Leningrad

His aims, from the campaign’s inception in 1940, were not those of conventional geopolitics. He did not want just to annexe useful territory and create a new balance of power, but to wipe out a culture and an ideology, if necessary a race. His vision for the newly conquered territories, as expounded over meals at his various wartime headquarters, was of a thousand-mile-wide Reich stretching from Berlin to Archangel on the White Sea and Astrakhan on the Caspian. ‘The whole area’, he harangued his architect Albert Speer,

must cease to be Asiatic steppe, it must be Europeanized! The Reich peasants will live on handsome, spacious farms; the German authorities in marvellous buildings, the governors in palaces. Around each town there will be a belt of delightful villages, 30–40km deep, connected by the best roads. What exists beyond that will be another world, in which we mean to let the Russians live as they like.12

Existing cities were to be stripped of their valuables and destroyed (Moscow was to be replaced with an artificial lake), and the delightful new villages populated with Aryan settlers imported from Scandinavia and America. Within twenty years, Hitler dreamed, they would number twenty million. Russians — lowest of the Slavs — were to be deported to Siberia, reduced to serfdom, or simply exterminated, like the native tribes of America. Putting down any lingering Russian resistance would serve merely as sporting exercise. ‘Every few years’, Speer remembered, ‘Hitler planned to lead a small campaign beyond the Urals, so as to demonstrate the authority of the Reich and keep the military preparedness of the German army at a high level.’ As a later SS planning document put it, the Reich’s ever-mobile eastern marches, like the British Raj’s North-West Frontier, would ‘keep Germany young’.

So surreal is this vision, so risible in its bar-room sweep and shallowness, that it is tempting not to take it seriously. What was the sense in occupying a country so as to destroy it? Where was the money for the new roads and cities to come from? The millions of willing settlers? The troops to hold half a continent in permanent slavery? For the Nazi leadership, though, it was no daydream. In July 1940, weeks after the fall of France, Hitler ordered the commander-in-chief of the army, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, and his military chief of staff, General Franz Halder, to start planning the conquest of the Soviet Union. Britain, Hitler argued, could not be invaded for the present, and the only way to persuade her to see reason and make peace was to eliminate the last continental power inherently hostile to the Reich. Brauchitsch and Halder were unconvinced (though less so than Halder claimed post-war), preferring to see Britain knocked out of the war first. (‘Barbarossa’, Halder wrote in his diary on 28 January 1941. ‘Purpose not clear. We don’t hit the British that way. . Risk in the west must not be underestimated. It’s possible that Italy collapses following the loss of her colonies, and we get a southern front in Spain, Italy and Greece. If we are then tied up in Russia, a bad situation will be made worse.’13) Equally doubtful was Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, who regarded the pact with Molotov as his greatest achievement, and pointed out that the USSR was still punctiliously honouring its promises to supply grain and other commodities. Hermann Goering, head of economic planning and the second most powerful man in the Reich, worried about shortages of food and labour. But Hitler was at the height of his popularity and prestige, and used to browbeating subordinates: the waverers swallowed their doubts and accepted the inevitable. The only member of the leadership to take decisive action over the issue was the unstable Rudolf Hess, who made his bizarre flight to Scotland just six weeks before the invasion, apparently in hope of preventing a two-front war by negotiating peace with Britain.