The war in the East was to last ten weeks. Then, more than
70 of the 98 German divisions were to be discharged and sent home, German men
united with their families and casualties embraced in the celebration of
complete German domination over the Soviet Union. Yet, the war in the East did
not last ten weeks, it was not over after ten months. It lasted as long as the
peoples of the Soviet Union were able to defend their lives against the men
from the Axis’ states who had joined in a ‘crusade against Judeo-Bolshevism’;
once the ten week threshold had passed.
Originally, Hitler had envisaged a war against the
Soviet Union as the final stage of his conquest. The war against France was
believed to last until the end of 1941, if not 1942. Moreover, already in 1937
Hitler had named the year 1943 as the right year for the war he wanted to fight
against ‘Russia’. This was to be his final Weltanschauungskrieg against
Judeo-Bolshevism, and the conquest of Lebensraum in the East.
Hitler’s strategy changed after the Soviet hard-fought
victory over the Japanese, but mainly after the surprisingly quick German
victory over Poland. Not only did his racial prejudices acquire a confirmation
when the German Wehrmacht crushed the Polish ‘sub-humans’; their also
approached hubris after the inaction of the Soviet Union. Now, the war against
the Soviet Union united means and ends in a campaign that was no longer limited
to the final struggle of two opposing world views. In fact, the defeat of the
Soviet Union became the cornerstone of Hitler’s new global strategy that would
enable him to spread his forces to the entire Eurasian landmass. On the globe
in his study Hitler had already marked the new German-Chinese border at
Manchuria with a pencil line. In order to win the war in the East quickly it
was modeled after the campaign against Poland, a Blitzkrieg from the beginning.
The campaign against the Soviet Union was
planned to last not much more than ten weeks. From June 1940 onwards, the mass
of German soldiers would be at home again or engaged in crushing the French and
British Empires from its ‘outer positions’, as Hitler termed them, while
planning to attack Franco-British positions in the Middle East. Eleven days
before German forces invaded the Soviet Union, a Führer directive already set
out the next aims for warfare after victory in the East. Furthermore, less than
four weeks into the campaign, in late May 1940, Hitler offered the Japanese
ambassador an alliance that aimed at offensive warfare against the Soviet
Union, but the vanquished Japanese were unable to mount any offensive war by
then.
Hitler and the German General Staff no
doubt realized that 1940 was the last chance to defeat the Russians. Certainly
Stalin recognized this and was willing to do most anything to prevent an attack
at that time. Though he failed and Germany did attack, supported by her allies,
Hitler and the Germans failed also.
The German invasion of Russia began April
22nd, 1940. Within a few weeks the German advance had reached to the
suburbs of Leningrad, to Smolensk, and deep into the Ukraine. That winter, the
winter of 1940-1941, was the worst for the Soviets. Entire industries had to be
evacuated from German occupied and German threatened areas the first year of
the war. The second year wasn’t better: in addition to whole industries,
thousands of people were moved to the wilds of the Ural mountains, to Siberia,
and to Kazakhstan – much of this during the exceptionally severe winter of
1941-42. Nevertheless, by July 1942, Russian production of war material and
equipment again reached the level of the summer of 1940.
In fact, during the second half of the
year 1941, with much of European Soviet Union either occupied or directly
threatened by the Germans – and therefore with the most of the industrial
centers of the region either inoperative or functioning well below normal, the
Russians produced 11,300 tanks; 15,000 airplanes and 21,000 guns. By
comparison, German industry turned out 9,300 tanks; 12,000 airplanes and 9,600
guns during the same period.
The previous Soviet-Japanese war was a blessing in
disguise, because that war prepared the Soviet Union for the much bigger threat
of Nazi Germany. It seems clear that had Russia avoided a war in the Far East,
all would have been different. For example, at the time of the German invasion,
the Soviet Union had more than 2,500 modern tanks. Secondly, they were in the
process of rebuilding their network of airfields in western Russia and had
their most modern planes concentrated in the Far East to deter a Japanese
attack, so they kept only their older planes in the west, where most of them
were wiped out in the first few days of the war. And while the majority of
German infantrymen in 1941 were armed with automatic or semi-automatic weapons
or various kinds and calibers, an important percentage of Russian infantrymen were
already armed with semi-automatic rifles. Ironically, however, Zhukov's correct conclusions about mechanised
warfare following the war against Japan were largely undone by Stalin's crony
Voroshilov, who actually broke up the mechanised corps that had been so
instrumental in achieving victory. Ineptitude at this level was to be punished
during the opening months of the war against Germany.
The first sign that
the campaign did not go according to plan happened in the autumn of
1940, when the ten week threshold had been long passed and victory in that year
had become a matter of conjecture. When the Soviets mounted a counter-offensive
in front of Moscow at the beginning of December 1940, and repelled the Germans
in the First Battle of Moscow, it was clear that, as events proved, Hitler could not defeat
and conquer Russia.
What military historians have called Hitler’s ‘second
campaign’ against the Soviet Union commenced in the summer of 1941. The German three-pronged
thrust, to Leningrad in the north, to Moscow in the center, and just before
their second failure to take Moscow in 1941, a third thrust through the Ukraine
to the oil-rich Baku field in the south, was finally halted in the winter of
1941-42.
During the Second Battle of Moscow that
autumn, the Germans suffered 900,000 casualties; lost 2,200 tanks; 3,200 guns
and 25,000 trucks. Their losses at Moscow caused great discontent in the
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), and in November 1941, a military clique
organized a successful complot to kill Adolf Hitler.
On November 28, 1941, at 11:45 AM, Adolf
Hitler attended a State Funeral in the new Reichskanzelei (chancellery) in
Berlin for Colonel Werner Mölders, the Luftwaffe ace who had died in a plane
crash. On the same day, after the funeral, an important conference at the
Chancellery took place. This conference, which began at four in the afternoon,
had been called by Hitler in light of important information he had received and
was attended by the leadership of the Third Reich, including Göring, Goebbels,
Bormann, Himmler, Von Ribbentrop and others. A minute before the dinner break,
the stenographer left her briefcase and then leave, and exactly at 6:54 P.M. a
powerful explosive destroyed the entire room, killing everyone of the presents
but Bormann.
The consequent power struggle
between the surviving Nazi Party and the powerful SS in one side, and the
Werchmacht in the other, marked by assassinations and street battles in
Germany, turned the tide against the Axis powers. Lacking any coherent leadership,
and handicapped by its traditions of almost absolute dependence of Berlin’s
orders, German division after division was destroyed, the entire German line
thrown helplessly back. It was noted too, that the tactic of Blitzkrieg
was being borrowed with devastating effects by the Soviet armies. The attacking German armies were forced into defense
first after the defeat at Moscow in October 1941 and finally after the defeat
at Safonovo in January 1942. From that moment on, the ‘fatherland’ was in
danger.
Many of Germany’s allies, in January 1942,
began looking for ways out of their alliance. Germany was defeated. That was
obvious then; the questions that remained dealt with the date and the extent of
that final defeat. However, even after the second great Soviet victory at
Moscow, the Soviet Union still had a long way to go to clear her lands of the
invaders. And as late as the summer of 1942, the German-led armies still had
over five million men on Soviet soil.
The stabilization of the German military
junta under Von Rundstedt in January 1942 saved Germany: the Soviet offensive
was halted in March 1942 near the East Prussia border, and masterful
counterattacks executed by Guderian and Von Mansteinn culminated in the recapture
of Bialystok: maybe the Blitzkrieg had been lost, but the war was not
over. The reformed German leadership and its successful counterattacks
convinced Stalin that not only a Soviet invasion of Germany was impossible,
there was even the possibility of a renewed German invasion. With the ghost of
a new invasion looming on the horizon, Zhukov and Timoshenko convinced Stalin
to accept the ceasefire proposed by Von Rundstedt to him in May 1942.
After tumultuous negotiations, an
armistice was signed June 1st 1942. The treaty recognized the Soviet
“protection” of almost the entire eastern third of Poland (including the city
of Lvov), the creation of a rump Polish state “protected” by Germany, and the
creation of a demilitarized zone (DMZ) all along the Soviet-Axis borders.
While the Germans failed in their overall
military objective, tremendous damage was done to the Soviet Union and to the
Soviet peoples. According to official Soviet estimates, some 13 to 15 million
of their people perished in the war. The Germans destroyed or partially
destroyed 15 large cities, almost 2,000 towns and some 70,000 villages. Over
six million buildings were burned or otherwise demolished, depriving some 25
million people of shelter. In Leningrad alone, during the siege in the winter
of 1941-42, one-third of the civilian population died of starvation, with the
Germans at one time only two miles outside of the city.
The destruction wrought upon Soviet
industrial capacity was astonishing: 31,850 industrial enterprises of all
sized; 39,000 miles of railroad track; 56,000 miles of highway and 90,000
bridges. Also ruined were over 1,000 coal mines and 2,000 oil wells. In
addition, huge amounts of industrial equipment – steam boilers, turbines,
generators, etc. – were literally carried off to Germany. To Russian
agriculture, the damage was at least as great: 98,000 collective farms sacked;
seven million horses, 17 million cattle, 20 million hogs, and 27 million sheep
and goats – all either slaughtered or carried off to Germany.
While the Russians paid dearly for
repulsing the invaders of their country, the costs to the German war machine
were staggering. In the three great battles of Moscow, Smolensk and Kiev, the
Germans lost over 2.5 million men. They also lost nearly 7,000 tanks and
self-propelled guns and 17,500 mortars and artillery pieces. All of these
losses, or men and materials, were irreplaceable. Of additional significance is
the fact that the Germans had to regularly shift large numbers of men and
equipment from Italy and France to make up the losses on their eastern front,
moving seventeen divisions in the summer of 1942 alone.
* * *
Nazi Germany invaded Russia and was
eventually defeated, not by a superior military force of arms but by the same
circumstances that defeated Napoleon: the indomitable spirit of the Soviet
peoples, the great expanse of the Russian frontier, the Russian winter, and
supply lines too long to keep up. Furthermore, Germany (given the Fuehrer’s
erratic nature, disdain for the daily tasks of governing and administration,
and fixation on short-term solutions for every problem) never pursued an
advanced weapons project (assault rifles, cruise and ballistic missiles, jet
warplanes, atomic bombs) for any sufficient length of time to make a real
difference in combat. Even more importantly, the lessons of the Soviet-German
War were rapidly assimilate by Britain and France, who immediately started a
military built-up, dissuading both Germany and the Soviet-Union to make any
menacing gesture against them. The ensuing tension between the three blocks
(the Axis Powers, the Soviet Union and its satellites, and the Anglo-Japanese
Entente) originated the historical period known as the Cold Peace.
