campaign 1941-45; important Facts about the Russian and German Leaders arranged under their
alphabetically listed names; a Waffen SS Rank Conversion Table, a Glossary of Abbreviations, and the Text of
Führer Directive # 34.
one | THE STATE OF THE WEHRMACHT
German OOB in 1941 on eve of Barbarossa

On the afternoon of Sunday, 5th November, 1939, it was raining in Berlin. Through the empty streets a single
black Mercedes, without escort, brought the Commander in Chief of the German Army from Zossen to the
Chancellery, where he was to receive, at his own request, an audience with Hitler.

General (as he then was) Walther von Brauchitsch was suffering from a painful attack of "nerves"—an unexpected
complaint for a commander whose armies had lately completed a rapid, victorious, and almost bloodless
campaign. The source of his apprehensive condition was to be found in a bulky memorandum which lay in his
briefcase and which, as he had promised to his colleagues on the Generalstab, he would personally read out to the
Führer. This document, though it bore the signature of Brauchitsch, had been prepared by many hands and rambled
over diverse subjects in the military field. Its purported motif was to "recommend" against launching an attack in
the West that autumn, but in essence it was a historical throwback, an attempt to formulate an ultimatum whose
substance was as much political as military and whose purpose was to assert the primacy of the Army over all the
other organs of government in the Reich.

This was a particularly embarrassing task for Brauchitsch. One, indeed, which he had been urged by his colleagues
to undertake on several occasions in the past, and which he had always managed to sidestep. Brauchitsch, who
owed his appointment to Hitler, and who saw more of the Führer than any other soldier outside the immediate Nazi
entourage, can have had few illusions about the value of any protest he might be allowed to utter or, indeed,
concerning the violence of the reaction which it would provoke. Why, then, having evaded it so often in the past,
did Brauchitsch now consent to take on the Führer face to face?

The development which had succeeded in uniting those elements in the Army which were opposed to the Nazi
regime and the more strictly professional soldiers who concerned themselves exclusively with military efficiency
arose out of the Führer's interference in the planning and conduct of military operations. Hitler had insisted on
being shown every order, down to regimental level, for the first three days of the Polish campaign in September.
Many he criticised, some he altered, one—the operation to seize the bridgehead at Dirschau—he completely recast
in a more audacious pattern, against the advice of every officer along the chain of command which finally led up to
Colonel General Halder, Chief of Staff of the Army and, effectively, No. 2 under Brauchitsch.

[Colonel General Franz Halder, Chief of the Army General Staff; appointed 1938, dismissed September 1942.]

The generals, who had already suffered the rebuttal of their traditional claim to be heard in matters of state that
impinged on military policy, now sensed a direct threat to their most jealously guarded precinct—the details of
tactical combat planning—and this on the very first occasion that the Army had taken up arms since 1918. And
their distaste cannot have been lessened by the fact that in every case Hitler's revisions had been justified in battle.
Brauchitsch, therefore, had found himself (and not for the last time) in a most delicate position: suspended between
the unanimous protestations of his colleagues and the certain wrath of his Führer.

Hitler, who may have suspected that something was afoot, received his Commander in Chief in the main
conference room of the Chancellery, under the bust of Bismarck, instead (as would have been more usual) of one
of the smaller antechambers. After a certain amount of verbal shadowboxing, in an atmosphere that must have
been anything but comfortable, Brauchitsch declared that "OKH would be grateful for an understanding that it, and
it alone, would be responsible for the conduct of any future campaign."

[Oberkommando des Heeres, the High Command of the German Army.]

This suggestion was received "in icy silence." Brauchitsch then went on, with one of those curious and mendacious
impulses which sometimes seized him (and of which other examples will be found in this book), to say that ". . .
the aggressive spirit of the German infantry was sadly below the standard of the First World War" and that there
had been "certain symptoms of insubordination similar to those of 1917-18."
By this time the interview had already lost all semblance of an exchange between equals—much less the deus-ex-
machina quality which was the traditional attribute of an encounter between the head of state and the Commander
in Chief of the Army. Brauchitsch never really got started on his main purpose. As his peevish complaints died
away, Hitler started to work up a tremendous rage. He accused the General Staff, and Brauchitsch personally, of
disloyalty, sabotage, cowardice, and defeatism. For ten, fifteen, twenty minutes the Führer poured forth a torrent of
abuse upon the head of his timorous and bewildered army commander, creating a scene which Halder, with truly
English understatement, has recorded as being "most ugly and disagreeable."

It was the first of the occasions on which Hitler abused his generals. They were to occur more frequently, last
longer, and be more "disagreeable" in the years to come. This was also the first occasion on which Brauchitsch
remonstrated with his Führer, and the last. The Commander in Chief drove shakily back to his headquarters, where
". . . he arrived in such poor shape that at first he could only give a somewhat incoherent account of the
proceedings."

Brauchitsch's fundamental error—or rather that of the conservative army generals whose emissary he was—was
the error latent in all measures that are based on a historical throwback. It arose from a blindness to the pattern of
evolution and, in particular, to the manner in which the power structure within the Reich had developed. For this
structure was no longer a duumvirate, shared between the façade of civil administration and the authority of the
military, but a lumpish hexagonal pyramid with Hitler at its summit. Obedient to the Führer but in deadly rivalry
with one another, were four major private empires within the Reich administration and a host of secondary ones,
revolving around personalities, crackbrained schemes, forgotten sectors of the economy or administration, whose
numbers were to proliferate as the war lengthened.

One of the most rational and intelligent of these personalities, Albert Speer, has said, "Relations between the
various high leaders can be understood only if their aspirations are interpreted as a struggle for the succession to
Adolf Hitler."

["Hitler's architect. Promoted to be Minister of Armament and War Production 1942.]

While (as was the case in the early 1940's) the prospect of succession was a remote one, the Nazi Diadochi
competed with one another to win Hitler's favour and to enlarge their own dominion. [The Diadochi were the
surviving generals of Alexander the Great, who quarrelled over the division of his empire. Several authorities (e.g.,
Trevor-Roper and Alexander Dallin) have adopted the term to describe the senior Nazi leaders.]

The result was that in addition to the Army there were many other foci of power, none of which was indispensable,
yet each of which was manipulated by the Führer to preserve the internal balance.

First, there was the Nazi Party machine itself, controlled by Martin Bormann and enjoying through him and Hess
the privilege of daily access to the Führer.

[Bormann was Chief of the Party Office after Hess's flight to Britain in May 1941; Hitler's personal secretary from
April 1943. Disappeared April 1945 after Hitler's suicide.]

The Party had its own press, controlled education, regional government, and a variety of paramilitary organisations
such as the Hitlerjugend.

[The Hitler Youth organisation, paramilitary in character, was for boys and girls of submilitary age.]

Then there was the SS hierarchy, presided over by Himmler and including the Gestapo, the RSHA (Reich Central
Security Office), the assassination squads of the SD, and the notorious "asphalt soldiers" of the Waffen SS.

[Heinrich Himmler was Reichsführer SS 1929; Police President, Bavaria, 1933; Chief of the Reich Political Police
1936; Minister of the Interior 1943; C. in C. of the Home Army, July 1944; C. in C. of the Rhine and Vistula
armies December 1944-March 1945. Committed suicide at British Interrogation Centre, Lüneburg, 23rd May,
1945.]

A third enclave was the personal creation of Goering and included the entire Luftwaffe, all the productive
capability that supplied it, and the administrative organisation of the Four-Year Plan, of which Goering was the
director.

Beside these three the conservative officers and gentlemen of the Heeresleitung, the German Army Command,
carried no exceptional weight or authority. If it came to a showdown, Hitler had at his disposal a highly armed
police, an air force and ground organisation, and a regional administrative machine. And as the stresses of the war
multiplied, so did the fragmentation of the German body politic, so that there came to be nearly a dozen primary
foci of power whose departmental rivalry was aggravated by personal animosities (Goebbels hated Bormann,
Goering despised Ribbentrop and mistrusted Himmler, Rosenberg was not on speaking terms with Himmler and
Koch, and so on)—and which were coordinated only through their direct allegiance to the Führer.

[Paul Joseph Goebbels. Reich Propaganda Minister, Gauleiter for Berlin. Plenipotentiary for Total War after 20th
July, 1944. Committed suicide in Berlin 1st May, 1945.

Hermann Goering, Prime Minister of Prussia from 1930. C. in C. of the Luftwaffe; chairman of the Reich Defence
Council; held the rank of Reichsmarschall, senior officer of the armed services. Committed suicide in Nuremberg
15th October, 1946.

Joachim von Ribbentrop, Ambassador in London 1936-38. Foreign Minister 1938-45. Hanged at Nuremberg,
October 1946.

Alfred Rosenberg, Chief of foreign political section in the Party office. Minister of Eastern Territories from April
1941. Hanged Nuremberg, October 1945.

Erich Koch, Gauleiter of East Prussia 1930-45. Reichskommissar of the Ukraine 1941-44. Extradited to Poland
1950 and disappeared.]

Yet when all this has been said the fact remains that the German failure in the East was essentially a military
failure. The Army proved unequal to the task which the state demanded of it, and so the state, living by the sword,
could not survive when the sword was shattered. A fundamental cause of this failure was the continuous tension
between the senior officers and staff of the Army (OKH) and the organisation of the Supreme Command (OKW)
headed by Hitler. While military operations were uniformly successful, this tension was dormant. But once the
Wehrmacht came under strain, relations between the two started to go sour. Hitler despised the generals for their
caution, he resented their class-consciousness, and he believed (with some reason) that they were the only potential
source of political opposition left in Germany. The generals, for their part, distrusted the Nazi Party because of its
proletarian origins and its evident irresponsibility in matters of state. As individuals, it is true, several of them were
converted by Hitler's "ideals" during the heyday of Nazi success, but under the stress of failure Party and military
alike were to undergo a disastrous polarisation.

Thus, in analysing the causes of this failure and the tensions which aggravated it, we must first look outside the
balance sheet of purely military affairs, of battalions and equipment, of brilliant tactics, bravery in combat,
misguided strategy, and take up the clues from the history of the Army in the period between the wars.

All was not well with the German Army. A curious malaise had crept over that magnificent body, having its
origins in the progressive erosion of its powers of decision. In the 1920's, under the brilliant and calculating
Seeckt, the German Army had enjoyed undisputed sovereignty as the arbiter of governments and policies.

[Colonel General Hans von Seeckt, Commander in Chief of the German Army 1919-30.]

But in the 1930's extraneous factors had begun to make themselves felt. Partly these were technological—the
advent of new weapons and new services threatened the primacy of the well-drilled soldier; partly they were
political—in the shape of Adolf Hitler, the Nazi Party, and their private brigades of well-armed rowdies, the SA.

During this period Hitler had substantial popular support, but not a majority. Already Chancellor, he was
determined to succeed Hindenburg as President, and to achieve this he needed the support of the Army.

[Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, 1847-1934. Chief of the General Staff 1916-19; President of Germany 1925-
34.]
The Army itself was anxious to reassert its power in domestic politics, and believed that in Hitler it might have
found an acceptable protégé—provided that he fulfilled certain conditions. What followed, the Deutschland
Compact, was a classic example of an agreement, not uncommon in history, in which each side believes that it has
gained the advantage because of its simultaneous (but undeclared) resolve to double-cross the other within the
framework of the agreement. In the mistaken belief that because the support of the Army would make Hitler,
withdrawal of that support could at any time unmake him, the War Minister, Blomberg, had agreed to back Hitler's
claim to succeed the ailing Hindenburg in the presidency. In return he extracted a promise that Hitler would curb
the SA, and "assure the hegemony of the Reichswehr on all questions relative to military matters."

The two men had made their agreement in the secrecy of a wardroom on the Deutschland steaming between Kiel
and Königsberg at the start of the spring manoeuvres of 1934. When these passed and spring turned to early
summer with no move by Hitler to fulfil his part of the bargain, it was felt by many in the Army that the
impertinent little Chancellor (he had been in office less than a year) was "unreliable." In June a political crisis,
deeper in shadow than substance, blew up, and "the unity of the Reich" seemed to the military—or they professed
it to seem—in jeopardy.

Hitler's experience on this occasion can have done nothing to temper his private resolve to subordinate the Army
as soon and as ruthlessly as was feasible. The nominal head of the executive, he was sent for by Blomberg, who
met him on the steps of the castle at Neudeck. The War Minister was in full uniform, and immediately (while
remaining standing at a superior level to the Chancellor) delivered a cold and formal speech ". . . If the
Government of the Reich could not of itself bring about a relaxation of the present state of tension, the President
would declare martial law and hand over the control of affairs to the Army." Hitler was allowed exactly four
minutes with Hindenburg, who woodenly recited a summary of Blomberg's caution while Blomberg remained
standing at his side. Hitler was then dismissed.

This was the last occasion on which the Army exercised real power in the politics of the Third Reich. Within ten
days the Nazis had shown that they were its equal in merciless application of the rules, and moreover, that they
changed these rules to suit themselves as their grip on the national policy tightened. After warning the High
Command that "civil action" was going to be taken against "certain disruptive elements" and arranging that the
Reichswehr be placed in a state of general alert and confined to barracks, Hitler struck out—placing his own
catholic interpretation upon the term "disruptive." To do the killing Hitler used his personal bodyguard, the black-
uniformed SS. In 1934 there were only a few thousand of them, but surprise and the passivity of the Army more
than made up for their lack of numbers. It was not from their own comrades in arms that the SA were expecting
trouble.

By the time the Army came to its senses "order" was restored and the blood was being swabbed out of the
execution cellars. The SA had gone, but so had nearly every figure of distinction, be he right, liberal, or even as
Schleicher and Bredow of the Generalstab, who had opposed the rise of the Nazi Party.

[Colonel General Kurt von Schleicher, a "political" soldier who held office as Minister of Defence in the twenties
and as Chancellor in 1932. Advised Hindenburg against dealing with Hitler.

Major General Kurt von Bredow; succeeded Schleicher as War Minister 1932; of similar political views.]

From that day on it was plain that whosoever opposed Hitler risked not simply his career but his life; and the
instrument of execution, the SS, had emerged, by the very terms of its confinement to "police" duties, as the true
arbiter of internal security.

For a few weeks, as the scope of the purge and the threat to its own position became apparent, the Army hesitated
over what action it should take. Its discontent, diverted by the death of the aged Marshal Hindenburg, rumbled on
into the following year, and then Hitler had opened the toy cupboard.

The declaration of general rearmament and military conscription gave every professional soldier so much work
and such glittering prospects as to effectively smother any desire he may have felt to dabble in politics. In any
case, to what purpose would such dabbling be directed? The Army seemed to have achieved its every goal. Its
"hegemony in military affairs" had been bloodily asserted, and all limits on its own development had been torn
down. Blomberg spoke for all in his speech at the German Heroes Remembrance Day celebrations on 17th March,
1935:

"It was the Army, removed from political conflict, which laid the foundations on which a God-sent architect could
build. Then this man came, the man who with his strength of will and spiritual power prepared for our discussions
the end that they deserved, and made all good where a whole generation had failed."

But if Blomberg had forgotten the interview at Neudeck, Hitler had not. Nor had the Führer (as he now was)
accepted the supercilious posturing of the then Commander in Chief, Fritsch, and his obstructive attitude to the SS;
or the flagrant manner in which Fritsch harboured political suspects within the ranks of the Army. Both these men
were marked for removal, and while their files at Gestapo headquarters accumulated detail and Himmler's web was
spun, Hitler employed a number of psychological—indeed, totemic—devices to bind the Army to him more
closely. It is in the history of this second period of Hitler's subjugation of the Army that the seeds of those
unseemly and at times catastrophic disputes which were to plague the conduct of the Eastern campaign were sown.

One of the "concessions" Hitler had extracted from Blomberg at the time of the Deutschland Compact was the
introduction of the Nazi emblem into the make-up of every soldier's uniform. From that time on the traditional
German eagle held within its claws a tiny swastika, and soon the sign began to appear in larger scale—on
regimental colours, in flags, over the entry arches to barracks, stencilled on the turrets of armoured vehicles.
Regardless of the political detachment of the senior officers, this measure served to identify the ordinary soldier
with the Nazi Party in the minds of the people and in their own consciences. This identity was reinforced by the
terms of the fealty oath—sworn by every member of the armed forces in August 1934, which superseded the old
form of oath sworn to the constitution under the Republic.

I swear before God to give my unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, Führer of the Reich and of the
German people, Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht, and I pledge my word as a brave soldier to
observe this oath always, even at peril of my life.

In 1937, Fortune gave Hitler the opportunity to rid himself of Blomberg, at the very moment Himmler's "frame"
around Fritsch was complete. In one headlong rush of brilliant exploitation Hitler brought the Army, stunned and
breathless, to heel.

The War Minister had proposed the luxury of taking to himself en deuxième noce a notorious prostitute. This
indiscretion, though committed in all innocence, could not be tolerated by the doctrinaire standards of the officer
corps. Hitler thus found himself in the impregnable position of being able to dismiss the Army's nominee while
claiming that he was prompted solely by a consideration of its interest. Into this atmosphere of sexual scandal the
Gestapo hastily flung its file on the Commander in Chief, accusing him of unnatural vice with a notorious
Bavarian convict.

Poor Fritsch! He had no idea how to combat these charges, of which he was completely innocent, save the
conventional resort of his caste: he challenged Himmler to a duel. In the subterranean jungle of Nazi politics such
a gesture had as little effect as a peacock spreading his tail feathers at a python. Hitler pressed his advantage
ruthlessly. Sixteen senior generals were dismissed (among them Rundstedt, who had been injudicious enough as to
suggest Fritsch as Blomberg's successor during the brief interval between the resignation of one and the charge
against the other) and another forty-four were transferred from their commands.

[Field Marshal Karl Rudolf Gerd von Rundstedt, "the Field Marshal who never lost a battle (until Normandy
1944)." Commanded Army Group South in Russia 1941. Dismissed after ordering the evacuation of Rostov.]

But harassing and humiliating as these moves were, they were slight beside the formal administrative changes
which were promulgated at the same time. By decree of 4th February, 1938, the three service ministries—of which
that of the Army was naturally the senior—were unified and subordinated to a single commander, Hitler himself.

From henceforth I exercise personally the immediate command over the whole armed forces. The former
Wehrmacht office in the War Ministry becomes the High Command of the Armed Forces [OKW] and
comes immediately under my command as my military staff. At the head of the staff of the High Command
stands the former chief of the Wehrmacht office [Keitel]. He is accorded the rank equivalent of Reich
Minister. The High Command of the Armed Forces also takes over the functions of the War Ministry, and
the Chief of the High Command exercises, as my deputy, the powers hitherto held by the Reich War
Minister.

The creation of OKW and the consequent subordination of the Army to a small executive that came, as has been
seen, increasingly under the Fuhrer's technical control as well as subject to his personal influence was a political
device, and as is so often the case with measures that are expedient from the aspect of domestic politics, it ran
counter to the strict requirements of military efficiency.

It was the final blow in the struggle between the civil power (if the Nazi Party may be so described) and the Army.
It meant that the Generalstab, which had already lost the broader power of judgment over the "best interests of the
Reich" and of intervention in its domestic politics, was now deprived of its historic and fundamental prerogative—
the decision as to when, and how, to make war. OKH was reduced in status to a department, specialising in army
affairs and subordinate to a staff composed of men who were themselves the nominees of, and directly responsible
to, the Führer. The result was that the orthodox procedure whereby strategic doctrine was evolved no longer
functioned. In the place of study and consultation between experts there were the Führer conferences—little better
than audiences at which Hitler, after listening with more or less good grace to "reports," hectored the assembled
company with his mind already made up—and the Führer directives, documentary orders concerning which no
dispute, query, or emendation was permitted.

[The clearest description of the way the directives originated has been given by Professor Trevor-Roper in his
introduction to their English translation (London 1964); although this, of course, refers to procedure in wartime:

"Every day, at noon, Hitler held his Lagevortrag or 'situation conference,' at which Jodl [the Chief of Staff]
submitted a report which had been prepared for him by Warlimont [Deputy Chief of Staff at OKW]. Hitler would
listen, discuss the situation, and then, after it had been fully debated, issue his orders. These orders, together with a
full account of the discussion, were then passed by Jodl to Warlimont to be converted into formal documents and
issued to the appropriate authorities."

It is true that the Commander in Chief, Brauchitsch, did have access to Hitler. He and, on occasion, individual
army commanders, were summoned to Führer headquarters. But as Professor Trevor-Roper points out, ". . . their
visits were not regular, and they could not compete with the constant presence of the regular courtiers. Besides,
Hitler preferred to deal with them through Keitel and Jodl. He disliked new faces. He liked Keitel and Jodl, who
gradually sank into the position of mere orderlies . . . and Keitel and Jodl liked the monopoly of power which their
industry and subservience ensured to them. Consequently both Keitel and Jodl, while they became increasingly
indispensable to Hitler, became increasingly odious to the generals in the OKH and in the field."

After the dismissal of Halder, in September 1942, the proceedings of these conferences were recorded verbatim by
a body of stenographers, and the surviving fragments of their records are exceedingly valuable source material.
(See, in particular, Chs. 15 and 18.)]

In this way the immense fund of technical expertise of which the Generalstab was the repository was canalised
into tactical and substrategic planning. The broad outlines of war policy, the coordination of theatres, even the
evolution of new weapons and the assessment of priorities in supply were settled without reference to its opinion.
There was no permanent consultative body of experts preparing appreciations and alternatives, no equivalent to the
Chiefs of Staff Committee or the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the West.

And, indeed, once the war began, policy in the military sense can hardly be said to have existed outside Goering's
comment, "Wenn wir diesen Krieg verlieren, dann möge uns der Himmel gnädig sein" (If we lose this war, then
God help us).

[When the English ultimatum of 3rd September, 1939, was delivered (Schmidt, Paul, Statist auf diplomatischer
Buehne, 1923-1945. Bonn 1945).]

War aims, together with the detail and timing of their achievement, were decided by Hitler. Such discussion as
took place was usually confined to the Führer's immediate entourage of Party cronies, Himmler and Bormann,
Hess and Goering; men who could keep the same nocturnal hours and talk the same language of racialism and
"destiny." Of these it was Goering to whom Hitler listened most often. But even Goering attained no more than a
negative influence—preferential treatment for the Luftwaffe, and in later stages of the war his influence declined
and he saw Hitler less and less often.

There is no evidence that Hitler ever changed his mind on questions of strategy either at the persuasion of his
intimates in the Party or the senior officers of the Army. He carried on his own back the responsibility for every
decision of importance and formulated in his own mind the development of his strategic ambition in its entirety.

This facility, which those who have reasons for belittling have compendiously labelled Hitler's "intuition"
(pronounced with a sneer), was truly prodigious and, for many years, infallible. The Devil's hand guided Hitler,
just as later on it was to protect his life. But with the outbreak of war, as the pressure intensified and
responsibilities widened, the absence of a permanent consultative body began to make itself felt.

The most serious, as also one of the earliest, examples of lacunae in strategic planning had followed immediately
on the collapse of France. Not only was there no plan in existence for the invasion of the British Isles, but over a
month passed before the Sea Lion directive—the order to prepare such a plan—was issued.

And the disadvantages of Hitler's practice of bypassing orthodox channels applied as much in matters of detail as
in grand strategy. For example, after the campaign in France, Hitler had ordered that the 37-mm. gun in the Pz III
tank be replaced with a 50-mm. L 60. However, for reasons which shall never be clear (but which owed much to
there being no permanent body which could see a directive of this kind through to fulfilment and supervise the
responsible officers at the Ordnance Office), the specification was altered to 50-mm. L 42. The result was that the
most successful tank of the war was equipped with a gun of markedly lower range and muzzle velocity than Hitler
had ordered, which if fitted would have preserved its technical ascendancy for another year at least.

After the French surrender Hitler approved an OKH suggestion to demobilise a number of divisions, which is
scarcely consistent with his own plan to attack what was believed to be the largest army in the world within the
coming year.

[The number of men scheduled for demobilisation has been put by some estimates as high as four hundred
thousand, but it is unlikely that this number was actually discharged.]

The only explanation is that in the absence of a proper supervisory body and procedure the order somehow leaked
past. Yet at almost the same moment Hitler was directing that the number of Panzer divisions in the Army was to
be doubled and tank production raised to a level of eight hundred to a thousand units per month. Once again the
Ordnance Office intervened, with a report that an expansion of this kind would cost over two billion marks, and
would require an additional one hundred thousand skilled workers and specialists. Hitler agreed to its
postponement "for the time being," but the reorganisation of the Panzer divisions had gone ahead, so that the net
effect was that the tank strength of each division was halved. In the result there was some compensation in their
increased fire power and the gradual substitution of the heavier PzKw III for the PzKw II, but the Panzer divisions
were never to recover the numerical strength and mobility with which they had begun the battle of France. Hitler
had also directed that the number of motorised divisions be doubled, but without making any provision for an
increase in the production of the vehicle industry. The result was that many of the new formations had to equip
themselves with captured or requisitioned trucks, which were to prove unreliable and difficult to service under
severe conditions.

Examples of this kind could be multiplied, and it is true that the deficiencies in vigour, authority, and scope of the
so-called OKW Chiefs of Staff were to make themselves increasingly felt as the war proceeded. But it would be
less than just to claim for the generals of OKH (as they themselves are not slow to do in their own works on the
subject) a particular but thwarted prescience in matters of grand strategy.

Hitler's sense of history was limited, but highly coloured, and he drew upon it to justify his assumption of a single
and exclusive responsibility. In the Great War (he would argue) the German General Staff, directing its country's
strategy for four years without hindrance, had made one error of judgment after another: it pressed the introduction
of unrestricted submarine warfare, thereby hastening the entry of the United States into the war; it cast away any
hope of a separate peace with Tsarist Russia after Galicia-Tarnow by its insistence on the establishment of a
kingdom of Poland; then achieved the same result in 1917, when its annexationist attitude to France and Belgium
ruined the chance of the Papal peace proposals being carried further. Finally there was its responsibility for the
most catastrophic single action of the century—the despatch of Lenin and his colleagues from Switzerland to
Russia in the famous "sealed train." Even in the exclusively military sphere it had made grave errors, mishandling
the only two serious attempts to defeat the Western powers in the field. Falkenhayn had allowed the course of the
attrition battle at Verdun to escape his control and thereby missed the chance of knocking France out of the war in
1916. Ludendorff's diminuendo sequence in April 1918 drew so heavily on his armies' blood and morale that they
were incapable of offering prolonged resistance to the Allied counteroffensives which followed.

When Hitler became Chancellor he found that OKH was still free with advice, and that its attitude was sadly
repetitive in two particulars—in the unanimity of the views of its members and the mistakenness (as it invariably
emerged) of their appreciations.

The first expansionist move undertaken by the Reich, the reoccupation of the Rhineland, had called forth a whole
sequence of protests from the General Staff. First Beck proposed that the entry of German troops be accompanied
by a declaration that the area would not be fortified.

[Colonel General Ludwig Beck, Chief of the General Staff 1935-38. Later nominated as head of the new German
state by the 20th July plotters; committed suicide when the plot failed.]

Hitler rejected the notion out of hand. Then Blomberg was persuaded by the General Staff to put forward a
suggestion that the troops sent across the Rhine be withdrawn on condition that the French agree to withdraw four
to five times as many men from their own borders. He was "bluntly and brutally snubbed" for his pains. Finally
after a lethargic concentration of thirteen French divisions had been observed in the Maginot Line, Beck and
Fritsch together had made Blomberg urge the withdrawal of the three battalions which had entered the
demilitarised zone. Again Hitler refused, and again he was proved right.

The generals were nonplussed. They laid no claim to an understanding of the subtleties of international politics.
But they had before them the figures of relative strengths. Did common sense and the simple calculations of a
military balance sheet count for nothing? Answer, no. What counted was the will, and that, with its full appareil de
mystique, was held in monopoly by Hitler. "It is my unalterable will to smash Czechoslovakia by military action in
the near future," he told them, and throughout the summer of 1938 the preparations for this had gone ahead,
without regard to the protesting bleats from almost every senior officer in OKH.

The original intention of the dissident generals had been that the Commander, in Chief, Brauchitsch, be forced by
their unanimous recommendation to go to Hitler and pronounce to him the magic words of Hindenburg and
Seeckt: that he "no longer enjoyed the confidence of the Army." Fritsch might have done this; but Brauchitsch,
never. In despair, the Chief of Staff of the Army, General Beck, resigned. None of Beck's colleagues followed this
example, but many did allow themselves to become privy to a plot for kidnapping Hitler and declaring a military
government. This coup was planned for the very last moment of peace, when it was established that Hitler had
fixed a zero hour for the attack on the Czechs. It was thwarted (and the whole course of history perverted) by the
Franco-British betrayal at Munich, but the commanders who had planned it—Witzleben, Helldorf, Schulenburg,
Hoepner—remained in office.

Thus can be detected two separate but complementary elements in the decline of the Generalität. It had been
outmanoeuvred politically, forsaking one foothold after another in a downhill retreat from the pinnacle of influence
it had occupied for the preceding half century. And the swift and bewildering march of events on the international
stage had shown it up (it seemed) as a timid clique at fault in assessing its own strength and hesitant over using it.

Many factors perpetuated this unhappy condition. None of them were vital when considered in isolation, but they
formed a sum of perplexity and disillusion; of confused loyalties, considered self-interest, and escapist devotion to
the narrow technicalities of its appointment.

It is not easy to feel sympathy for the members of the Generalität because the ultimate source of their discontent
was in their own lack of moral fibre. What affronted them about Hitler's conduct was not its immorality but its
irresponsibility. Hence their tendency to hang back, to procrastinate on whatever excuse, and watch to see if the
risk "came off." Furthermore, Hitler's success in curtailing their independent power had been achieved without
alienating the bulk of the officer corps or disturbing the foundations of professional efficiency which had been laid
by Seeckt. This meant that those who wished to alter the course of events must dabble in politics—a field which
they entered no longer as arbiters but as participants, hampered by scruple, plagued by disunity, and burdened with
a lingering contempt for civilians which was for long to frustrate all efforts to coordinate the two separate elements
of the opposition.

Out of their depth in this unfamiliar element, the generals groped and fumbled. Some intrigued actively against the
regime. Others, nearly all, listened with sympathy to those who were intriguing, yearned for the days of decision,
and watched for a change in fortune. Others, and they included the majority in both these categories, sublimated
their frustration in work. The result was a quality of staff work and a tactical brilliance unequalled by any other
army.

Hitler had effectively shut out the Army from politics, and the price he paid seemed at first to be even less than the
pittance he had promised Blomberg on board the Deutschland. But in one important respect the Army held out for
its rights. It steadfastly and persistently refused all efforts by the Nazi Party to penetrate into the conduct and
administration of its internal affairs. The generals clung to their privilege (more formal than real) of being the "sole
bearers of arms within the Reich," and they twice resisted with success major efforts at infiltration by Himmler
(once through a campaign by the SS to deprive army chaplains of their military status, on another occasion when it
was proposed to institute "voluntary" classes of Nazi indoctrination in place of religious services). The Army
became a haven for all those discontented with the regime, a loose fraternal body—politically inert, it was true, but
where the writ and dossier of the SS never ran.

The result was, quite literally, fantastic. The whole of the Abwehr (the military intelligence branch) was riddled
with dissent. Admiral Canaris, its head, and his lieutenants, Oster and Lahousen, not only allowed the organization
to be freely used as a medium of communication and movement by the various malcontents, but perpetrated the
most incredible acts of treachery—Oster warning the Danish Military Attaché ten days before the impending
invasion of that country and of Norway in April 1940; and doing the same to the Netherlands before the attack on
the Low Countries.

Another department headed by a general steadfastly hostile to the regime was the Wi Rü Amt, the economic and
armaments branch of OKW under Georg Thomas. Neither Thomas nor Canaris allowed his sympathies to affect
the day-to-day running of his department, any more than their brother officers allowed their own feelings to intrude
on the ruthless efficiency with which they planned and fought. But the effect, a certain inner weakness, was
lasting. The "conspirators" (by which is meant those who were actively plotting for a change of regime), although
hardly worthy of such a title at this stage, suffered no restrictions in such an atmosphere. Passes, movement orders,
transfers, all these could be arranged at an instant's notice. They would receive early warning, too, of plans and
proscriptions that might affect them.

Was this a form of reinsurance by the generals? Or was it simply the code of the officer and gentleman that
allowed them to continue in the dangerous practice of tolerating seditious conversations in their presence, of not
reporting the continuous and sometimes farcical indiscretions with which the conspirators bored them? Once the
war had started, the practice of sedition was confined to the medium levels of the Army. The senior commanders
regarded such activity with no more than a tolerant interest. For too long they had offered opinions, to one another
and to Hitler, and had seen their validity compromised by the perverse tricks of circumstance. Like
ultraconservative bankers during an inflationary boom, they could no longer bring themselves to utter the
conventional warnings which had so often led to disappointing investment policies.

A time was approaching when orthodoxy and sober calculation were to assume their rightful importance, as it was
when the fussing of the conspirators was to become an altogether more troublesome phenomenon; but dazzled by
the brilliance of the Führer's achievement, the generals could no longer see that far ahead. To a man they would
have echoed Brauchitsch when he told Otto John after the war, "I could have had Hitler arrested easily. I had
enough officers loyal to me to carry out his arrest. But that was not the problem. Why should I have taken such
action? It would have been an action against the German people. I was well informed, through my son and others.
The German people were all for Hitler. And they had good reason to be . . ,"

[This conversation is taken from the John Memorandum, quoted in Wheeler-Bennett, The Nemesis of Power, 492.
The background illustrates the surprising freedom with which sedition was discussed in the highest circles of the
Army. Popitz (Johannes Popitz [1884-1944] Prussian Minister of State and Finance, a close friend of General von
Schleicher, who had been killed by the SS in 1934, and one of the earliest members of the "Resistance circle") had
visited Brauchitsch—the Commander in Chief, let it be remembered—in the autumn of 1939 and "besought him to
take action for the honour of the Army in rescuing Germany from the talons of the Black Landsknechte [the SS]."
Brauchitsch had remained "virtually silent" throughout the interview, but at the end he had asked if there was still a
chance of securing a decent peace for Germany.

Later General Thomas came to him with some details of "terms" on which the Pope was prepared to act as
intermediary for an understanding with Britain. The Commander in Chiefs reaction was surprisingly mild.
Although complaining that "the whole thing was plain high treason," he did nothing further than tell Thomas that
"if he persisted in seeing him in this connection he would place him under arrest."]

These, then, were the infirmities that afflicted the German Army. But in that period of victorious euphoria, when
the first strands of the Barbarossa plan were woven, they lay dormant. The generals were bathed in glory, and
generously rewarded by their Führer. Decorations, pensions, gratuities, building permits, estates in East Prussia,
were heaped on them. In disgust Hassell wrote, ". . . the majority are out to make careers in the lowest sense. Gifts
and field-marshals' batons are more important to them than the great historical issues and moral values at stake."

At this stage, the winter of 1940, it is probably true that the Army would have followed Hitler wherever he led it,
in spite of its deeprooted fear of a direct confrontation with Russia. Only one senior member of OKW, Admiral
Raeder, went on record at the time as being against it, and "All the men of the OKW and the OKH with whom I
spoke," wrote Guderian, ". . . evinced an unshakeable optimism and were quite impervious to criticism or
objections."

[Colonel General Heinz Guderian, the leading exponent of the Panzer arm in the German Army. Commander of
the 2nd Panzergruppe 1941; Inspector General of Panzer forces 1943; Chief of the Army General Staff 1944.]

These convictions were largely the result of personal inspiration from Hitler, whose strategic argument seemed
unanswerable:

... Britain's hope lies in Russia and the United States. If Russia drops out of the picture, America, too, is lost
for Britain, because the elimination of Russia would greatly increase Japan's power in the Far East.
Decision: Russia's destruction must be made a part of this struggle—the sooner Russia is crushed the better.

And in fact during the autumn of 1940 this strategic bias had received detailed support from a number of political
developments in the Balkans. The differences between the two powers accumulated so rapidly that by November it
had been necessary for Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov to visit Berlin. The ensuing conference, at which the last
exchanges took place between the two tyrannies, had not been a happy affair. The purported occasion for its
gathering was "the apportionment of the British Empire as a gigantic estate in bankruptcy," but in fact this subject
was hardly mentioned (except by Ribbentrop, who spoke of nothing else).

When it was suggested to him that their latent differences be papered over by Russia joining the tripartite alliance,
Molotov had replied, ". . . paper agreements do not suffice for the Soviet Union; rather, she must insist on effective
guarantee for her security." The Russian Foreign Minister then went on to press a number of delicate points: What
were German troops doing in Russia? And in Finland? What if the Soviets were to guarantee Bulgaria in the same
terms as the German guarantee to Rumania? His intransigence had been emphasised by a "personal" letter from
Stalin after the conference broke up in which the Russian dictator "insisted" on an immediate withdrawal of
German troops from Finland, a long-term lease of a base for Soviet land and naval forces within range of the
Bosphorus, and certain concessions from the Japanese in North Sakhalin. Stalin also warned of an imminent pact
of mutual assistance between the Soviet Union and Bulgaria.

The tone of the November conference made a profound impression on the German Army when the details were
made known to it—and this Hitler lost no time in doing. Many who had believed that diplomacy should keep the
Russians at arm's length for as long as possible now swung around to the view that a preventive war could not be
avoided. But it is wrong to claim, as many German writers do, that the November conference accelerated, or even
initiated, the planning of the campaign in the East. This was already fixed for the spring of 1941—the earliest date
at which it would be physically possible to move and deploy the whole army. Stalin's letter may have strengthened
Hitler's resolution, and it gave him a convenient justification; but his mind had been made up during the battle of
France, when he had seen what the Panzers did to the French Army.

The date most conveniently ascribed to the start of German planning for war with Soviet Russia is 29th July, 1940.
On this day a conference was held at Bad Reichenhall, under conditions of the utmost secrecy, at which Jodl
addressed a few hand-picked planners drawn from the staff and the economic administration of the Reich, on the
Fuhrer's "expressed wishes."

[Colonel General Alfred Jodl, Chief of Staff at OKW 1938-45.]

Some weeks earlier, while the battle of France was still being fought, Hitler had told Jodl, "I will take action
against this menace of the Soviet Union the moment our military position makes it at all possible," and this resolve
had been expanded in a series of private meetings at the Berghof between Hitler, Keitel, Jodl, and Goering in the
days following the armistice. The first directive, Operation Aufbau Ost, was issued in August, with its intentions
camouflaged under a plethora of code names and generalities, and from that time the widening circles of planning
spread rapidly across the pool of Nazi administration, so that when the new quartermaster of OKH took up his
appointment on 8th September he found in his files "a still incomplete operational plan dealing with an attack on
the Soviet Union."

A further directive (No. 18), issued in November, was more explicit. In it Hitler wrote:

Political discussions have been initiated with the aim of clarifying Russia's attitude for the time being
[Molotov was actually visiting Berlin at the time]. Irrespective of the results of these discussions all
preparations for the East which have been verbally ordered will be continued. Instructions on this will follow
as soon as the general outlines of the Army's operational plans have been submitted to me and received my
approval.

Less than a month later Halder had submitted the OKH plan, and on 18th December the Führer, in his famous
Directive No. 21, set out the strategic objectives and gave to the unborn child conceived that summer a name,
Operation Barbarossa.

But although the summer of 1940 saw the start of the planning, the intention can be traced even earlier than this, to
Hitler's celebrated Berghof conference of 22nd August, 1939. Of all the speeches and all the occasions in the
history of the Nazis it is this "private" conference which illustrates most vividly their devilish character. Hitler had
exulted that day, "There will probably never again be a man with such authority or who has the confidence of the
whole German people as I have. . . . Our enemies are men below average, not men of action, not masters. They are
little worms." In any case, he told his listeners, the Western powers would not move to defend Poland for that
morning Ribbentrop had flown to Moscow to sign the nonaggression pact with the Soviets. "I have struck this
instrument from their hands. Now we can strike at the heart of Poland—I have ordered to the East my Death's
Head units [of the SS] with the order to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish race or
language."

At this point, we are told, Goering jumped on the table, and after offering "bloodthirsty thanks and bloody
promises . . . danced around like a savage."

[These antics must have been rendered the more impressive by Goering's attire. "He was dressed in a soft-collared
white shirt, worn under a green jerkin adorned with big buttons of yellow leather. In addition he wore grey shorts
and long grey silk stockings that displayed his impressive calves to considerable effect. This dainty hosiery was
offset by a pair of massive laced boots. To cap it all, his paunch was girded by a sword-belt of red, richly inlaid
with gold, at which dangled an ornamental dagger in an ample sheath of the same material.

"Up till now I had assumed we were here for a serious purpose," was the acid comment of Manstein [at that time a
Colonel on the planning staff], "but Goering appeared to have taken it for a masked ball."]

"My only fear," Hitler said to his audience, "is that at the last moment some Schweinhund will make a proposal for
mediation." As to the future, "There is no time to lose. War must come in my lifetime. My pact was meant only to
stall for time, and, gentlemen, to Russia will happen just what I have practised with Poland—we will crush the
Soviet Union."

With this last pronouncement the euphoria generated by Hitler's drum-beating was sensibly diminished, and at the
close of the address, "A few doubtful ones [among the audience] remained silent." For here, let out quite casually,
it seemed, was the one unpardonable military heresy that all had agreed must be eschewed forever—the "war on
two fronts."

German military opinion was about evenly divided on the desirability of fighting Russia—the "Prussian school,"
which favoured an Eastern alliance, still balanced those whose ideological convictions were compounded by an
imagined strategic necessity, the need for the raw materials and Lebenstraum; but the most enthusiastic of these
had never considered attacking Russia while a Western front was in being. Even in Mein Kampf this was held up as
the cardinal error, the one fatal move which would annul every step in the ascent of the Reich to world domination.
The General Staff had for long been uneasy about the weight and quality of Russian equipment, concerning which
their intelligence reports were so alarming that they usually adopted the practice of dismissing them as "plants" by
the MVD.

[Guderian has related an incident which exemplifies this (Panzer Leader 143): "In the spring of 1940 Hitler had
specifically ordered that a Russian military mission be shown over our tank schools and factories; in this order he
had insisted that nothing be concealed from them. The Russian officers firmly refused to believe that the Panzer IV
was in fact our heaviest tank. They said repeatedly that we must be hiding our newest models from them, and
complained that we were not carrying out Hitler's orders to show them everything. They were so insistent on this
point that eventually our manufacturers and the Ordnance Office officials concluded, 'It seems that the Russians
must already possess better and heavier tanks than we do.' It was at the end of July 1941 that the T-34 tank
appeared at the front and the riddle of the new Russian model was solved."]

Every senior officer in the German Army had, at some time or other, warned Hitler about the danger of attacking
Russia while still engaged in the West, and both Brauchitsch and Rundstedt claimed that he had given them an
understanding never to do this.

But when, almost exactly a year later, the idea began to acquire the bones and flesh of operational planning, Hitler
could with some reason contend that the Western front existed no longer. The French had collapsed and made
peace, and the British were confined to their own territory, where they licked their wounds in impotence. The
battle of Britain, that miraculous victory so light in blood and so limitless in consequence, could hardly have been
foreseen—much less the Italian defeats in Africa and all the strategic complications and distractions that were to
flow from them. In the warm afterglow of the battle of France, with absolute dominion over the whole of the
European mainland, there was some substance to Hitler's argument that an invasion of Russia would be not a
second but a first, and last, front.

As so often happens in global affairs of state, the planning, once set in motion, matured inexorably, while around it
the circumstances in which it had originated altered in character and emphasis. The Luftwaffe, hitherto supreme,
met its match. Certain regions of the European sky were closed to it. Operational control and many items of its
equipment were shown to be deficient. The Navy had been seriously unbalanced by the losses sustained during the
Norwegian campaign. The U-boat programme was retarded and poorly planned—in the summer of 1940 there
were only fourteen submarines with the endurance to sail west of the Killarney Bluff.

These things made it difficult to strike at Britain and, if she remained obstinate in her choice of war, impossible to
subdue her without a long period of revised priorities and careful preparation. But time was short, or so Hitler
believed: "... I can be eliminated at any moment by a criminal or a lunatic." The Army was ready and undefeated.
Alone of the three services it had risen to every demand which the German people had made of it. How
preposterous to suggest that this magnificent machine be allowed to run down; that the armed forces be recast in an
amphibious pattern to tackle a maritime power in her own element! The ascendancy Hitler had established over his
generals in politics was now absolute, and he had no fear that their exploits in the field, however magnificent,
could threaten this. Indeed, the Führer seems to have felt that his personal authority over the Army would be
confirmed in such a campaign, with its powerful ideological overtone, and justified by the close attention he
intended to devote to its conduct.
In 1930, Hitler had written, "Armies for the preparation of peace do not exist. They exist for triumphant exertion in
war." And in the spring of 1941 the Wehrmacht stood victorious, hardly blooded; trained and equipped to
perfection; a beautifully balanced and coordinated fighting machine now at a pinnacle of martial achievement.
Where was it to go from there? Sheer gravitational pull must, it would seem, direct it against its one remaining
opponent in the European land mass; draw it like Napoleon's armies, which also had stood in frustration on the
Channel, eastward, to the dark unconquered steppe of Russia.

two | MOTHER RUSSIA

DISPOSITION OF THE SOVIET ARMIES AT THE START OF Barbarossa, 22ND JUNE,
1941

Army Strength Armour & General Reserv

Leningrad Military District

(H.Q. Leningrad)

Commander: Lt. Gen. M. M.

Popov

Chief of Staff: 14th A Lt. Gen. V. A. Frolov (Murmansk)

10th Mechanised Corps (to
Maj. Gen. D. N. Nikishev 7th A Lt. Gen. F. D. Gorolenko (N.E. Lake Ladoga)
June, 1941)
23rd A Lt. Gen. P. S. Pshennikov (Karelian Isthmus)
Commissar:
Corps Commissar N. N.
Klement'ev

(Designated "Northern
Front" 23rd June, 1941)

Baltic Military District (H.Q.

Riga)

Commander: Col. Gen. F. I.

Kuznetsov
8th A Maj. Gen. P. P. Sobennikov (Coastal Defence &
Chief of Staff:
Dago & Osel)
Lt. Gen. P. S. Klenov 1st Mechanised Corps (plu
11th A Lt. Gen. V. I. Morozov (E. Prussian Frontier)
27th A Maj. Gen. N. Berzarin (Dvina R.)
Commissar:
Corps Commissar P. A.
Dibrov

(Designated "Northwestern
Front" 23rd June, 1941)

Western Military District 3rd A Lt. Gen. V. I. Kuznetsov (Grodno) 13th A Lt.Gcn.P.M. Filatov
(H.Q. Minsk) 11th Mechanised Corps 7th & 5th Mechanised Cor
10th A Maj. Gen. K. D. Golubev (Bialystok) 16th, 21st, 22nd Armies (S
Commander: 6th Mechanised Corps Yershakov) (Vitebsk)
Gen. D. G. Pavlov 13th Mechanised Corps (understrength)
4th A Maj. Gen. A. A. Korobkov (Brest-Litovsk)
Chief of Staff: 14th Mechanised Corps (Pruzhany-Kobrin)
Maj. Gen. V. E. Klimovski

Commissar:
Corps Commissar A. Ya.
Fominyi

Deputy Front Commander:

Lt. Gen. I. V. Boldin

(Designated "Western Front"

23rd June, 1941)

Kiev Military District (H.Q.

Kiev)

Commander:
5th A Maj. Gen. of Tank Troops M. I. Potapov (Lutsk)
Col. Gen. M. P. Kirponos
8th Mechanised Corps
6th A Lt. Gen. I. N. Muzychenko (Lvov)
Chief of Staff:
6th Mechanised Corps
Lt. Gen. M. A. Purkayev 19th & 9th Mechanised Co
26th A Lt. Gen. F. Ya. Kostenko (Borislav)
15th Mechanised Corps
Commissar:
12th Army Maj. Gen. P. G. Ponedelin (Czernowitz)
22nd Mechanised Corps
Div. Commissar P. E. Rykov

(Designated "Southwestern
Front" 23rd June, 1941)

In the summer of 1941 the Red Army presented an enigma as much to the Western intelligence services as to those
in Germany. Every facet by which military quality is assessed seemed to have an opposite. Its equipment, by all
accounts, was lavish (in fact, it disposed of more tanks and as many aircraft as the rest of the world put together),
but how much of this machinery was up to date, and how capable were the Soviet commanders of handling it? Its
reserves of manpower seemed inexhaustible, but sheer mass was valueless without proper leadership, and
Communist timeservers chosen for their political reliability would be as ineffective on the field of battle as the
court favourites who had enjoyed the patronage of the Tsar. Even the innate courage and resilience of the Russian
soldier, to which successive European wars bore testimony, was thought by some to have been jeopardised by
political indoctrination. The "ordinary Russian," it was claimed, would show himself only too anxious to escape,
by laying down his arms, from the menacing supervision of the commissars.

These problems faced foreign observers in 1941, and even today, with all the advantages of hindsight, it is not easy
to resolve so many apparent contradictions. There are three distinct elements which must be considered: first, the
paper strength of the Red Army, the state of its training, and its tactical doctrine; second, the impact of Party
control on its leadership and its strategic posture; third, the reality of Soviet strength, as demonstrated by
operational experience in the period immediately preceding the German invasion.

The modern Red Army was essentially the creation of two architects, Trotsky and Tukhachevski (both of whom
were to pay with their lives for achieving such prominence).

[Leon Trotsky, Commissar for War in March 1918. Ousted 1925; exiled 1928; assassinated 1940.
Marshal M. N. Tukhachevski, Chief of the Red Army Staff 1926-28. Other appointments, and promoted to the
Military Soviet (q.v.) 1934; demoted May 1937; executed June 1937.]

Trotsky had imposed form and discipline upon an amorphous proletarian rabble. Tukhachevski had evolved
tactical and strategic doctrines which, although not so revolutionary as those of some British tank experts, were
nonetheless far in advance of current thinking in other European armies.

[Notably Captain B. H. Liddell Hart and Major General J. F. C. Fuller, whose writings had greatly influenced the
formation of the first Panzer division in the German Army (although they made little impression on the German
General Staff until much later).]

However, in the late 1930's domestic politics and the shifting orientation of the Soviet Union in the European
power complex led to corresponding (and damaging) changes in its military attitude.

The problem of defending Russia was dominated by the physical characteristics of her western frontier and the fact
that Soviet economic and administrative centres were concentrated in a relatively small part of the country—within
five hundred miles of this same western frontier. Furthermore, the eastern zone was effectively divided into two
halves by the Pripet Marshes—a sprawling region of reed and forest, nearly two hundred miles across, which
covers the area where the great rivers of European Russia take their source.

Besides their value as an obstacle to the invader the Marshes pose problems to the defence. For they effectively
break the western zone into two halves, each of which must operate independently, being served by different rail
complexes and protecting separate objectives. On a front of such length it is impossible to maintain strength
everywhere, and the problem which had always confronted the Russian staff, and which was aggravated by the
growing concentration of industrial power in the eastern Ukraine, was the according of priorities between the
defence of the north, the twin capitals of Leningrad and Moscow, and the south, whence the country drew the bulk
of its food, its machinery, and its armament.

In the early 1930's Marshal Tukhachevski had drawn up a master plan for the conduct of this defence, and this
scheme, curiously, survived the execution of its author on a charge of German-inspired espionage. He had
suggested a relatively light concentration in the north, with the bulk of the mobile forces to be placed on the
Dnieper, where they could menace the right flank of an invader and, if all went well, undertake a rapid occupation
of the Balkans.

By this reckoning it was estimated that the sheer physical difficulties of distance and supply would protect the
capital; the enemy would be drawn into a wide and desolate corridor between the Pripet Marshes and the fortress
area of Leningrad, and the defence would be given time to regroup and to select its point for counterattack. This
notion was originally conceived in the context of a threat from Poland or, at worst, an alliance between Poland and
the rump of the German Army that remained after Versailles. But by 1935 three new factors had altered the scope
of the appreciation. The pace of German rearmament under Hitler was rapidly accelerating, the emphasis in
German training was on mobility and the use of armour, and the political attitudes of the other Western powers
seemed clearly to indicate their hope for and encouragement of a move by Germany against the Soviet Union at
some point in the future.

It was accordingly decided that a fortification system be extended southward from the Baltic to the northern fringe
of the Pripet Marshes, and this work was started in 1936. At this time the doctrine of the all-powerful defence was
firmly rooted in the armies of the West. The theory of the deep armoured thrust, although it originated in England,
had taken root only among a few of the more enlightened of the officers in the German Army. The whole of
military science was applied to the problems of devising and perfecting permanent defence systems against which
the opponent would batter himself to exhaustion—systems which found their exemplar, if not their most perfect
consummation, in the Maginot Line. Many details of the Maginot system were disclosed to the Russians, who had
enjoyed intermittent good relations with France, at both military and diplomatic levels, for periods during the
thirties, and it was not difficult for their intelligence to collect additional material from elements among the French
military and the administration that were sympathetic to the Soviet ideology.

The result was that the Russians were able, by starting several years later, and with a considerable mass of data and
experience at their finger tips, and with unlimited space and depth of ground to use, to construct a system—it was
known as the Stalin Line—that was in places even more formidable than its French prototype. An appreciation by
OKH intelligence made after the line had been overrun described it as:

A dangerous combination of concrete, field works and natural obstacles, tank traps, mines, marshy belts
around forts, artificial lakes enclosing defiles, cornfields cut according to the trajectory of machine-gun fire.
Its whole extent right up to the positions of the defenders was camouflaged with a consummate art. . . .
Along a front of 120 kilometres, no less than a dozen barriers, carefully camouflaged and proofed against
light bombs and shells of 75 and 100 mm. had been constructed and sited in skilfully chosen fire positions.
Thousands of pine trunks masked ditches which the attacker could not discover until it was too late. About
three kilometres behind, over stretches of ten or twelve kilometres, three ranges of pines had been driven
more than a metre into the ground. Behind this obstacle stretched out abatis made of trees sawn to within a
metre of the ground, and whose tops, turned towards the enemy, had been entangled with barbed wire.
Concrete pyramids strengthened this barrage.

But although stretches of the Stalin Line were extremely formidable, it was in no sense a continuous belt of
fortification. Certain areas—notably around Lake Peipus, and between the Pripet Marshes and the upper Dniester;
and the approaches to a number of key cities near the frontier zone—Pskov, Minsk, Korosten, Odessa—were
heavily protected. The fortified districts were not linked, however, by any connecting strip of field works, and the
term "line," although it may have denoted an ultimate goal, was, in 1941, no more than a geographical illusion
founded on the presence of a sequence of fortified districts all in roughly the same longitude.

Then, following the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939 and the agreement to partition Poland, the Red Army had
deserted its fixed defences in White Russia and pushed westward, up to and beyond the line of the river Bug. And
in July of the following year the Russians annexed Bessarabia and Bukovina. These measures, together with the
"absorption" of the Baltic states in the north, advanced the western frontiers of the Soviet Union by hundreds of
miles, and keeping step with the new geography, the Army went forward also, leaving empty its old training areas,
its supply dumps, and the permanent emplacements of the Stalin Line.

Stalin believed that space was more important than fixed defences, but he ignored the fact that the Army was not
trained in the sort of fluid defensive battle that alone makes the use of space profitable. And if any of the Red
Army generals disagreed with him they had the sense, by 1939, to keep their thoughts to themselves. For still more
important than his obsession with space (but equally disastrous) was the Russian dictator's conviction that the
primary requirement in an army, and particularly in its senior officers, was that of political reliability. Communism
teaches that the internal enemy is the most dangerous, and in a society as repressive as was prewar Russia the
presence of three million men permanently under arms could become a source of anxiety to the regime unless they
and their officers were ruthlessly disciplined into toeing the Party line.

In theory, the chain of command ran downward from the Committee of the Defence of the State (GOKO), which
was presided over by Stalin and included Molotov, Voroshilov, Malenkov, and Beria.

[Vyacheslav M. Molotov, Soviet Foreign Minister 1939-52. A convinced Stalinist disgraced by Khrushchev after
the 20th Party Congress.

Marshal K. E. Voroshilov, an early member of the Communist Party (1903), fought with distinction in the civil
war. Commissar for Defence 1934-40. Commanded Leningrad armies 1941 (see Ch. 6). Removed from operational
command 1942 and held various ceremonial posts until disgraced by Khrushchev 1959.

G. M. Malenkov, successful career in security and political sides of the military organisation, 1920-41. An intimate
of Stalin's; succeeded him briefly as Premier after Stalin's death. Ousted by Khrushchev and Bulganin, and
branded as "anti-Party" at 20th Congress.

L. P. Beria, Chief of the NKVD 1935-52. Circumstances of death mysterious, but believed to have been shot on
Khrushchev's orders, the only member of the anti-Party group to be "liquidated."]

Subordinate to this was the Stavka, a kind of GHQ. Nominally a "committee of equals," the Stavka comprised
eight army officers, with four commissars (among whom was Bulganin) to keep an eye on them; in fact,
administrative control of the Stavka was in the hands of the Chief of Staff, Marshal Shaposhnikov, and his deputy,
General Zhukov, both of whom consulted directly with Stalin. Neither GOKO nor the Stavka impeded the direct
and autocratic sovereignty of Stalin himself, nor could they diminish the power of Beria and the NKVD, whose
dossiers and firing squads, reaching along the web of commissars and "political education officers," were what
kept the Army in line. They had been introduced in wartime in an attempt to revive the Red Army from the
lethargic and apprehensive torpor into which it had fallen in the period following the great purges of 1937-38.

The high point of the Red Army's prestige and influence can be fixed at 22nd September, 1935, when a decree
introduced formal distinctions and marks of rank to its officers. Majors and above were granted immunity from
civil arrest, and the political commissars were obliged from that time on to pass the exams of the normal military
school. And at the pinnacle, to flaunt this new professionalism, were created five "Marshals of the Soviet Union."
These were Blücher, the "Emperor of the Far East"; Yegorov and Tukhachevski; and those two sly and durable
toadies of Stalin's, Budënny and Voroshilov.

Among the marshals Tukhachevski had stood paramount. And in the year following the September Decree he was
allowed to travel extensively in Western Europe. On his tour Tukhachevski had behaved with that particular
indiscretion which seems, unless vigorously and continuously suppressed, to be a national characteristic. He had
acted at the same time the part of diplomat, roving military attaché, and socialite. He wined and dined with
Madame Tabouis, and she quoted him in her column; he made contact with General Miller, the head of the Tsarist
officers in exile.

[Madame Tabouis was a journalist who moved freely in Parisian high society in the 1930's. She appears to have
combined with equal facility the role of femme fatale, procuress, and oracle (she also dabbled in astrology), and
tidbits of information derived from the resulting intimacies were passed on in her column as revelations, or
"predictions."]

The Germans he lectured that ". . . if it came to war, Germany would not be meeting the old Russia." Although
qualifying his overtures with the formal disclaimer, "We are Communists, and you have need not to forget that we
must and will remain Communist," Tukhachevski went on ". . . if Germany adopted a different position, nothing
need stand in the way of further Soviet-German collaboration—if both countries enjoyed their friendship and
political relations as in the past, they could dictate peace to the world."

To the French, on the other hand, Tukhachevski declared that he "would like to see an intensification of the
relations between the French and the Red Army." He spent a week as guest of the French General Staff, and at the
end boasted to Gamelin (apropos of ordering new equipment), "As for me, I get all I ask for."

What he was asking for, in the strictly colloquial sense, Tukhachevski was shortly about to receive. For Death was
already standing at his shoulder, as it was for more than half of his senior colleagues. Less than a year after
Tukhachevski's return the first cloud appeared in the sky, which immediately began to darken with nightmare
speed. On 28th April, 1937, an article in Pravda on the necessity for the Red Army man "to master politics as well
as techniques" and the assertion that the Red Army existed "to fight the internal as well as the external enemy"
carried implications that were sinister in the extreme. Stalin had decided that the time had come when the Army
was to be purged, in conformity with the ruthless pattern which had been set the previous year, when the "old
guard" was driven out of the Party and shot; that the certainty of political reliability was more important than the
risk of a loss of martial efficiency.

There is also some evidence that the Russian dictator had become alarmed by developments in Spain, where the
Red Army contingent fighting against Franco (besides acquiring valuable tactical experience) was beginning to
show its teeth in conflict with the members of the NKVD who were attached to it.

Whatever Stalin's motives, and whether or not he intended to go as far as he did, the final figures were staggering.
Only Budënny and Voroshilov survived among the marshals. Out of eighty members of the 1934 Military Soviet
only five were left in September 1938. All eleven Deputy Commissars for Defence were eliminated. Every
commander of a military district (including replacements of the first "casualties") had been executed by the
summer of 1938. Thirteen out of fifteen army commanders, fifty-seven out of eighty-five corps commanders, 110
out of 195 divisional commanders, 220 out of 406 brigade commanders, were executed. But the greatest numerical
loss was borne in the Soviet officer corps from the rank of colonel downward and extending to company
commander level.
Before the purge the Red Army had been a vigorous and perceptive body, abundantly equipped and alert for new
ideas. Now innovation slowed down to walking pace; technique disappeared, the "Mass Army" reclaimed its
position as the proletarian ideal—but the trained reflexes which can quicken a mass and make it formidable had
been eliminated. Its training and indoctrination were primarily offensive. But, unlike the Germans, who were the
only European army to consider the offensive concept with any optimism, the Russians had not absorbed the
teachings of Liddell Hart and Fuller on the correct employment of armour. Thus, although by 1941 they had
accumulated no fewer than thirty-nine armoured divisions (compared with the German strength of thirty-two)
these were not grouped, as were the German, in independent corps and armies, but distributed evenly, in close
support of the infantry divisions; duplicating with a heavier weight the tactical principles of close support that were
indoctrinated in the tanks and artillery directly attached to the infantry.

This may be explained by three factors. During the early thirties the Russians, unlike the conservatively inclined
staffs of the Western powers, had paid considerable attention to the development of tactics and design in the United
States Army. The Americans, who had arrived late on the scene in World War I, at a time when the German armies
were already breaking, had not the same traumatic memories of frustrated attacks on fixed defence systems as had
the British and the French. In 1918 use of the tank in "packets," with groups of infantry and backed by a huge
weight of artillery, had seemed the key to all fortifications, however complex, provided only that the two arms did
not become separated and the tanks did not "outrun" the soldiers on foot. Since then the Americans had adopted
the idea of using tanks not simply as nutcrackers, but in reconnaissance and as "cavalry." They had developed a
number of lightly armoured fast tanks, and one of these, the Christie, was sold to the Russians.

[ In fact, this design was to form a working basis, through the BT series, for the famous T 34; "the best tank in any
army up to 1943," Guderian called it.]

But although they were groping in the right direction, the Americans had never really taken hold of the Panzer
concept in its essence, as conceived by Liddell Hart and developed by Guderian—the heavy, balanced force,
moving on tracks not to "reconnoitre" but to strike and to exploit. Consequently the Russians gradually built up a
"tank park" with machines eminently suitable for mobile armoured warfare (in 1932 they had also bought from
Britain the Vickers Six-Ton tank, from which they developed their own T 26 series), but they remained wedded to
an offensive principle which rejected—if it ever considered—the radical notion of independent operations by a
single arm.

In 1937 a "number of Russian officers had been attached to the Republican forces in Spain, and here they saw
these principles given practical endorsement. Except under conditions of street fighting the defence was
everywhere overcome by the relentless pressure of a balanced force of tanks, infantry, and artillery: The Iron Ring
of Bilbao, the Ebro Line—a system of permanent emplacements seemed capable of imposing only a delay, never a
stalemate. General Pavlov, the tank expert who had gone to Spain (and who was to be shot in the opening weeks of
the war, for incompetence) had reported to Stalin and Voroshilov, "The tank can play no independent role on the
battlefield," and he recommended that the tank battalions be distributed in an infantry-support role.

Finally, as a reminder that the offensive though sound in concept must not be foolhardy in execution, came the
Finnish war of the winter of 1940. Here, underestimating the courage and adaptability of the defenders, the
Russians had tried to circumvent the permanent defences of Lake Ladoga by wide and deep outflanking
movements in the north. The columns of the Red Army thrust deep into Finnish territory, were surrounded and
annihilated. Then in the second stage of the war it was found that the permanent Finnish defences on the Karelian
Isthmus could gradually be eroded by steady pressure from tanks and infantry acting in close support.

In this way, by ignoring the effect of local conditions in each case, the Russians drew on their experience to
formulate a doctrine of the general offensive, an integrated "steam roller" of all arms that was nothing more than
their traditional military posture dressed up with modern equipment. This attitude was firmly grounded in the
personal experience of the two soldiers who would be primarily responsible for the direction of the Red Army
when the German attack came.

Marshal Shaposhnikov, Chief of the General Staff since 1937, had been called in to supervise the planning of the
final stages of the attack on the Mannerheim Line. The Chief of the Army Staff, General Zhukov, had been
appointed after the disastrous winter of 1939-40, and he, too, had moved to close quarters with the "Finnish
question" at the very moment when orthodox mass tactics were finally producing results. Moreover, Zhukov's
appointment owed much to his successes in the most important engagement fought by the Red Army up until the
German invasion, the previous year against the Japanese in the battles of Khalkin Ghol.

[This operation, coming after seven years of intermittent but bloody jockeying for position between Russia and
Japan in the Soviet Far East, finally settled the issue in favour of Russia. Although over a quarter of a million men
were engaged, the battle received scant attention in the West, coinciding as it did with Hitler's attack on Poland and
the outbreak of World War II. But it had a profound strategic importance. The Japanese never moved—nor looked
as if they would—against Russia again, even in the dark hours of November 1941. They had learned the painful
lesson of underestimating the Soviets and, unlike others, had no desire to repeat it.]

This costly operation had been executed with competence rather than originality; and although tanks had been
employed extravagantly (Zhukov had disposed of nearly five hundred), the rewards seemed due chiefly to
"persistence," i.e., the dismissal of subordinates who were squeamish about casualties, and rigid co-operation
between all arms, especially with the artillery.

While the Soviet Union was engaged against opponents who fought along orthodox military principles, sheer
weight of flesh and metal would guarantee its victory in the end. But against the fast-moving, highly trained
Panzers with their tremendous volume of fire power the Russians were going to have to learn, and learn very fast,
if they were to survive.

To make matters worse for the Red Army its disposition in Eastern Europe at the start of the German attack was
extravagantly vulnerable. It was the compromise product of a continuing and barely articulate disagreement
between some of the senior generals and Stalin, which was itself a function of the hesitant approach to tactics.

Zhukov had agreed that it was desirable to occupy the western territories in order to forestall entry by the
Germans, but wished to do so with a light screen and revise Tukhachevski's plan by dividing the strategic reserve
between Kiev and the Novgorod-Lake Ilmen region in the north.

During the summer and autumn of 1940 it seemed as if Zhukov were getting his way, as there were only fourteen
Russian divisions in Poland and seven in Bessarabia, while the Novgorod region was becoming a substantial
concentration area with upward of twenty divisions, of which eight were armoured. But following on the Vienna
Award and the mounting evidence of German infiltration into the Balkans this pattern of concentration altered.

[For the political background to relations between the two powers and the Berlin conference of November 1940,
see Ch. 1.]

The shift in emphasis gathered speed and weight during the winter, after the rejection of Stalin's letter of 27th
November seemed to have made conflict between the two powers inevitable; and the effect was that by the spring
of 1941 the Russian dispositions resembled a caricature of Tukhachevski's old plan, with the troops bunched on the
new frontier, which they had little time to prepare for defence and with their communications to base areas already
stretched.

Indeed, there is a certain parallel, on a vaster scale, between the Russian layout and the manner in which the
French and British armies deserted their own positions and rushed headlong into Belgium to meet the invader in
May 1940. In explanation, though, motives that are less highminded than the desire to offer immediate succour to a
small ally suggest themselves. During the winter of 1940-41 the strength in the Novgorod concentration area
shrank again, and there was a corresponding build-up (twenty infantry divisions, two cavalry divisions, and five
armoured divisions) along the Finnish frontier. Two separate army groups were formed (normally the whole area
would come under one of the Leningrad army groups) under Generals Meretskov and Govorov, and this fact,
together with certain remarks of Molotov's which have been recorded in the minutes of the Berlin conference,
suggests that the Russians were preparing a renewal of their attack on Finland in the summer of 1941.

The even heavier concentration in the area between Lemberg (Lvov) and the upper Prut was partly an extension of
Tukhachevski's original plan, partly also a means of strengthening Russia's hand in the intensified power politics
that were being played out in the Balkans. For Stalin's opinion was that further Russian annexation would be
possible in the Balkans if Germany became more deeply involved in the West, either by an attempted invasion of
the British Isles or in the Mediterranean. When Stafford Cripps presented to Stalin comprehensive evidence of the
German plan (supplied by Hess), the Russian leader thought that it was a plant, sharing the view of Voroshilov that
"We have the time to play the role of gravedigger to the capitalist world—and give it the finishing blow."

The result of this divergence of opinion between the Stavka and GOKO was an exceedingly unwieldy and top-
heavy distribution of the Russian Army. By the middle of May 1941 there were nearly 170 divisions, or over five
sevenths of the country's total armed strength, outside the 1939 frontiers. They were distributed in five "military
districts" running from north to south as "Leningrad," "Baltic," "Western," "Kiev," and "Odessa" commands, and
under generals whose names—Popov, Tyuleney, Pavlov—were destined, if they survived the first desperate days
of battle and the punitive firing squads that punctuated them, for obscurity.

But although the Red Army was at a disadvantage because of this vulnerable distribution and was to suffer
fearfully from clumsy, hesitant, and incompetent leadership, it was more than the equal of the Germans in the
purely logistical field of equipment and supply. There were deficiencies, notably in the field of medical services
and radio communication, but in the key figures of tank strength (over seven thousand in the forward area) and
field artillery the Russians were superior.

There were three types of divisions: the infantry, composed of three regiments, each of three battalions, and one
reserve regiment of two battalions; the cavalry, with four regiments, each of two battalions; and the armoured
division. In the later stages of the war there were separate motorised infantry divisions, but in 1941 the infantry
had no motor transport and depended on horsedrawn wagons. The only motorised infantry was that attached to the
armoured divisions. Each infantry division had an artillery component, and this had wheeled and tracked vehicles
for drawing the guns and carrying the ammunition. The infantry divisions also had a tank strength attached to
them, but this was made up mostly of old French designs of the twenties. Output of the T 34 was restricted to the
armoured divisions.

The cavalry, far from being an anachronism, was of immense value. Recruited from Cossacks and Kalmuks—
peoples who spent their lives in the saddle—it had an extraordinary mobility. Its men were trained to fight as
infantry, but would use the horses to cover huge distances over bad ground, and to tow their light artillery and
mortar limbers. They were adept at the art of concealment and dispersion. "A Soviet cavalry division," Manstein
grumbled, "can move, in its entirety, a hundred kilometres in a night—and that at a tangent to the axis of
communication." They were invaluable under conditions of fluid fighting, and their horses, shaggy little Kirkhil
ponies from Siberia, could stand temperatures of 30 degrees below zero.

The importance of the cavalry divisions was heightened by their status as the only mobile units capable of
operating with any degree of independence. For following on Pavlov's recommendations in 1939 the armoured
divisions had been broken up and their strength distributed as "brigades" throughout the infantry armies. Although
the divisional organisation was retained in a number of cases, the breakdown of the brigades into "heavy,"
"medium," and "reconnaissance" spelled the end of the tank force as an independent arm.

Then, following the success of the Panzer divisions in Poland and France, efforts, first lethargic, then frantic, had
been made to start the regrouping of the tank brigades back into armoured divisions. But this process was just
beginning by the summer of 1941, and the Russian commanders had had no time to acquaint themselves with the
problems—much less the solutions—of handling large tank forces. Nonetheless, the actual weight of the armour
deployed was, in the aggregate, very formidable (some authorities have put the total number of tanks in the Soviet
Army at the start of the campaign as high as twenty thousand), and its even distribution endowed the regular
infantry divisions with a fire power that was at least the equal of their German equivalent.

Mass, then, the Russian Army possessed in abundance—as always in its history. In equipment, too, it was better
off than any of the Wehrmacht's earlier victims. The key question remained, what of its morale and its leadership?

In Russia, as in Germany, the relationship between Army and state was a delicate one. In both countries a personal
dictatorship and a "Party" organisation had been faced with the problem of disciplining the military and
subordinating it to their own political purpose. In both this had been achieved, but by completely different
approaches, which in turn left residual influences of profound importance. Hitler had outmanoeuvred his generals
and, within a few years, achieved their exclusion from the field of politics, where for half a century they had ruled
as arbiters. Then with bribes, cajolery, and browbeating he canalised their energies and their expertise into one
field, the pursuit of pure military efficiency.
But the Russian officer corps was not isolated, it was crushed. When the purges were over, the Red Army was
obedient to the point of witlessness; dutiful but without experience; stripped of political weight or ambition, at the
expense of initiative, experiment, or the desire to innovate. The question remained, had their native patriotism, the
primaeval love of "Mother Russia" which had quickened ancestors suffering under regimes more barbarous and
tyrannical even than Stalinism, to rise and reject an alien invader, also been eradicated? For this, and will power,
and fatalism, and that readiness to accept terrible sufferings that are essentially Russian qualities, would all be
needed to the full in the first dreadful weeks of the German assault.

At the beginning of 1941 the OKW intelligence branch had estimated Russian strength at "not more than" two
hundred effective divisions. Since the war Haider has said, "This was a gross underestimate, the figure was more
like three hundred and sixty." In actual fact, the original figure was probably much nearer the truth, but the Soviet
mobilisation machinery was highly efficient, succeeding in putting over a million men under arms before the end
of July. In this prodigious feat the Russians were greatly helped by Osoaviakhim, which had thirty-six million
members, of whom 30 percent were women. It was a nationwide paramilitary organisation which "implanted in
them the rudiments of civil defence and close fighting. Its clubs were formed of units to defend local areas, units of
pilots, of parachutists, of Partisan cadres and even for the use of dogs in warfare. It was entrusted with the
neutralisation of mine fields and the recovery of equipment in the rear of armies . . ."

Hitler dismissed the latent strength of such an organisation. He believed that the Soviet military machine was so
riddled with Communism, insecurity, suspicion, and informers, and so demoralised by the purges that it could not
function properly. Intelligence had drawn up a clear picture of the Russian Army in Poland and of the vulnerability
of its disposition.

"You have only to kick in the door," he told Rundstedt, "and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down."

It is certainly paradoxical to find Hitler, whose own contempt for the professional soldier was unbounded, and who
never ceased to exalt the ties of Party over the scruples of caste, expressing so orthodox a view on the corrupting
effect of politics on a military system. But whatever his reasoning, he had, in his estimate of the Russian potential,
overlooked one very important factor. The Wehrmacht was now confronted by an opponent of a completely
different kind from the soft nations of the West. "The Russian soldier," Krylov has said, "loves a fight and scorns
death. He was given the order: 'If you are wounded, pretend to be dead; wait until the Germans come up; then
select one of them and kill him! Kill him with gun, bayonet, or knife. Tear his throat with your teeth. Do not die
without leaving behind you a German corpse.' "

[A more formal rendering of these instructions can be found in par. 2 of the "General Principles" to the Provisional
Field Service Regulations of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (People's Commissariat for Defence 1937):

"The constant urge to get to grips with the enemy, with the aim of destroying him, must lie at the basis of the
training and activity of every commander and soldier of the Red Army. Without special orders to this effect the
enemy must be attacked boldly and with dash wherever he is discovered." My italics.]

three | THE CLASH OF ARMS

Weighted down with heavy cares, condemned to months of silence, I can at last speak freely—German
people! At this moment a march is taking place that, for its extent, compares with the greatest the world has
ever seen. I have decided again today to place the fate and future of the Reich and our people in the hands of
our soldiers. May God aid us, especially in this fight.

Hitler's proclamation was read by Goebbels over the radio to the whole nation at seven o'clock on the morning of
22nd June. Four hours earlier the glare from six thousand gun flashes had lit the eastern dawn, overwhelming the
bewildered Russians in a tumult of fire and destruction. The frontier guards, awakened by the squeal and clatter of
tank tracks, were shot down as they emerged from their barracks, running half dressed through the smoke. From
gun positions in the line the Germans intercepted again and again the same message: "We are being fired on; what
shall we do?"

[General Günther Blumentritt, Chief of Staff to Field Marshal von Kluge, quotes the retort of Russian
headquarters: "'You must be insane. And why is your signal not in code?' "]
What an appalling moment in time this is! The head-on crash of the two greatest armies, the two most absolute
systems, in the world. No battle in history compares with it. Not even that first ponderous heave of August 1914,
when all the railway engines in Europe sped the mobilisation, or the final exhausted lunge against the Hindenburg
Line four years later. In terms of numbers of men, weight of ammunition, length of front, the desperate crescendo
of the fighting, there will never be another day like 22nd June, 1941.

The Russian defence was quite unco-ordinated, depending at this stage on the initiative—where they dared
exercise it—of local commanders and the instinctive tenacity of the forward troops, who held on grimly in
undermanned and incomplete fortification. Even after the battle was three and a half hours old, at the very moment
that Hitler's broadcast was exulting in "the greatest march the world has ever seen" the Red Army Command was
ordering:

. . . troops will attack enemy forces and liquidate them in the areas where they have violated the Soviet
frontier [but] unless given special authorisation ground troops will not cross the frontier.

Flights by the Red Air Force over Finland or Rumania were expressly forbidden, and over Germany permitted
only to a depth of sixty miles.

The Germans had divided their forces into three army groups; North, under Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb; Centre,
under Field Marshal Fedor von Bock; and South, under Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt. In conformity with the
pattern of deployment which had been so successful in Poland and France, the Panzer forces were kept separate
from the infantry, and were concentrated in four independent Gruppen, under young commanders of exceptional
vigour and skill—Kleist, Guderian, Hoth, and Hoepner.

[For opposing orders of battle see charts in this chapter.]

It appeared that this division of strength (which was soon to be matched by an equivalent Russian disposition)
corresponded to the three objectives of Moscow, Leningrad, and the Ukraine, and this assumption has passed into
history as a guide for measuring the success of German strategy. But in fact the "general intention" of the
Barbarossa directive was, geographically, imprecise. It set out in very loose terms the aim of reaching a line from
Archangel to the Caspian, but made it clear that the primary objective was exclusively military:

. . . Destruction of the bulk of the Soviet Army located in Western Russia by bold operations involving deep
penetrations by armoured spearheads; prevention of the withdrawal of battleworthy elements into the
Russian interior . . .

The Panzer forces were to carve up the Soviet Army, the slower-moving infantry and artillery were to force their
surrender. Hitler had no desire to fight for, or in, the cities of the Soviet Union, and many of the generals on the
staff agreed with him. The battle of France had been won by striking for the Channel—not for Paris.

This formula, as will be seen, carried in itself the seeds of trouble. There was often friction between the Panzer
commanders, who believed that they had the whole of Russia at their feet and longed to be sent after the glittering
spires of the capital cities, and the infantry locked in combat with the stubborn Russian masses in the rear, who felt
that the tanks should be held back to help them. This friction was to cause a number of local tactical errors, and
gradually came to infect the whole High Command with indecision, leading to a succession of command crises in
the early autumn. But in June it certainly seemed as if the terms of the directive were being followed to the letter.

In the vital central sector, where the eight hundred tanks of the 2nd Panzergruppe were piled up behind the Bug,
both bridges over the river to the south of Brest-Litovsk fell, intact and undefended, at the first rush. North of the
town the 18th Panzer Division, using tanks which had been specially waterproofed for "Sea Lion" (the projected
invasion of England), forded the river and struck across the marshy ground to the main Russian defences on the
left bank of the Lesna, reaching them three hours later and there also capturing the bridge intact. Minute by
minute, as the tanks probed deeper and the German guns lengthened their range, the tremors which shook the
Russian front magnified in strength and frequency. A few fragments, a gradual crumbling—by midday the vital
sectors were already in landslide.
During the afternoon, when the first positive orders began to percolate to the defenders, a gradual stirring at corps
and divisional levels took place. But there was no real effort at concentration—not, at least, in any coordinated
sense. It is simply that all the units grouped behind the frontier seem to have packed up as best they could and
moved off to encounter the Germans head on. And in that time the Luftwaffe had finished its work on the forward
Soviet airfield network, and these approach marches led straight into the German bomb-sights. Roads were
smashed and raked with machine-gun fire; tank parks were blasted; fuel stores set alight; thousands of horses were
scattered, wounded and in terror, across the countryside. It was the classic stencil of Blitzkrieg, imprinted now on
the broadest canvas.

In addition to the advantage of surprise the Germans had secured a devastating superiority of numbers and
firepower at the points selected for their armoured penetration. Halder's plan had put the entire tank strength of the
German Army into these opening attacks, dividing it into four Panzergruppen whose purpose was to perforate the
Russian defensive membrane at the first blow, then to wheel inward, isolate, and cut to pieces the mass of Soviet
army as it stood on the frontier. The map will show how effective a degree of concentration was achieved.

In the north three Panzer divisions (over six hundred tanks) and two infantry divisions had an attack frontage of
less than twenty-five miles. Opposite them stood one weak Russian unit, the 125th Rifle Division. In the centre,
where Bock's army group carried the Schwerpunkt of the opening days, the two Panzer groups, under Hoth and
Guderian, comprised seven divisions with nearly fifteen hundred tanks between them.

[A Blitzkrieg term, meaning spearhead, point of maximum concentration.]

They were opposed by one complete rifle division (the 128th), regiments from four others, and a tank division (the
22nd) which was understrength and in process of reorganisation.

On the southern front two Soviet rifle divisions faced six infantry divisions with about six hundred tanks
distributed among them in close support. Small wonder, then, that the comment of a German lieutenant of the 29th
Motorised Division was, ". . . the Russian defences might have been a row of glass houses," and that by the
afternoon of 22nd June the leading elements of all four German armoured groups were motoring fast along dry,
undamaged roads, with the sound of gunfire fading in their rear.

These "reconnaissance detachments" were mixed groups of motorcyclists with armoured cars and half-track
infantry carriers towing antitank guns: sometimes they were supported by a sprinkling of light or PzKw III
medium tanks. On the road they moved at about twenty-five mph. Immediately behind them travelled the mass of
the tank strength, in continuous radio contact with the leaders and ready to deploy into attack formation if the head
of the column should get held up. Still farther to the rear was a "sandwich" of mechanised infantry, divisional
artillery, and more infantry. The whole column, deployed in extended order of advance, stretched over a distance
of from seven to ten miles, yet by the evening of 22nd June all the leading Panzer divisions were well clear of the
fighting zone and had penetrated to nearly twice their own length.

The deepest advance had been made by Manstein's 56th Corps in the north, which had crossed the East Prussian
frontier at dawn and captured the bridge at Airogola, over the Dubisa gorge, before sundown—a forward leap of
over fifty miles! In the centre Guderian's columns had joined up on either side of Brest-Litovsk, captured Kobrin
and Pruzhany, and crossed the line of the Krolewski Canal.

But even before dusk on the 22nd certain differences from previous campaigns were apparent. Like some
prehistoric monster caught in a net, the Red Army struggled desperately and, as reflexes gradually activated the
remoter parts of its body, with mounting effect. Until that day the Germans had always found that bodies of
surrounded enemy lay down and died. There would be a contracting of perimeters, a drawing in of "flanks,"
perhaps some perfunctory efforts to break out or counterattack, and then—surrender. The speed and depth of a
Panzer thrust; the tireless ubiquity of the Luftwaffe; above all, the brilliant coordination of all arms, had given to
the Germans an aura of invincibility that had not been enjoyed by any other army since the time of Napoleon. Yet
the Russians seemed as ignorant of this as they were of the rules of the military textbook.

The reaction of the surrounded formations was in every case vigorous and aggressive. Their very lack of
coordination bewildered the Germans and hampered the plans for containing the various pockets. Whole divisions
would assemble and move straight into the attack, "marching towards the sound of the guns." During the day the
tank parks emptied as one brigade after another took on fuel and ammunition and clattered off to be destroyed
piecemeal in the sights of the German artillery. By the afternoon fresh masses of aircraft, summoned with
desperate urgency from the flying fields of central Russia, began to appear over the battlefield, though "It was
infanticide, they were floundering in tactically impossible formations." By that time Stalin's restriction against
sorties over German territory had been lifted, and the Russian bomber force (which had largely escaped the first
Luftwaffe strike, owing to its bases being farther from the frontier) took off obediently in accordance with an
already outdated operational plan. Over five hundred were shot down.

On 23rd June, Lieutenant General Kopets, commander of the bomber group, committed suicide, and within a week
General Rychagov, the commander of aviation on the northwestern front, was under sentence of death for
"treasonable activity" (that is to say, having been defeated). In the first two days the Russians lost over two
thousand aircraft—a casualty rate without precedent. The (numerically) strongest air force in the world had been
virtually eliminated in forty-eight hours.

The effect of being thus completely deprived of air cover was, on the frontier armies, disastrous. For the rest of the
year the Russians were to fight with only minimal support from their Air Force, and were quick to adjust
themselves to the operational limitations this imposed. But in those first hectic days of confusion and encirclement,
when there were no orders, when there was no central direction, nothing more specific than the standing
instructions, ". . . attack the invader whenever and wherever he be encountered," casualties were increased tenfold
by this blindness in reconnaissance and vulnerability on the march.

While the Panzers streaked across the plain, toward objectives seventy miles distant, a slow polarisation took place
among the Russian armies left standing in Poland. Like giant cedars, which remain erect after their roots have been
cut, they stood up to assaults whose result was certain before crashing down to disappear forever under the saw. In
the first week of the campaign four major "battles of annihilation" cleared the way for the German Army to step
bodily into European Russia as far as the line of the Dnieper.

The idiotic disposition of the frontier armies [Refer to disposition chart] had left Pavlov with a weak centre
(known in the first ten days of the campaign by its peacetime designation, "Western Military District") and a bare
numerical parity with the Germans opposite him in terms of infantry. In tanks Pavlov was completely outclassed,
for he faced nearly 80 percent of the German strength, including the Panzergruppen of Hoepner, Hoth, and
Guderian.

Pavlov had three armies, the 3rd, 10th, and 4th, drawn up in a line running south from the Latvian frontier to
Wlodawa, on the fringe of the Pripet Marshes. In close reserve there were five mechanised corps (little bigger than
a division, in reality), which were evenly distributed and fully occupied in training to assimilate the volte-face
which had come over the Red Army Command's attitude to the employment of armoured forces.

[See Ch. 2.]

Hoepner brushed his sleeve against the right wing of the Russian 3rd Army on the first day, tearing a wide gap
between it and the edge of the Baltic Military District area, and through this Manstein's 56th Panzer Corps flowed
at breakneck speed. Russian counterattacks during the afternoon had run into the full strength of the 4th Panzer
Army, now fast eroding the walls of the breach, and withered under its fire.

By nightfall three Russian infantry divisions had gone completely—men, guns, staff organisation, transport,
everything—and another five were licking their wounds. More serious, half of Pavlov's tank strength was lost in
the desperate confusion of that first afternoon's encounter. The 14th Mechanised Corps, assembling in the
Pruzhany-Kobrin area, had been so badly punished by German bombers that it never got under way; the 13th,
being nearer the point of impact, was in action by six o'clock in the evening, but shortage of fuel, mechanical
failures, and unsuitable ammunition dissipated its effect, for the brigades went into battle singly, often following
their predecessor's tracks and repeating his mistakes.

[The majority of Russian tanks (mainly T 28 and the T 50-60 light) were fitted out with high-explosive
ammunition for "close support," and altering the ration in favour of armour-piercing shot, for antitank work, was
just beginning.]
During the night Pavlov attempted to draw off the remainder of his tank strength from the 10th Army, forming the
6th and 11th Mechanised Corps and 6th Cavalry Corps into a special "shock force" under his deputy, Lieutenant
General I. V. Boldin, with instructions to attack the southern flank of the German penetration on the 23rd. It is
probable that these orders were not evenly disseminated during that first hectic night; likely also that the 10th
Army commander, Major General K. D. Golubev, was not overanxious to hear them en clair, as his own front was
under mounting pressure. At all events, only the 11th Mechanised Corps was in position the following morning.
Both the 6th and the cavalry were still on the road, strung out in all directions, vulnerable and understrength.
During the morning all were visited by the Luftwaffe, and the cavalry, in particular, paid a terrible price for their
delay. The result was that no move was made by Pavlov's armies to close the gap during the 24th.

In the meantime the commander of the Baltic Military District (now redesignated the "northwestern front") had
been assembling such tank strength as remained to him, and during the afternoon of the 23rd it was all (about the
equivalent of three divisions in strength) committed in an attack south-westward from Shaulyai. It is highly
doubtful that the gap could have been closed even had this attack been simultaneous with that of Boldin's group.
With Boldin inactive, it was doomed to failure, running straight into the concentrated strength of Reinhardt's 41st
Panzer Corps, which was deploying to attack Kovno (Kaunas). The following day, 24th June, Boldin at last put in
his attack, but punishment on the march and the isolated character of the operation made it, too, a failure. By now
the northwestern front, denuded of its armour, was disintegrating fast, with the surviving armies falling back on
Riga and uncovering the approaches to Dvinsk. By 24th June, Manstein had penetrated over a hundred miles, as
far as Wilkomierzi; on the 25th he was in sight of the town; on the 26th he entered it, the motorcyclists of the 8th
Panzer capturing the huge road bridge over the Dvina at the very moment that the sentries were fumbling with the
demolition charges.

Now a corridor, amost a hundred miles wide at its entry, was leading directly toward Leningrad. In five days the
Germans had halved the distance which separated them from the "Cradle of the Revolution."

Frantic to close this gap and to regain contact with the disintegrating northwestern front, Pavlov continued to shift
divisions pell-mell out of the 10th Army area northward to stiffen the shaky 3rd Army. This uncovered Minsk and
left the luckless 4th Army commander, Major General A. A. Korobkov, without support on either flank. Had the
Russians but known it, the threat to Leningrad was as nothing beside the menace bearing down on the 4th Army.
With his centre under pressure from Kluge, Korobkov was isolated to the north by Hoth's 3rd Panzergruppe and
his left flank driven in by Guderian's 2nd Panzergruppe. In three days Guderian had driven a hundred miles
northeast to Slonim, drawing, with Hoth, a noose around the bulk of the Soviet infantry and the remaining armour,
which Pavlov had left in position. On 25th June, the 26th Panzer Corps took Lesna and advanced fifty miles
toward Slutsk; on the 26th, the 66th Panzer Corps captured Baranovichi in the morning and drove nearly sixty
miles during the day to enter Stolpce at nightfall. On the 27th this corps covered the remaining fifty miles to
Minsk, where it joined up with the southern arm of Hoth's pincer, putting a "long-stop" behind the Slonim pocket
and achieving one of the most spectacular marches in the history of armoured warfare.

In the south the Red Army held its ground better, thoueh at a fearful price in men and equipment. The front
commander was Colonel General M. P. Kirponos (commander of the Kiev Military District), and the forces of
which he disposed were substantially stronger both than those of his colleague to the north, the unfortunate Pavlov,
and of the Germans opposite him.

The main German thrust was directed down the relatively narrow gap between the southern edge of the Pripet
Marshes and the foothills of the Carpathian range. Here Rundstedt, the commander of Army Group South, had
concentrated the whole of the 1st Panzer Army (Colonel General von Kleist) and the 6th Army (Field Marshal von
Reichenau) and the 17th Army (Colonel General von Stülpnagel).

The longer front along the Prut and down to the shore of the Black Sea had only one German army, the 11th
(General von Schobert), to stiffen a large mixed group of Hungarians and Rumanians. These last were slow in
getting off the mark, and being fitted out with French equipment, were not formidable.

Kirponos therefore was free to concentrate against Kleist and Reichenau. He had four infantry armies, [These were
the 5th (Major General of Tank Troops M. I. Potapov), the 6th (Lieutenant General I. N. Muzychenko), the 26th
(Lieutenant General F. Kostenko), and the 12th (Major General P. G. Ponedelin).] three mechanised corps in close
support (the 22nd, 4th, and 15th), one (the 8th) in reserve, about 250 miles inland, and two in "strategic reserve" at
Zhitomir (the 19th and 9th). But this powerful force was dissipated in a sequence of piecemeal counterattacks, and
due largely to command difficulties and the inexperience of the senior officers of the Red Army in handling masses
of armour, the strongest concentration of Russian tank strength in the east lost its cutting edge before the really
critical phase of the southern battles developed.

On 22nd June, Kirponos had ordered up all three mechanised corps from the reserve with the intention of
concentrating them northeast of Rovno and staging an attack, together with the 22nd (which was already in
position there), against Kleist's left flank. In fact, the 22nd Mechanised Corps was drawn into battle on the first day
and cut to pieces. The 15th Mechanised Corps, attacking from the south, was likewise fought to a standstill in front
of the German antitank screen. With his tank strength seriously diminished, Kirponos held on grimly, but by the
time the 8th Mechanised Corps had completed its forced march the situation had become so bad that it was sent
straight into action alone. Once again the Russian tanks took a severe mauling, though better combat discipline and
more up-to-date equipment (some regiments had just been refitted with the T 34) helped the corps preserve its
cohesion.

[On 24th June, Halder, besides noting, "Interesting historical coincidence that Napoleon also took Vilna on 24th
June," also wrote (underlining the sentence), "New enemy heavy tank!" The T 34 was issued to some armoured
brigades in May 1941 and went into action in the first week of the campaign. Not, as is sometimes claimed, at the
"relief of Moscow."]

When finally the 9th and 19th corps arrived from Zhitomir, things were so critical that they, too, had to go straight
into action—at half the strength originally planned. The inexperienced Russian tank crews, exhausted by four days
on the march and round-the-clock hammering by the Luftwaffe, were no match for the confident veterans of the
1st Panzer Army, who knew how to concentrate, when to disperse, the secrets of holding fire and picking ground.
Once again many of the Russian tanks broke down, others floundered into German ambushes or lost their way.
One division followed its corps commissar into a swamp, and all the tanks had to be abandoned.

Yet although the situation seemed desperate from the Russian side, the Germans found their opponent's strength
highly perplexing. "The enemy leadership in front of A. G. South," Halder grumbled, "is remarkably energetic, his
endless flank and frontal attacks are causing us heavy losses."

Again, on the following day, "One has to admit that the Russian leadership on this front is doing a pretty good
job."

At least, by his lavish expenditure of lives and machinery, Kirponos was holding the southern front in being. But
its days were numbered, for north of the Pripet Marshes the Russian armies of the centre were fast breaking to
pieces. A general breakdown in communications aggravated the fragmentation of the various commands. Signals,
radio, telephones, nothing functioned properly. Roads and railways were raked by the Luftwaffe; some units had
their effectiveness reduced by as much as half while on the march.

Only the regional machinery of the Osoaviakhim functioned with efficiency, continuing to churn out a mass of
conscripts under its mobilisation decrees. These wretched fellows, the cadres of 1919, 1920, 1921, with those of
other years following on their heels, were brought from all over Russia in slow-moving freight trains and dumped
as near the front as the Luftwaffe allowed. Out they clambered, in their civilian clothes, holding their cardboard
suitcases, and set off on foot, toward mobilisation centres long since overrun.

In the huge no man's land of White Russia, which had a week, some parts only a few days, of grace before falling
to the enemy, those fittest to command survived. A few commissars together with some Red Army officers of
courage and foresight struggled day and night to form fresh units out of the unarmed reservists, wandering
stragglers, men on leave, and garrison brigades which littered the area. Installations were demolished, dumps set
ablaze, extempore fieldworks thrown up, cattle and fowl slaughtered or driven east. Over the whole scene brooded
the "rear security detachments" of the NKVD, machine gunners held ready "to check panic . . . and prevent
unauthorised withdrawal." On 28th June, Korobkov had been taken back to Moscow and shot for cowardice.
Pavlov was to follow him, together with his Chief of Staff, Klimovski, and his signals commander, Grigoriev.

As the frontier force withered in battle, new armies, under new commanders, took shape in the interior. To speed
their concentrations the Russians made all the major rail lines west of the Dnieper one-way traffic; only the
engines went careering back to collect their loads. This puzzled German intelligence.

Air reconnaissance shows enormous mass of rolling stock accumulating in marshalling yards. Appears to be
empty. Is this a bluff?

Halder's reaction was typical of that of all Germans who came face to face with the extraordinary Russian
profligacy in battle. First, exultation: the Germans counted heads, measured the miles of their advance, compared
it with their achievements in the West, and concluded that victory was around the corner. Then, disbelief: such
reckless expenditure could not go on, the Russians must be bluffing, in a matter of days they would exhaust
themselves. Then, a certain haunting disquiet: the endless, aimless succession of counterattacks, the eagerness to
trade ten Russian lives for one German, the vastness of the territory, and its bleak horizon.

A German Colonel Bernd von Kleist, wrote:

The German Army in fighting Russia is like an elephant attacking a host of ants. The elephant will kill
thousands, perhaps even millions, of ants, but in the end their numbers will overcome him, and he will be
eaten to the bone.

There were differences, too, in the manner of the fighting. Manstein has described how, on the very first day, he
was shown the bodies of a German patrol which had been cut off, and "gruesomely mutilated," and the Soviets'
practice of "throwing up their hands as if to surrender and reaching for their arms as soon as our infantry came
near enough, or ... feigning death and then firing on our troops when their backs were turned." As early as 23rd
June, Halder had been complaining of the "absence of any large take of prisoners," on the 24th that "the stubborn
resistance of individual Russian units is remarkable," on the 27th, again, dissatisfaction at "the singularly small
number of prisoners." The fissures in Russian morale which were to open that autumn (and as suddenly to be
closed by German brutality and miscalculation) were still far below the surface.

All this had been immediately apparent to the German infantry, which was fighting at close quarters. But on the
Panzer crews, riding out on the armoured decks of their vehicles, the sun shone. For the first few days it seemed
almost like the summer campaign in the West, as the undamaged villages slid beneath their tracks, the bewildered
population peering from windows and doorways. Soon, though, this similarity began to fade. The first effects of
the distance they were travelling began to be felt. Many of the motorised divisions had been re-equipped with
captured French trucks, and these were starting to break down on the poor roads. Spare parts had to be flown in as
the long trails that stretched west behind the armoured spearheads were dangerously vulnerable to wandering
bodies of "surrounded" Russians. "In spite of the distances we were advancing," wrote a captain in the 18th Panzer
Division, ". . . there was no feeling, as there had been in France, of entry into a defeated nation. Instead there was
resistance, always resistance, however hopeless. A single gun, a group of men with rifles . . . once a chap ran out
of a cottage by the roadside with a grenade in each hand . . ."

On 29th June, Halder, after summarising the day's progress in his diary, concluded:

Now, for once, our troops are compelled to fight according to their combat manuals. In Poland and in the
West they could take liberties, but here they cannot get away with it.

There is a note almost of smugness about this entry. It is as if the dedicated graduate of the General Staff College
was gratified to see the rules of war beginning to assert themselves. But, "for once . . ." For always. Had the
Germans but known it, the first (and, for their arms, the most spectacular) phase of the Eastern campaign was
already fading into memory.

The 30th of June was Halder's birthday, and at OKH the anniversary was a happy occasion. On coming down to
the breakfast room the Chief of the General Staff found that it had been specially decorated. The junior officers
stood in a line and presented their compliments, preceded by "the H.Q. Commandant, accompanied by a man from
the guard unit who brings a bunch of wild flowers." Halder read the teleprints from army group headquarters and
pronounced the news satisfactory. The Russians were in full retreat, and Luftwaffe reports from the southern front
told of disorganised columns three and four abreast. Of the total of two hundred aircraft shot down the day before,
the majority had been old types, TB 3 highwing bombers dragged up from the training airfields of central Russia.
It was evident that the enemy was scraping the barrel.
It is nothing if not paradoxical to think of these precise and immaculate staff officers, dressed this day in their best
uniforms, seated at a table with a clean cloth, exchanging formal pleasantries with one another. These men were at
the nerve centre of the German war machine in the East. Each day they sifted reports which expressed in cold print
a fresh and enormous sum of human agony—men dying of wounds and thirst, villages smashed and burning,
animals slaughtered, families separated and sent into captivity. They had heard Hitler speak of his intentions
toward the Russian people, his rejection of the Geneva convention on prisoners of war, of the "Commissar order,"
of his wish to "level" Leningrad in order not to be embarrassed by the size of its population. They knew, too, what
Nazi occupation meant: they had all fought in Poland and seen the revolting behaviour of the SD detachments at
close quarters; and there, no farther than the ration-strength sheet on the wall, the movement orders in the daily
file, was confirmation that these same criminals were operating close up behind their own soldiers. Yet such is the
schizophrenic capacity of the human mind that all this could be submerged with facility, and like schoolboys, they
set out to enjoy themselves at their housemaster's birthday party.

Brauchitsch, or "ObdH," as he was affectionately called by Halder, punctilious as ever, had sent red roses and
strawberries for the table.

[Not to his face, of course. It is an abbreviation for Oberstdas Heeres, Commander in Chief of the Army, under
which Brauchitsch's name always appears in Halder's diary.]

When Halder telephoned to thank him, the Commander in Chief revealed some exciting news. Hitler had decided
to visit OKH headquarters in person. He would be arriving for tea. Overcome by the atmosphere of good feeling
which Halder's birthday celebrations had generated, Brauchitsch went on to say (quite mendaciously) that the
Führer's visit "is primarily on your account." Other "well-wishers" then took the telephone, ending with the
fanatically Nazi Frau Brauchitsch, who rang off with a strident "Heil Hitler!"

During the day the collapse of the Russian front went several stages further. In Kirponos' command, the only area
where the defence still held a certain degree of cohesion, the valiant 8th Mechanised Corps had fought itself to a
standstill, and with his tank arm almost eliminated, Kirponos ordered a retreat to the positions on the old Soviet-
Polish frontier. In the north Pavlov's forces were in a state of complete disintegration, their strength broken by a
sequence of counterattacks which for clumsiness and extravagance were to be rivalled only by Budënny's later
performance in the Ukraine. In the centre the Soviet mass was now enclosed in two pockets, at Slonim and Minsk,
and the way seemed clear for the Panzers to roam undisturbed. After eight days' fighting the bulk of the Soviet
forces standing on the frontier had been splintered, and accordingly, within the terms of the Barbarossa directive,
OKH now ordered that the crossing over the Dnieper be seized.

Hitler arrived at teatime, and an SS adjutant brought a large silver flagon of cream. After a tour of the wall maps
the Führer sat down, and the conversation—if such a term may be used of the discreet assent with which Hitler's
rambling monologues were received—turned to "global subjects." After some grumbles about Germany's African
colonies (the return of Togo was "not essential") Hitler began to develop, with an uncharacteristic benevolence, the
theme of "European unity after the war." From England there was still some hope, "Epecially," Halder records,
"the possibility of Churchill's overthrow by Conservatives with a view to forestalling a Socialist-Communist
revolution in the country." The Führer was in excellent spirits. Some of those present may have been reminded of
the occasion, almost exactly a year before, when he had danced a victory jig in the Forest of Compiègne.

During these first halcyon days of victory, when the campaign seemed almost to be running itself, Hitler relaxed
happily into dreams of a colonial East. Now, truly, it seemed as if that most fantastic of the Nazi visions—a million
square miles of Slavic helots, ruled by a handful of Herrenvolk—were on the point of realisation. Hitler envisaged
a mixture of British India and the Roman Empire: "A new type of man will take shape, real masters . . . viceroys."

But reality, though maturing with delirious speed in the field of military achievement, lagged sadly in that of
administration. The quality of the "viceroys" was far from uniform, for

When ministries were summoned to supply their quotas of civil servants for the new Führerkorps Ost . . .
[they had seen] in this call a welcome opportunity to rid themselves of personal enemies, obnoxious
meddlers and incompetent chair-warmers.
The result was

A colourful and accidental conglomeration of Gauleiters, Kreisleiters,

Labour Front officials, and a great number of SA leaders of all ranks,
who assumed high positions in the civil administration after listening to
a few introductory lectures delivered by Rosenberg's staff at the Nazi
training school at the Croessinsee.

This motley crew owed a nominal loyalty to their chief, Rosenberg. In fact,
they were infiltrated, particularly in the higher echelons, by the personal
representatives of other Nazis who were determined to carve their own
empires out of the Eastern territory while the going was good. Besides
Rosenberg, the two most persistent and avaricious rivals were Bormann and
Himmler, with occasional (and waning) intervention by the
Reichsmarschall, Goering, who based his claims on his responsibility for
the "Four-Year Plan."

Rosenberg's own views had been set out in a long memorandum in April.
Part of this document is unintelligible rambling, but its essence may be
found in the following paragraph:

The aim of our policy to me, therefore, appears to lie in this direction:
to resume in an intelligent manner and sure of our aim, the aspirations
to liberation of all these peoples [the "imprisoned nationalities" of the
Soviet Union] and to give them shape in certain forms of states, i.e., to
cut state formations out of the giant territory . . . and to build them up
against Moscow, so as to free the German Reich of the Eastern
nightmare for centuries to come.

This plan—the "Wall against Muscovy"—may have had a certain romantic

appeal for Hitler, with its suggestion of the legions standing guard on the
Barbary frontier, but privately the Führer rejected Rosenberg's principles—
at least on a political level. With characteristic brutality of logic Hitler
declared:

Small sovereign states no longer have a right to exist . . . the road to

self-government leads to independence. One cannot keep by democratic
institutions what one has acquired by force.

His own view, which he was to express at the notorious 16th July
conference on the future of the occupied East, was:

[See Ch 1]

While German goals and methods must be concealed from the world at
large, all the necessary measures—shooting, exiling, etc.—we shall take
and we can take anyway. The order of the day is

first: conquer
second: rule
third : exploit.

Sometimes it is hard to understand why Hitler ever installed Rosenberg as

chief of the Ostministerium or gave even qualified endorsement to his
schemes. But it must be seen in a context separate from Reich foreign
policy and in relation to the personal power struggles that cut fissures
across the Nazi hierarchy. Pursuing the analogy of the Roman Empire,
Hitler must have seen that the only threat to his own position in the future—
a future of German domination, actual and undisturbed, over half the globe
—would come from the provincial governors, "over-mighty subjects" who
were allowed an excess of freedom in building up their private empires.
Indeed, Ovens' assessment of Bormann can be applied, a fortiori, to Hitler.

He preferred a crackbrained Ostminister to a clever one; a block-

headed foreign minister to an adroit one; a wishy-washy
Reichsmarschall to one hard as iron.

After Hitler the two most powerful figures in the Reich were Himmler and
Bormann. Each was a direct claimant to his succession and each saw in the
limitless potentialities of an Eastern empire the means to tip the balance in
his own favour. Their rivalry and their mutual personal dislike lie at the root
of all the inconsistencies in German Ostpolitik, for first one, then the other
would use the bewildered Rosenberg as an indignant pig in the middle,
blocking, perverting, or exploiting his policies to achieve their own long-
term ambitions.
Rosenberg's great weakness was that he had no personal corps d'élite, and
the quality of the material from which he was compelled to draw to staff his
Ministry and execute its policy has already been the subject of remark.
Bormann, on the other hand, had at his disposal the mass of the SA,
decapitated by the purge of 1934, but still substantial, frustrated, and
experienced in politics and administration. From the very day when the
Ostministerium was incorporated, it was subject to a double stress—from
Himmler, who wished to sterilise it completely, and from Bormann, who
tried to staff its higher posts with his own nominees.

As early as April 1941 talks had begun between the SS and OKW
concerning the operation of the SD detachments in the rear of the advancing
troops. Himmler rapidly forced the pace and tried to extend the "talks" into
a general agreement that the Army would be left as undisturbed master of
the forward zone, "with the SS as a free corps in effect responsible for the
New Order in the East . . . the SD would be advance teams of the future
commissariats." At the last moment the Army took fright and started to
back away— ". . . these demands must be refused," Halder noted grimly in
his diary. Bormann, who had got wind of the scheme, persuaded Hitler to
"discuss the affair with everyone concerned," not in conference, but one by
one.

When his turn came, Bormann had warned Hitler that an accommodation
between the SS and the Army would result in "a measure of power which
was inconvenient, perhaps even dangerous, to the Party." Rosenberg put
things more formally, and unlike Bormann, was not reticent about declaring
his views to anyone who would listen. Hitler threw the scheme out,
although he reserved "police matters" to the SS, and Himmler blamed his
defeat on Rosenberg's duplicity.

In a state of pique, Himmler complained innocently to Bormann:

The manner in which Rosenberg approaches this question once again

makes it endlessly difficult to work with him, man to man ... to work
with, let alone under, Rosenberg is surely the most difficult thing in the
Nazi Party.
Inflamed by his "victory" and rampant with megalomania, Rosenberg now
proceeded to claim the right "to approve all assignments of SS personnel to
the East." Once the campaign had begun and conquered territory began to
accumulate, relations between the various agencies deteriorated to such an
extent that Hitler was obliged to call another conference (on 16th July).
Himmler was not present, but Goering, Rosenberg, and Bormann all took
part with vigour, and there were some undignified scenes—particularly
when it came to selecting the names for the actual commissariats, or
regional governorships. At the end a Führer directive promulgated that the
conquered regions should pass from military to civilian administration
"once they had been pacified." The authority of the Army, the SS, and the
Four-Year Plan were to be defined under separate agreements, and it was to
be hoped that ". . . in practice the conflict [between the different bodies]
would very soon be settled."

In practice, however, nothing had been settled except the names of the
commissars. Each of the separate directives, being negotiated separately
and under the pressure of its own particular lobby, granted a measure of
overlapping authority to that agency with which it was concerned. For
example, the SS was specifically delegated responsibility for "police
security" in the East, and by Article II the Reichsführer (Himmler) was
empowered "to issue directives on security matters" to Rosenberg's
subordinates. To ensure that his privileges would be enforced, and that he
would be kept informed of any opportunity for their extension, Himmler
appointed as "liaison officer" to the Ostministerium Reinhard Heydrich, his
most trusted deputy and one of the most evil figures in the Nazi Party.

The effect of this squabbling was that the Nazi machine was to administer
Russia on a basis of almost complete fragmentation—at the levels of both
policy and personality. The only sentiment which may have united them
was Backe's [Herbert Backe, German Minister for Food and Agriculture]
when he spoke of "The Russian . . . who . . . has stood poverty, hunger, and
austerity for centuries. His stomach is flexible; hence, no false pity!"

The General Commissar for Belorussia (the vital central sector of the front,
with civil responsibility behind Bock's army group) was Wilhelm Kube, a
former Nazi member of the Reichstag who had been duly promoted in the
West Prussian administration on Hitler's accession to power, but whose
subsequent behaviour had been so scandalous that he had been "retired"
before the outbreak of war. By the end of June, however, he was installed in
Minsk and making the most of his vice-regal powers. Kube was delighted to
find that many of the Belorussians were "blondies and blue-eyed Aryans."
He also spoke highly of the vodka and the beer. He found himself a
magnificent building for his commissariat and embraced a number of
peasant girls in his domestic service.

[The harem, as oriental scholars know, has its own perils, and these are not
exclusively venereal. Eventually one of the "blondies" put an anti-personnel
mine in Kube's bed and he was blown to pieces. See Ch. 15.]

The administrative staff, in contrast, was far from decorative. It

consisted of woefully unprepared personnel . . . Nazi waiters and dairy

men, yesterday's clerks and superintendents, graduates of quick
training courses . ..'. dizzy with power, yet quite unfit for their jobs. In
practice Kube's instructions were often disregarded by his
subordinates ...

Another factor which irritated Kube was the constant encroachment by the
SS upon his jurisdiction and the manner in which its members held
themselves above either civil or military law. They were particularly prone
to "sequestrate" gold and silver in any form, and their indiscriminate
violence against the civilian population was already having effect. A typical
day in Slutsk saw the arrival of a black-uniformed SD detachment which

fetched and carted off all the Jews . . . with indescribable brutality they
were brought together from their apartments. There was shooting from
all over the town, and corpses of dead Jews [and Belorussians, too]
were piled up in several streets. Besides the fact that the Jews . . . and
the Belorussians . . . were mistreated with frightful roughness before
the eyes [of spectators] and "worked over" with rubber belts and rifle
butts. There is no more question of a Jewish action. Much rather it
looked like a revolution.

On another occasion, in Minsk itself,

the SD one day took about 280 civilian prisoners from the gaol, led
them to a ditch, and shot them. Since the capacity of the ditch was not
exhausted, another thirty prisoners were pulled out and also shot . . .
including a Belorussian who had been turned in to the police for
violating the curfew by fifteen minutes . . . and twenty-three skilled
Polish workers who were quite innocent but had been sent up to Minsk
from the Government-General [i.e., Poland] to relieve the shortage of
specialists and had been billeted in the jail . . . because there were no
other billeting facilities.

In this particular case Kube's protest got as far as Rosenberg, and in due
course wound its way from the Ostministerium to Lammers, who presided
over the withered rump of the German judiciary.

[Hans Lammers, Chief of the Reich Chancellery 1933-45.]

The essence of Rosenberg's case was not (need it be said) humanity, but
administrative protocol:

It impinges most emphatically upon the responsibility entrusted to me

by the Führer for the administration of the occupied Eastern
territories.

But when Lammers' reproof finally reached Heydrich, the SS liaison officer
brushed it off. "The executions were due to a danger of epidemics."

All the same, Kube continued to grumble. Not only was the SS competing
in its efforts to run the territory by issuing its own decrees, but the
wholesale slaughter which it practiced daily was already having its effect on
the economy:

Jewish artisans simply cannot be spared because they are indispensable

to the maintenance of the economy.

The confusion was being aggravated by Goering, who was eagerly

extending the net of his own administrative machine and finding to his
annoyance that he was being forestalled by Himmler. Throughout European
Russia the SS was "requisitioning various industrial and commercial
enterprises."

Forced to operate through the corrupt and rickety machinery of the Reich
commissars and without a private army of his own (a state of affairs which
he was soon to remedy), Goering was compelled to bow out with as good a
grace as he could muster, but the effect of this triangular rivalry in the fields
of murder, plunder, and administration on the smooth running of the
occupied territory needs no emphasis.

[On 26th August, 1941, Goering wrote to Himmler (Doc. NO-1019), "I
have asked the Reichskommissar for Ostland to handle your requests for the
supply and disposal of service and consumer goods with the requisite
understanding . . ."]

In the Ukraine the Reichsmarschall was better served, for at the 16th July
conference his own nominee, Erich Koch, had been chosen for the
commissariat. Rosenberg had protested vigorously against this choice,
believing with some reason that the whole of his delicate and crackbrained
scheme for racial discrimination would be placed in jeopardy by a man who
was already notorious for sadistic taste and corrupt practices.

[Gisevius, in To the Bitter End, London, 1948, has described how, while
Gauleiter of East Prussia, Koch had established the "Erich Koch Institute,"
and "cheerfully watered the stock whenever he needed money for his
palaces or similar amusements . . ."]

The Ostminister had also considered the close personal friendship between
Koch, Bormann, and Goering, and the direct link which his (nominal)
subordinate would thereby enjoy with the Führer.

In fact, Koch agreed with Goering that 'The best thing would be to kill all
men in the Ukraine over fifteen years of age, and then to send in the SS
stallions," and the two of them made an informal deal with Himmler that
the SS would be allowed a free hand in its extermination program in return
for allocation of the economic resources and "general loot" to Goering.
Koch had begun as a railway official in the Rhineland (and his subsequent
career may be studied with some misgivings by persons who have had the
misfortune to attempt travel in Germany or Switzerland with tickets that are
out of order). Under Goering's patronage he had risen to be Gauleiter of
East Prussia, and he retained this title even after being "given" the Ukraine.
He had his own notions of colonial-style government, and liked to carry a
stock whip.

He persuaded Goering to extract certain provinces of Belorussia and the

Bialystok forests from the general carve-up that took place in the first
weeks of the German advance, and added these to his dominion, frequently
boasting that he was the "first Aryan to hold sway over an empire from the
Black Sea to the Baltic." The essence of Koch's theme was that propounded
to him by Himmler:

Like the skimmed fat at the top of a pot of bouillon, there is a thin
intellectual layer on the surface of the Ukrainian people; do away with
it and the leaderless mass will become an obedient and helpless herd.

Against this attitude Rosenberg kept up a running fight, handicapped by the

disloyalty and incompetence of his own staff, and by his periodic tiffs with
Hitler. After one such scene, at which Rosenberg complained:

Koch, through various remarks to officers of the OKW, has given the
impression that he has the privilege of reporting directly to the Führer
and, in general, that he intends to reign without reference to Berlin [i.e.,
to the Ostministerium . . .

Similar remarks to the effect that he made policy have been made to
my associates ... I have made it clear to him that a distinct relationship
of subordination exists . . .

Hitler agreed to receive Koch "only in my [Rosenberg's] presence."

This, however, was a meaningless concession, for Koch could always

obtain access at the shortest notice through Bormann, who himself nurtured
personal schemes of empire building through "nominees." Bormann
encouraged Koch to issue a proclamation to the effect that the
Reichskommissar was

the sole representative of the Führer and the Reich Government in the
territory entrusted to him. All official agencies of the Reich must
therefore ... be subordinated to the Reichskommissar.

Poor Rosenberg! At the very moment when he was locked in combat with
Koch he was distracted by interference from a new and unexpected quarter.
For he found that his principles—or a rationalisation of his principles—
were being taken up and pushed hard by yet another organisation, which,
although the last to climb on the bandwagon, was nonetheless determined to
take its share of the spoils and the power.

This latest intruder was none other than the Reich's Foreign Minister,
Joachim von Ribbentrop. In the weeks immediately preceding the start of
Barbarossa, Ribbentrop had been hastily accumulating a diversity of
"experts" and émigré leaders within the confines of his offices at the
Wilhelmstrasse. Their purpose was to identify and encourage separatist
movements in Russia, whether they existed on a basis of nationality (Baits,
White Russians, Galicians, and so forth) or simple "anti-Bolshevism." The
most civilised of these "experts" was the former German Ambassador in
Moscow, Count Werner von der Schulenburg, who believed

[ Not to be confused with his kinsman Count Fritz von der Schulenburg, the
Deputy Police President of Berlin. Both men were subsequently members
of the 20th July plot.]

the definitive status of the Ukraine can only be settled after the
conclusion of the war. As possible solution [I] envisage a strong
autonomy of the Ukraine within a Russian confederation, or under
certain circumstances an independent Ukraine within a confederation
of European states.

This, of course, was the only policy which could, in the fullest sense, solve
the problem of "pacification" in the rear areas and bring the occupied
territories solidly into the German war effort. Ribbentrop was pressing it,
not because of its obvious justice and humanity but because he thought that
within weeks the war would be over and within months the whole world
would be at Hitler's feet. Then the only raison d'être for the Foreign Office
would be as the apparatus which continued to dabble in nationalities and
play with countries in a world of make-believe diplomacy, where the Reich
Foreign Minister would always have the last word.

[A week before the invasion Ribbentrop had addressed a pompous note to

Lammers:

The territory to be occupied by German troops will on many sides

border foreign states, whose interests will thereby be most strongly
affected. . . . The Foreign Office cannot acquiesce in the absence on the
spot of representatives schooled in matters of foreign policy and versed
in local conditions. (NMT, NG-1691, xiii 1277-79)]

It is this feeling, amounting to a conviction, that the war would be over in a

week or so, that conditioned the attitude of every person concerned with the
administration of occupied Russia in 1941. There was no cause to fear
retribution, no restraint on the grossest indulgence of personal greed and
lust—whether for blood, torture, or "blondies."

Only Rosenberg, half mad with vanity, continued with his plans to separate
and purify the racial strains in his kingdom, and it is precisely because the
theories of Ribbentrop and Schulenburg came nearest to, and thereby
carried a direct threat to supplant, his own schemes that Rosenberg opposed
them with all his resources.

After several months of correspondence, urgent and clandestine approaches

to the Führer, complicated and at times farcical manoeuvres in a steadily
rising temperature, Rosenberg got his way.

[In April 1942 a "conference" of émigré leaders was arranged by the

Foreign Office at the Hotel Adlon. Some forty persons attended, drawn
from governments in exile as far away as Ankara, and including Count
Heracles Bagration, Pretender to the throne of Georgia, and the grandson of
the Caucasian bandit, Said Shamil.]
Hitler sent for Ribbentrop and put him straight in a "down-to-earth" talk.
The Foreign Minister returned to Berlin and declared to his bewildered
aides, "It is all nonsense, gentlemen! In wartime nothing can be achieved
with your sentimental scruples."

The decision was codified by a Führer directive to the effect that "The
Foreign Office is not to concern itself with countries with which we are at
war." The files on all the émigrés in Berlin were turned over to Rosenberg
and in due course fell into the hands of Himmler, who threw most of the
persons named there into concentration camps.

(Much later, as will be seen, some of the survivors were hauled out and
allowed to restart their movements, but by then there was little incentive for
them to do so, as the probability of German defeat loomed large.)

This, then, was the brief tale of the only policy that might have achieved
solid gains for the Germans in the occupied East. It had originated in
grounds not of justice but of expediency, and was rejected because, on the
shortest possible view, it was not so much inexpedient as inconvenient.
Rosenberg regarded its rejection as a personal victory, and if it was such, it
was certainly his last. But even then he would scarcely have been reassured
to hear Hitler's private opinion:

Anyone who talks about cherishing the local inhabitant and civilising
him goes straight off into a concentration camp . . . my one fear is that
the Ostministerium will try to civilise the Ukrainian women.

While the Ostministerium was occupied in repelling the usurpers from the
Foreign Ministry, Koch tightened his hold on the Ukraine. Daily there were
executions—if that term, with its overtones of judicial rectitude, can still be
used of the rattling machine guns and haphazard mass graves that
characterised the terror—and nightly the trucks of the SS rumbled through
the streets, collecting "suspects." Whippings (usually to death) were a
feature of Koch's regime, and they were conducted, for "exemplary"
reasons, in public places such as squares and parks. In these first weeks of
the occupation there was no systematic plan of exploitation. It was pure
recreation for the Germans, "scraping the icing off the cake."
Nor was there any resistance worthy of the name on the part of the local
population. Yet in this orgy of sadism and mis-government it required no
gift of prescience to see, as Rosenberg explained in one of his many letters
of reproof to Koch, that

There exists a direct danger that if the population should come to

believe that the rule of National Socialism would have even worse
effects than Bolshevik policy, the necessary consequence would be the
occurrence of acts of sabotage and the formation of partisan bands.
The Slavs are conspiratorial in such matters. ...

In contrast to the regime in the Ukraine and Belorussia, that which

prevailed in the Baltic provinces at the northern end of the front seems
easygoing. Lohse, the Commissar, was the German bureaucrat par
excellence. He liked good food, and overindulgence of this taste compelled
him to take frequent leaves of absence at curative spas. But when he was at
his office his appetite for detail was insatiable. He sent out "A flood of
decrees, instructions, and directives which covered thousands of pages.
Lengthy correspondence took place between Riga [Lohse's headquarters]
and the four general commissariats on the most trivial administrative
problems. Price control was established for [inter alia] metal wreaths for
geese 'with' and 'without' heads, alive and dead. A decree of 'maximum
prices for rags' was promulgated, with differences of ten pfennigs per
kilogram between light brown and dark brown rayon rags in Latvia. Even
NO SMOKING signs had to be signed by Lohse personally."

The commissar's attitude to the "subjects of Ostland" was summarised in an

address to his staff the following year:

So long as a people is peaceful, one should treat it decently. To make

political mistakes and to hit people over the head—anyone can do that.

Moreover, Lohse cherished the hereditary principle:

I am not working for myself. I work so that my son, who has just been
born, can some day put the hereditary ducal crown on his head.
The result of this policy was twofold. First, the industrial capacity of
Ostland contributed far more to the war effort of the Reich than that of
other, potentially richer areas where the administration was needlessly harsh
and oppressive. Although even here the effect was diminished by a
ludicrous corruption and inefficiency—it was open season for German
businessmen, large and small, who built up private industrial empires by
confiscation and "licensing" and then used them to manufacture and market
luxuries (such as perambulators) which were banned in the more tightly
organised economy of the Reich.

The second result was that the Partisan movement never became a major
adjunct of the Red Army, as it was to become in the other parts of Russia,
and indeed, as it became in Ostland itself once the frontiers of the Baltic
states had been passed and the dark forests of the Narva gave cover. In
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania the population lived through the war in a
state of dumb resignation, tempered, during its later years, by a fearful
apprehension of the revenge the Red Army would exact on its return.

While the rear areas succumbed to a hodgepodge regime of terror, bungling,

and exploitation, the German Army continued with its gallop across the
steppe.

On 1st July, Guderian had crossed the Berezina at Svisloch with the 4th
Panzer, and the following day the 18th Panzer won a bridgehead higher up
the river, at Novy Borisov, entering the town simultaneously with tanks
from the 14th Panzer on Hoth's right wing. But the clash of personalities,
which compounded the incompetence of the civilian administration, was by
no means absent from the conduct of military operations, even at this early
stage. In particular, the activities of Army Group Centre suffered from this
affliction.

The primary source of this trouble was friction between Guderian and
Kluge. Kluge had commanded the 4th Army in Poland (when Guderian had
a corps), and in France (and again Guderian was only a corps commander).
Now Kluge was still commanding the 4th Army and his erstwhile
subordinate had a whole Panzergruppe—the very tip of the spear which,
wielded not by Kluge but by the army group commander, Bock, was to
lance the centre of European Russia. Kluge, it was true, had been promoted
to Field Marshal for his achievements in France, and the 4th Army was the
most powerful of the eleven which the Germans deployed at the start of
Barbarossa; but though these things may have diminished, they could not
eradicate Kluge's chagrin at being denied a Gruppe.

Partly out of deference to the Field Marshal's feelings, partly from a

supposed administrative convenience, the chain of command at Army
Group Centre had been altered so as to make Guderian subordinate to
Kluge and not (as would have been the normal arrangement) directly to
Bock. The circumstances under which this had arisen were as follows. The
fortress of Brest-Litovsk had stood directly in the path allotted to the 2nd
Panzer Army. To subdue it Guderian had asked for an infantry corps from
the 4th Army and had divided his tanks, sending a column to the north and
one to the south. Guderian's version of the arrangement is that

In order to ensure unity of command, I asked that these troops be

temporarily subordinated to me, and expressed my willingness to place
myself under the command of F-M von Kluge during this time. [These
arrangements] . . . involved a sacrifice on my part; Field-Marshal von
Kluge was a hard man to work under.

Whether it is true that the subordination was done at Guderian's request or

(as seems more likely) was decided at OKH, the operational phrase was
"during this time," i.e., during the siege of Brest-Litovsk. But in fact, Kluge
continued to interpose himself between Guderian and Bock long after the
river Bug had been crossed and the Panzers were in open country. And at
this point personal animosity began to aggravate the very real differences in
tactical approach which characterised the two men.

Guderian was the tank general par excellence; more than Manstein,
O'Connor, Model, with a cooler nerve than Rommel or Patton, he knew
how to handle an armoured division. He was one of the very few men who
had really absorbed the teaching of Liddell Hart on the importance of speed,
mobility, and firepower; who understood the tank as an independent arm,
not simply as an adjunct to orthodox deployment. Kluge, on the other hand,
disliked seeing the panzers rushing too far ahead, and claimed that their
extra weight was required to keep the Russian pockets "contained."
Guderian believed that this was a task for infantry, that the tanks should
keep moving, and were vulnerable only when they stopped. Bock,
commander of the entire army group, privately backed Guderian. But he
could see the risks, risks which in those first hectic weeks were more
apparent at headquarters than through the observation slit of an armoured
command car. Kluge's policy was the safe one, and the prime concern of
Bock was that nothing should prejudice his own prospects of acclaim as the
captor of Moscow and the hammer of the Soviets. He tried to compromise
between Kluge's restraint and Guderian's audacity—and always to keep
himself covered in case anything should go wrong.

It is characteristic of this officer [wrote Halder testily] that he should

demand a written confirmation of an order from my headquarters
simply because he does not agree with it.

Halder himself, who could have given a lead, shirked the responsibility.
From his desk at OKH he could see the opportunities, but his strict
professional training urged caution. It is also the case that he was subject to
a steady stream of telephone calls from the nervous ObdH, who himself was
under more or less constant cross-examination by Hitler. Was the pocket at
Slonim holding fast? Was the 292nd Division across the Desna yet? Was it
true that two Russian corps had been identified in the Naliboki forest? How
many serviceable PzKw III's were left in the 29th Motorised? "There they
go, fussing again." One can imagine Halder's irritation as he scribbled down
this phrase before leaving his evening journal to answer, once again, a
telephone call from Rastenburg.

Drawn in two directions at once, Halder committed himself on 29th June to

one of the most craven admissions of executive impotence that can ever
have been uttered by a member of the General Staff:

Let us hope that the Commanding Generals of Corps and Armies will
do the right thing without express orders, which we are not allowed to
issue because of the Führer's instructions to ObdH.

Yet at this point Halder himself does not seem to have been clear as to what
"the right thing" was. For the very next day he was echoing Kluge's
complaints about Guderian's headstrong advance:
... in disregard of its orders [the Panzer group] has neglected to attend
to the mopping up of the territory traversed by it, and now has its
hands full with local enemy breakthroughs.

Among these five generals a multilateral dispute (which, with Hitler's

intervention, was to blow up into a major crisis by the end of July) was
already in the making.

On 1st July a sharp Russian attack against the east side of the Slonim
pocket had penetrated the German screen and allowed the remnants of two
tank brigades to escape into the marsh and forest area between the 47th and
24th Panzer corps. This setback had occurred almost simultaneously with
the forcing of the Berezina by the 18th Panzer, over sixty miles to the
northeast. The 18th Panzer was stretched to the limit, and with a hostile (if
somewhat ragged) Russian brigade group straggling its lines of
communication, the question of its reinforcement was urgent. Guderian had
ordered the 17th Panzer, on that day in leaguer to the south of Minsk, to
drive at once to Borisov. But Kluge countermanded this, personally
communicating directly with Weber, the divisional commander, instead of
through Guderian.

Thus far, although Kluge had not been tactful in his approach, the incident
was unremarkable. But now an element of mystery intrudes. Guderian had
been touring the forward units throughout the day, and learned of the 4th
Army order only when he arrived at Weber's headquarters in the afternoon.
He does not mention any conversation between the two, and no other source
is available concerning their exchanges as Weber was mortally wounded a
week later.

However, when Guderian finally arrived at his own command post that
night he "immediately despatched a signal to Fourth Army, informing them
that a mishap had occurred in the transmission of orders to 17th Panzer;
part of the division had not received the order to remain on the encirclement
front and had, therefore, set off for Borisov. ... It was too late to do anything
about it."

The reply from Kluge's headquarters was instantaneous—a summons to

report there in person at eight o'clock the following morning. Guderian says
that he was "strongly taken to task," and in view of the fact that Kluge raged
about a "generals' conspiracy" (the same sort of "muddle" had occurred
earlier in Hoth's Gruppe) and threatened him with court-martial, this can
hardly be called overstatement.

In the result the forward dispositions were not affected, and neither the
strength around the Slonim pocket nor the striking power of Guderian's left
wing was adequate. On 3rd July it rained all day, and forward movement
stopped. Evidence that the Russians were going to make a fight for the
Dnieper soon began to accumulate. On 6th July a strong Russian force
drove back the 10th Motorised and the cavalry division from Shlobin, and
an attempt to storm Rogachev by the 3rd Panzer was repulsed. Then the
following day came violent pressure against the left wing; the 17th Panzer
was ejected from Senna.

Guderian, however, was undeterred. The revival of Russian strength made it

all the more urgent, he believed, to force the crossing of the Dnieper at the
earliest possible moment. Instead of clearing his flanks he contracted them.
The 17th Panzer and 10th Motorised were ordered to "break off the
engagement," and to content themselves with keeping the enemy "under
observation." Guderian's plans suffered another setback when SS Das Reich
was bloodily defeated in an attempt to capture the bridges at Mogilev—
right in the centre of the Panzer group's front, but even this failed to deter
Guderian, and finding weak spots at Kopys and Shklov, he prepared to
force both the 47th and 46th Panzer corps across the river.

By this time Kluge was not the only one to be alarmed. Halder recorded that
"Everyone [at OKH] is vying for the honour of telling the most hair-raising
tales about the strength of the Russian forces [behind the Panzer group in
the Pripet Marshes]. Foremost are the radio intelligence people who claim
three Armoured Corps, and two Infantry Corps." Another disturbing feature
was the evidence of mounting concentration at Bryansk and Orel, and the
fact that the remaining Soviet fighter aircraft seemed to be devoted to
protecting the railway stations there.

July 9th was marked by "exceptionally heated conversations." Kluge flew

to Guderian's headquarters at first light and "ordered that the operation [i.e.,
crossing the Dnieper] be broken off and the troops halted to await the
arrival of the infantry." Guderian claimed that his preparations had "already
gone too far to be cancelled." Guderian continued by asserting, ". . . this
operation would decide the Russian campaign in this very year if such a
decision were at all possible."

After a good deal of argument Kluge was convinced, and gave his approval.
But there is no doubt that he impressed his subordinate with the verdict that
it was "now or never"; the headstrong General could not be allowed another
such chance. At the close of their meeting he passed his celebrated
judgment on Guderian's tactics:

"Your operations always hang by a thread!"

On the northern front, too, great prizes beckoned, but the generalship
faltered before the diffusion and tenacity of Russian resistance. Hoepner,
the commander of the 4th Panzer Army, has been widely criticised by his
colleagues since the war.

[Treatment which cannot be divorced from his own career following his
dismissal in 1941, and his execution in 1944.]

But the fact remains that of all the Panzer armies his was the weakest, and
had been given the most ambitious objectives. Hoepner was expected to
strike directly for Leningrad, yet at the same time he had to protect his right
wing and that of the whole of Leeb's army group from the Russian armies
along the Lovat—an open flank of over two hundred miles. Hoepner's task
was further complicated by the fact that his neighbour, Hoth, had an axis of
advance due east, and was in fact repeatedly turning his forces inward to
meet Guderian in their succession of encirclement battles.

Manstein has described how, after his corps had been waiting for two days
at Dvinsk, Hoepner arrived in a Fieseler Storch but "could tell us nothing"
except "to widen the bridgehead, and keep the crossings open." The 56th
Corps commander goes on to complain, ". . . one might reasonably have
expected the commander of a whole Panzer Group to be in the picture about
future objectives, but this was obviously not the case." But how could
Hoepner possibly have allowed Manstein to press on with only two
divisions (the 8th Panzer and 3rd Motorised)—which was what Manstein
was wanting—while his sister corps was not yet abreast of the Dvina, much
less across it?

And so another five days passed while SS Totenkopf moved up and the 41st
Panzer Corps forced a crossing at Jacobstadt. The Russians meanwhile were
frenziedly redeploying their forces, taking men, tanks, and airplanes from
the Finnish front to bolster the crumbling armies of Popov and Kuznetsov.
Instead of being husbanded for the next stage, these regular troops were
used to stiffen the masses of conscripts, workers, and militia units that were
beginning to take shape, and thrown into a succession of savage
counterattacks, so that ". . . at a number of points the German situation
became quite critical." As for the Red Air Force, ". . with an almost mulish
obstinacy one squadron after another flew in at treetop level, only to be shot
down . . . one day alone they lost sixty-four aircraft."

As on so many occasions, this reckless profligacy in lives and equipment

had an unnerving effect on the Germans, and Leeb, overestimating his
enemies' strength and the cohesion of the Russian Command, made his first
tactical mistake. When the Panzer army resumed its march on 2nd July, the
axis of the two corps was separated, Reinhardt being directed on Ostrov and
Manstein into the yawning void on the right flank—toward Opochka and
the Lovat.

Within a few days both the 8th Panzer and the motorised division were
stuck fast in swampy ground. SS Totenkopf made better progress, but then
ran into the concrete fortifications of the "Stalin Line," where "their losses
and lack of experience led them ... to miss favourable opportunities, and
this . . . caused unnecessary actions to be fought." None of the three
divisions of the 56th Panzer Corps were able to give the others support, and
after a week of inconclusive fighting the 8th Panzer and the motorised
division were pulled back and sent in behind Reinhardt. Totenkopf, after this
brief and violent experience of real combat, was returned to "Reserve,"
where it could vent its spite on the civilian population.

Reinhardt, in the meantime, had captured Ostrov, but had not the strength to
press on past Pskov and along the eastern shore of Lake Peipus. And once
again Manstein was prevented from lending the weight of his own corps to
the main thrust; he was directed due east—now with only two divisions—
with the grotesquely vague and ambitious objective of "breaking
communications between Leningrad and Moscow at the earliest possible
date." This bifurcation of the two weak Panzer corps was soon to have
serious results.

These cumulative errors of decision on the northern and central fronts can
be (and have been) attributed to many things: timidity at OKW, the conflict
of personalities, the absence of a long-term strategic plan, and so on. But
the hard fact remains that the Germans, even at this early stage, were
attempting too much. Their mobile forces were not strong enough or
numerous enough, to support three simultaneous thrusts.

[Strength, that is to say, in a qualitative sense. The Panzers had only a

limited cross-country ability as nearly all their supply vehicles were not
tracked, but wheeled, and had difficulty over bad going. The reduction in
the tank quota had reduced not only the number of tracked vehicles but the
overall firepower of the division.]

Few of the German commanders realised this at the time. Each attributed
other, local causes to his own (qualified) failures. On the wall maps at
Hitler's headquarters the territorial gains looked enormous—and the more
impressive in relation to the few weeks they had taken to acquire.

"No Schweinhund will ever eject me from here," said Hitler to General
Köstring when the latter visited him at Rastenburg.

What Köstring, the last military attaché at Moscow, and one who knew
more about the Red Army than anyone else in the room, thought may
perhaps be gauged from his laconic reply.

All he could manage was, "I hope not."

four | THE FIRST CRISIS

At this point in the campaign there occurs a major break in the continuity of
its direction. The latent conflict of attitude between Hitler and his generals,
rooted in their training, instinct, and technique, assumes hereafter a
gradually increasing importance. It gathers momentum until by 1944 the
changed balance in the field between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army
coincides with a final subordination of the professional to the amateur on
the German side. This conflict had been a factor of primary importance
during the political evolution of the Third Reich, and its residue was to
foment bitterly as the prospect of victory faded. Now for the first time it
began to assume positive military significance.

To say that Hitler was an amateur is not intended as an unqualified

derogation. He was a brave man who had won the Iron Cross in the field.
Throughout his life he had studied military affairs. His ability to gauge the
feeling of the common soldier and to inspire him is unquestioned. All these
are vital ingredients in the essence of successful command. And in the early
months of the war his élan, his propensity to take risks, his "intuition," had
reaped a tremendous harvest.

But eight weeks after the start of the campaign in the East, these roles were
reversed. The General Staff was to become virtually unanimous in its desire
to reinforce Bock and strike directly on a narrow front toward Moscow.
Hitler insisted on the orthodox solution after Clausewitz—the methodical
destruction of the enemy's forces in the field, regardless of geographical or
political objectives. As early as 13th July he had told Brauchitsch, "It is of
less importance to advance rapidly to the eastward than to destroy the living
forces of the enemy," and this attitude, to which he clung for the ensuing
two months, was no more than consistent with the original terms of the
Barbarossa directive, which laid down that the purpose of the operations
was "to destroy the Russian forces deployed in the West and to prevent their
escape into the wide-open spaces of Russia."

The problem was simple in outline, vastly complex and elusive in

substance. After the first flush of success the Wehrmacht was losing
momentum. Partly this was a question of supply. Food and ammunition,
auxiliary services, the maintenance of machinery, all these became
progressively more difficult as the front broadened and the divisions fanned
out. But there was also a tactical aspect. The detailed plans worked out
under Halder and Warlimont were already surpassed, and the dispersal of
the armies widened daily as each fought deeper along its own prescribed
axis, bypassing resistance and exploiting weakness. At this distance from
headquarters army and even divisional commanders were acting more and
more on their own initiative, the more adventurous fighting a series of
interlocking (but not necessarily coordinated) local actions deep in the
Russian rear, while their more placid—or less mobile—colleagues sat
patiently in rings around those portions of the Soviet Army that had been
cut off.

In the middle of July the German front ran true along a north-south line
from the mouth of the Dniester, on the Black Sea, to Narva, on the Estonian
frontier. But in the centre the reversed S of two gigantic salients bulged
ominously. The Panzer groups of Army Group Centre, advancing on
Moscow to the north and south of the Minsk highway, had already passed
the longitude of Smolensk. But to their right the Russian 5th Army still held
its forward positions in the Pripet Marshes. In this way there was an extra
"front" of over 150 miles which lay against the exposed flanks of Army
Group Centre, and of Rundstedt's left wing as it approached Kiev. The
Russian salient, although giving the appearance of mass, was in reality a
fragmented hodgepodge of defeated units, stragglers, men without
equipment, tanks without fuel, guns without ammunition. But this was not
apparent from the large-scale war map at Rastenburg, and the Germans
simply did not dispose of the men to probe the area in sufficient strength to
find out. And so the Russian presence, poised (as it seemed) over its supply
routes, acted as a brake on the freedom of the army groups to either side.
Meanwhile, as the days passed with them undisturbed, the Russians were
exploiting to the full that extraordinary gift of improvisation which was to
succour them on so many occasions during the campaign.

Under Potapov they were busy restoring cohesion to their shattered

brigades, laying the foundations of the Partisan movement, and operating
vigorously with their cavalry—the only mobile arm left to them in any
strength.

[Major General of Tank Troops Potapov, commander of the 5th Army.]

The 5th Army and the units gathered around it were the largest
concentration operating in the German rear, but there were many others still
in vigorous action, even though (unlike the 5th Army) they were completely
cut off from the main front. The garrisons at Orsha and Moailev, great
numbers of wandering infantry—some as far west as Minsk and Vilna—the
whole stretch of the Baltic coastline up to the west of Tallinn, the continued
resistance of all these "pockets," lent force to the arguments of those who
believed that the Wehrmacht was being dangerously overextended.

With the intention of restoring concentration and asserting at the same time
a strict priority of objectives, OKW had issued, on 19th July, Directive No.
33. This opened with a reminder that although the Stalin Line had been
pierced along its whole front, ". . . the liquidation of important enemy
contingents caught between the mobile elements of the Centre will take a
certain amount of time." The directive went on to complain that Army
Group South had its northern wing immobilised by the continued resistance
of the Soviet 5th Army and by the defence of Kiev. Therefore ". . . the
object of the immediate operation is to prevent the enemy from
withdrawing important forces beyond the Dnieper and to destroy them."

To this end:

(a) The Soviet 12th and 6th armies are to be crushed by a concentric
attack of Army Group South;

(b) The inner wings of an Army Groups South and Centre are to inflict
the same treatment on the Soviet 5th Army;

(c) Army Group Centre is to push only its infantry toward Moscow. Its
mobile elements which are not engaged to the east of the Dnieper [i.e.,
a