Leningrad

The plan for Barbarossa was completed in December 1940, and a launch date set of 15 May 1941. Both date and design soon changed (Italy’s calls for help in Greece and Libya forced a delay, and a two-pronged attack turned into a three-pronged one), but from its conception, the campaign was to be conducted with unprecedented harshness, a policy to which the army put up shamefully little objection. ‘This war’, wrote Halder after a two-and-a-half-hour address by the Führer to his assembled generals on 30 March, ‘will be very different from the war in the west. . Commanders must make the sacrifice of overcoming their personal scruples.’ In June High Command itself instigated the notorious ‘Commissar Order’, under which captured political officers were to be shot out of hand. Further orders authorised ‘collective measures’ against civilians ‘who participate or want to participate in hostile acts’, and removed military courts’ right to try crimes — including rape and murder — committed by German soldiers against Soviet civilians. Individual officers were effectively freed to treat the Russians they came across as they saw fit. Also assumed from the outset was ruthless food requisitioning. The occupying troops were to live off what they could commandeer locally, even if it meant that civilians starved. ‘The Russian has stood poverty for centuries!’ joked Herbert Backe, state secretary in the Ministry for Food and Agriculture. ‘His stomach is flexible, hence no false pity!’ Goebbels quipped that the Russians would have to ‘eat their Cossack saddles’; Goering predicted ‘the biggest mass death in Europe since the Thirty Years War’.14

Most of all, the Bolsheviks were to be beaten quickly. This was to be a Blitzkrieg, or ‘lightning war’, of swift onward movement led by tanks and motorised infantry. The army should not wait to capture every centre of resistance on its race east, and above all it should not get bogged down in the sort of static, attritional fighting that had lost it the war of 1914–18. In all, the campaign was to take no more than three months; the first few weeks in major battles destroying the Red Army, the rest in mopping-up operations. Once conquered, the whole of European Russia would swiftly be transferred to civilian rule under four new Reichskommissariats, allowing most troops to come home.

Things didn’t work out that way not only because Hitler was a fantasist, but because he radically misunderstood Soviet society. He vastly overestimated the power of Russian anti-Semitism, and underestimated patriotism and national feeling. He failed — in common with mainstream British and American opinion of the time — to see that most Russians, despite having been terrorised and impoverished over the preceding two decades by their own leadership, would tenaciously resist foreign invasion. ‘Smash in the door!’ he famously declared, ‘and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down!’ The crass slurs — ‘the Slavs are a mass of born slaves’; ‘their bottomless stupidity’; ‘those stupid masses of the East’ — endlessly repeated in his mealtime diatribes were a measure not only of his racism, but of intellectual laziness, of complacency in the face of a vast, fast-changing and secretive country of which he and his advisers knew very little. His misconceptions, ironically, mirrored Soviet ones about Germany: ‘Too high hopes’, one of Hitler’s generals recalled later, ‘were built on the belief that Stalin would be overthrown by his own people if he suffered political defeats. The belief was fostered by the Führer’s political advisors, and we, as soldiers, didn’t know enough about the political side to dispute it.’15

As the war progressed, rivalry increasingly broke out not only between the multiple, overlapping agencies responsible for the occupied Soviet Union, but between ideologues, intent on their Führer’s grand vision of extermination, and pragmatists (many of them Baltic German by background), who advised something closer to the traditional colonial policy of co-opting ethnic minorities — in particular the Ukrainians — and reversing unpopular Communist measures, such as the closure of churches and collectivisation of land. But even if Hitler had understood the Soviet Union better, it is likely that he would have ignored the pragmatists’ advice. The attack on the Soviet Union had rational justifications: it was to bring Germany agricultural land and oil wells, and eliminate an inimical regime. But it was also about race: a Vernichtungskrieg, a war of extermination. Bolsheviks, Jews, Slavs — they were vermin, brutes, cankers, poison; their very existence anathema to the National Socialist dream. Liquidating or enslaving them was not just a means to territorial domination, but part of its purpose.

2. Barbarossa