A Sense of the Enemy: The High Stakes History of Reading Your Rival's Mind (14 page)

Without recognizing Hitler’s key driver, it was impossible for Stalin to predict the Führer’s actions in June 1941. But prior to the invasion, how could Stalin have grasped that Hitler was willing to take extraordinary risks in order to accomplish his racist mission? There were, in fact, some clues. They were to be found among the pattern breaks.

For more than a decade following his membership in the German Nazi Party, Hitler had been building up the
Sturmabteilung
, a paramilitary band of thugs variously known as the SA or Brown Shirts. Atop this rapidly expanding organization of ex-World War I soldiers and unemployed young men stood one of Hitler’s few close friends, Ernst Röhm.

Röhm possessed two salient traits. He exuded an aggressive toughness, exemplified by the scar he bore on his right cheek, the remnant of an earlier fencing duel. Hitler saw in his friend a reliable machismo, a quality essential for building the Nazi movement. Both men believed that strength should be tested in battle and that the worthy would
always prevail. Röhm’s other notable trait was his flagrant homosexuality. The fact that Hitler overlooked this behavior evidenced the degree to which Hitler depended on his SA chief. But by the fall of 1933, Röhm had grown overconfident in his newfound power.

Having assembled such a massive paramilitary force, Röhm expected that he could subsume the small German military within the SA’s ranks. The Reichswehr naturally resisted. Though the bulk of the professional officer corps were not Nazi Party members, they possessed the skills and training that Röhm’s brown-shirted bullies thoroughly lacked. Reichswehr commanders complained that former soldiers who had been dishonorably discharged now held prominent positions in the SA. Seeing no other option, War Minister von Blomberg decreed on September 19, 1933, that all Reichswehr members must offer the Nazi salute when encountering SA men. Soon thereafter, a Reichswehr lieutenant in Giessen failed to salute an SA flag. The stormtroopers attacked him. Rather than coming to his lieutenant’s defense, General von Blomberg confined the young officer to three days of room arrest.

On December 1, Hitler elevated Röhm to a Cabinet position, which only exacerbated Röhm’s sense of self-importance. The following month Röhm pushed the issue too far. He wrote to Blomberg: “I regard the
Reichswehr
now only as a training school for the German people. The conduct of war, and therefore of mobilization as well, in future is the task of the SA.”
¹²

Tensions between the SA and the military had reached a breaking point. The Reichswehr could not abide Röhm’s high-handed attempts to subvert them. Hitler would have to make a choice. He could continue to back the Nazi paramilitary force that had helped bring him to power, or he could support the non-Nazi professional military. In an episode known as the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler chose the Reichswehr. On June 30, 1934, Hitler ordered Röhm arrested. He had hoped that Röhm would commit suicide with a pistol left in his cell. When Röhm refused, a guard shot him dead.

In the bloodbath that followed, Hitler, with the aid of Himmler’s SS and Göring’s police force, rounded up all of the leading SA officials and had them shot. Hitler replaced Röhm with Röhm’s own deputy, the squeaky-voiced Viktor Lutze, a man unlikely to intimidate anyone, and the SA never again played a meaningful decision-making role in
the Nazi regime. It was Lutze who had informed Hitler that Röhm had insulted the Führer and was plotting a coup against him. The government portrayed the mass killings as a necessary countermeasure to crush a plot against the regime. However much of Lutze’s report was fabricated for his own benefit, the tension between the SA and the Reichswehr was undeniable. Hitler could not escape a choice between the increasingly uncontrollable Nazi Brown Shirts and the disciplined officer corps.

Hitler’s liquidation of his old friend, and his demotion of the SA from a position of influence, represented a meaningful break in his behavior pattern. By choosing the vastly smaller, non-Nazi Reichswehr, Hitler revealed that he was committed to a long-term plan, one that required the skills of a professional military. It meant that he intended to use that military, and soon. If foreigners wanted to gauge Hitler’s underlying drivers, this episode should have caught their attention.

Correctly interpreting the Röhm purge presented a legitimate challenge to any foreign observer. On its surface, the events seemed to represent a choice for realism over racism. Hitler sided with the non-Nazi Reichswehr and against his ideological compatriots. It looked as though Hitler had acted to crush a potential threat to his power—nothing more. That is, in fact, precisely how Stalin understood the affair.

Stalin was watching. He learned about Hitler’s actions and spoke of them in admiring tones. “Some fellow that Hitler. Splendid,” Stalin remarked to his close colleague, Anastas Mikoyan. “That’s a deed of some skill.”
¹³
Stalin no doubt saw himself in Hitler, or at least some aspects of himself. Despite their dramatically opposing ideologies, Stalin viewed Hitler’s violent power play as a mirror of his own behavior. The Night of the Long Knives was merely a small-scale version of the deep and wide mass murders that Stalin himself would soon unleash upon his country. There was, however, a crucial difference between Hitler’s and Stalin’s actions. Stalin’s purge of the Soviet officer corps reflected a madly paranoid desire to protect his own power. Hitler’s purge of the SA, in contrast, was motivated by a long-range ideological plan. Hitler recognized that the SA could never substitute for a highly trained, professional military, and such a disciplined military would be essential for executing his ideological agenda: the acquisition of
Lebensraum
(living space) for the German people and the extermination of subhuman, inferior peoples from the Reich. Hitler was dependent on his military
to bring his racist plans to fruition. The tensions between the two organizations impelled him to choose one over the other. Tellingly, after the coup, Hitler did not elevate Röhm’s replacement to the Cabinet, and he confined the SA to less consequential matters, not the decisive affairs of party or state. Had Hitler acted solely to prevent a putsch, he could have simply eliminated Röhm and his supporters but kept the SA in a position of high influence as rivals to the Reichswehr. Instead, Hitler backed the non-Nazi military because it was essential to his future plans.

Two questions immediately arise from this analysis. First, could Stalin have read Hitler’s drivers correctly at the time, without the benefit of hindsight? The answer is almost certainly no, given Stalin’s particular proclivity for projecting his own reasoning processes onto others. Second, how did Stalin try to enter Hitler’s mind? By what means did he attempt to understand the German chancellor?

The Great Simulator

In the Introduction I briefly mentioned that cognitive psychologists have developed theories about how all of us try to understand how others think. The scientists in this field have coined the term “mentalizing” as shorthand for the act of placing ourselves into someone else’s head. Much of this vein of exploration centers on the theory of mind. Within the theory of mind literature, two principal theories stand out. The first of these is called, rather awkwardly, theory-theory. It holds that we construct a theory about what another person believes, based on what we know about that person’s attitudes and experiences. We then use that theory to predict his behavior. For example, if you believe that John is driven mainly by greed, then in a situation where he would be able to steal money and get away with it, you would expect him to steal.

The second prominent theory of how we get into another person’s head is called simulation theory. It suggests that we ask ourselves, “What would I do if I were she?” Simulation theory suggests that we imagine ourselves in the other person’s position. It is, unfortunately, the worst approach to empathy because it assumes that others will think and act as we do, and too often they don’t. Simulation theory essentially says that we project our own motivations onto someone else, assuming that her motivations will resemble our own.
¹⁴

Although psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists debate which approach is more common, most likely we all engage in both types of thinking at different times. Stalin, however, may well have been different. He appears to have engaged in simulation theory most of the time. Viewing Stalin’s thinking in this light makes his behavior far more comprehensible.

Stalin typically asked himself what he would do if he were in another’s shoes, and being a distrustful, violent person with no regard for the feelings of others, he naturally assumed that others were likely to behave in disloyal, violent ways. This explains Stalin’s destruction of his own officer corps in the Great Terror of 1937–1938 and the subsequent murders of his intelligence officials. Stalin believed that others were more than merely against him. He was certain that they would depose or destroy him. He believed this about his officer corps not simply because they had the weapons, the organization, and therefore the power to remove him. He believed they were a threat because he asked himself what he would do in their position. Since Stalin himself would have sought to overthrow the leader and install himself atop the hierarchy, that is what he assumed his officers would do. This is, in fact, what Stalin did do after Lenin’s death. He consolidated his power base, isolated his rivals, and ruthlessly destroyed them. In fact, immediately after the Nazi invasion, when it was plain to all that his judgment had utterly failed and now imperiled the Soviet Union’s existence, Stalin despondently awaited his colleagues from his home. When they arrived, he appears to have assumed that they had come to arrest and depose him. Only gradually could they convince him that they actually sought his leadership.
¹⁵
That his subordinates did not, in fact, arrest him at this moment is a testament to Stalin’s strategic empathy toward those he knew best. Attuned to the greed, corruptibility, and fear in others, Stalin managed for decades to manipulate his colleagues with exceptional aplomb. But this skill betrayed him when it came to reading Hitler.

From 1940 through June 1941, Stalin confronted two contradictory bodies of intelligence. The first indicated a German invasion of Russia; the second suggested a German invasion of the British Isles. Stalin’s generals, and his competent intelligence officers, recognized that a German invasion of Russia was likely. They suggested to Stalin that they make all reasonable preparations. But Stalin refused to let them prepare.
He insisted that this might provoke a war, believing that a split existed within the German leadership between those who favored war with Russia and those who wanted to conquer England. Stalin feared that by putting Russia on a war footing, the Germans could interpret this as justification for launching preemptive strikes, making war inevitable.

Stalin interpreted all incoming information about the German buildup through this filter. When in April 1941 he received a direct communication from Churchill warning him of the coming invasion, Stalin had to dismiss it as a British provocation. After reading the letter, Stalin smiled and declared that Churchill would benefit if they entered the war as soon as possible, but it would benefit them to remain on the sidelines.
¹⁶
When the Soviet Ambassador to Germany, Vladimir Dekanozov, provided intelligence on Germany’s intensifying preparation for a Soviet invasion, Stalin remarked that Dekanozov was not clever enough to recognize that he was being fed disinformation. Even when Germany’s own ambassador to Moscow, Werner von der Schulenburg (who would later be hanged for his part in a plot to assassinate Hitler), informed Dekanozov that Hitler was preparing to invade, Stalin still could not accept the truth. No matter the source, be it a British ally, a Soviet colleague, or a German anti-Nazi ambassador, Stalin assumed a trap. He did so not simply because he trusted no one. It is obvious that Stalin was paranoid, but that is irrelevant in this case. His paranoia could just as easily have led him to conclude that Hitler was indeed planning to invade, despite Hitler’s repeated assurances to the contrary. Stalin’s distrustful nature cannot explain his interpretation of the evidence surrounding Barbarossa. Instead, the explanation must be found in Stalin’s particular reasoning process, namely his projected rationality.

As a consummate simulator, Stalin would have asked himself what he would do in Hitler’s place. Stalin’s own underlying driver, the force that ruled him above all others, was power—the desire to attain it and the fear of losing it. Had he been in Germany’s position, with Britain still undefeated and the Americans drawing closer to the British war effort via Lend-Lease, he never would have risked fighting a two-front war. Stalin was a realist not out of some philosophical conviction that pragmatism was the sine qua non of sensible statecraft. It was much simpler than that. Stalin was a realist because adventurism abroad could
jeopardize his power. From Stalin’s perspective, the sensible move for Hitler in 1941 would have been to finish off Britain before turning on Russia.

The problem, of course, was that Hitler never thought this way. Hitler’s underlying driver was to accomplish his mission, the one he believed fate had enabled him to achieve. That mission was the destruction of Jewish Bolshevism and the conquest of Russian lands to provide living space for Germans. Conquering Britain was never part of his vision. Quite the opposite—Hitler consistently desired an alliance with Britain, and he wrote about this in
Mein Kampf
.