Barbarossa (6 page)

[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.