Barbarossa (2 page)

18
The Aftermath
Himmler is uneasy | His acquaintance
with Dr. Langbehn | Hitler hears of the Badoglio coup | General
agitation at the Führer's H.Q. | Manstein in difficulties |
Koniev's offensive | Langbehn and Himmler meet | Langbehn goes to
Switzerland | Arrested on his return | Himmler extricates himself |
Langbehn's grisley fate | Army Group A on the point of disintegration
An evening conference at Führer H.Q. | Zeitzler visits Manstein
| Further evidence of unease at Hitler's court | Schirach and Goering
| Hitler's private convictions | His intellectual isolation | General
decline in the morale of the Wehrmacht.

BOOK IV | Nemesis

19
"The Floodgates Are Creaking"
The Wehrmacht
in a decline | Russian weapons output soaring | The Germans face
their third winter in Russia | A breakfast party at Hitler's H.Q. |
Manstein again in difficulties | His dismissal | The great Russian
summer offensive | The
attentat
of 20th July | Guderian
appointed Chief of Staff.

20
Eastern Europe Changes Hands
The "Polish
problem" | Russian designs | American connivance | The Warsaw
uprising | The arrival of Bach-Zelewski | Character of the fighting |
Guderian's concern over behaviour of the SS | Armistice discussions
begin | Bach-Zelewski is placatory, but the fate of Poland is settled
| The Germans mobilise their last resources | Himmler adds to his
powers | Hitler's war plan | Russian motives for halting on the
Vistula | Centre of gravity shifts to the Balkans | Rumania changes
sides | Bulgaria also | Guderian visits Admiral Horthy | Germans
apprehensive of internal disorder | Their strength in Poland
continues to decline [ Guderian tries to draw reinforcement from the
Western front | The Soviet offensive opens | Russian troops set foot
on German soil.

21
Black January
Breakthrough by the Russian armour |
Behaviour of the invading forces | Guderian sees possibility of a
limited counteroffensive | Formation of Army Group Vistula | Its
commander an unhappy choice | Guderian has a meeting with Ribbentrop
| Hitler's wrath | Army Group Vistula in difficulties | Collapse of
the "Warthe position" | Guderian's plans for a
counterstroke | The Führer is undecided | Russian caution now
evident | An undignified scene at the Reich Chancellery | Guderian
tries to supplant Himmler's military authority, but is only partially
successful | The Arnswalde counteroffensive | Its early success |
Provokes a violent Soviet reaction | General Wenck's motor accident |
Political background to the German failure.

22
The Fall of Berlin
State of the Reich | Chaos and
terror | Himmler retires to Dr. Gebhardt's clinic | Professes
Christianity | Is visited by Guderian | Resigns his army command |
Further deterioration of the Oder front | Dismissal of Guderian |
Differing attitudes within the Nazi hierarchy | Russians collecting
themselves for a final effort | Peace "negotiations" by
Ribbentrop | And Himmler The concept of a bargain | The Jews on offer
to the Red Cross, but things go wrong | Himmler will not commit
himself | Russians cross the Oder in force | Hitler's birthday party
| Failure of the Steiner attack | Hitler commits suicide |
Disintegration of the Wehrmacht | The fate of some
dramatis
personae
, German and Russian | Chuikov accepts the surrender of
Berlin.

Appendices :
1 Facts about the Russian and German Leaders
2
Chronology
3 Waffen SS Rank Conversion Table
4 Glossary of
Abbreviations
5 Text of Führer Directive #34
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

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
.