Barbarossa (12 page)

Brauchitsch, or "ObdH," as he was affectionately called
by Halder, punctilious as ever, had sent red roses and strawberries
for the table.

[Not to his face, of course. It is an abbreviation for Oberstdas
Heeres, Commander in Chief of the Army, under which Brauchitsch's
name always appears in Halder's diary.]

When Halder telephoned to thank him, the Commander in Chief
revealed some exciting news. Hitler had decided to visit OKH
headquarters in person. He would be arriving for tea. Overcome by the
atmosphere of good feeling which Halder's birthday celebrations had
generated, Brauchitsch went on to say (quite mendaciously) that the
Führer's visit "is primarily on your account." Other
"well-wishers" then took the telephone, ending with the
fanatically Nazi Frau Brauchitsch, who rang off with a strident "Heil
Hitler!"

During the day the collapse of the Russian front went several
stages further. In Kirponos' command, the only area where the defence
still held a certain degree of cohesion, the valiant 8th Mechanised
Corps had fought itself to a standstill, and with his tank arm almost
eliminated, Kirponos ordered a retreat to the positions on the old
Soviet-Polish frontier. In the north Pavlov's forces were in a state
of complete disintegration, their strength broken by a sequence of
counterattacks which for clumsiness and extravagance were to be
rivalled only by Budënny's later performance in the Ukraine. In
the centre the Soviet mass was now enclosed in two pockets, at Slonim
and Minsk, and the way seemed clear for the Panzers to roam
undisturbed. After eight days' fighting the bulk of the Soviet forces
standing on the frontier had been splintered, and accordingly, within
the terms of the
Barbarossa
directive, OKH now ordered that
the crossing over the Dnieper be seized.

Hitler arrived at teatime, and an SS adjutant brought a large
silver flagon of cream. After a tour of the wall maps the Führer
sat down, and the conversation—if such a term may be used of
the discreet assent with which Hitler's rambling monologues were
received—turned to "global subjects." After some
grumbles about Germany's African colonies (the return of Togo was
"not essential") Hitler began to develop, with an
uncharacteristic benevolence, the theme of "European unity after
the war." From England there was still some hope, "Epecially,"
Halder records, "the possibility of Churchill's overthrow by
Conservatives with a view to forestalling a Socialist-Communist
revolution in the country." The Führer was in excellent
spirits. Some of those present may have been reminded of the
occasion, almost exactly a year before, when he had danced a victory
jig in the Forest of Compiègne.

During these first halcyon days of victory, when the campaign
seemed almost to be running itself, Hitler relaxed happily into
dreams of a colonial East. Now, truly, it seemed as if that most
fantastic of the Nazi visions—a million square miles of Slavic
helots, ruled by a handful of
Herrenvolk
—were on the
point of realisation. Hitler envisaged a mixture of British India and
the Roman Empire: "A new type of man will take shape, real
masters . . . viceroys."

But reality, though maturing with delirious speed in the field of
military achievement, lagged sadly in that of administration. The
quality of the "viceroys" was far from uniform, for

When ministries were summoned to supply their quotas of civil
servants for the new
Führerkorps Ost
. . . [they had
seen] in this call a welcome opportunity to rid themselves of
personal enemies, obnoxious meddlers and incompetent chair-warmers.

The result was

A colourful and accidental conglomeration of Gauleiters,
Kreisleiters, Labour Front officials, and a great number of SA
leaders of all ranks, who assumed high positions in the civil
administration after listening to a few introductory lectures
delivered by Rosenberg's staff at the Nazi training school at the
Croessinsee.

This motley crew owed a nominal loyalty to their chief, Rosenberg.
In fact, they were infiltrated, particularly in the higher echelons,
by the personal representatives of other Nazis who were determined to
carve their own empires out of the Eastern territory while the going
was good. Besides Rosenberg, the two most persistent and avaricious
rivals were Bormann and Himmler, with occasional (and waning)
intervention by the Reichsmarschall, Goering, who based his claims on
his responsibility for the "Four-Year Plan."

Rosenberg's own views had been set out in a long memorandum in
April. Part of this document is unintelligible rambling, but its
essence may be found in the following paragraph:

The aim of our policy to me, therefore, appears to lie in this
direction: to resume in an intelligent manner and sure of our aim,
the aspirations to liberation of all these peoples [the "imprisoned
nationalities" of the Soviet Union] and to give them shape in
certain forms of states, i.e., to cut state formations out of the
giant territory . . . and to build them up against Moscow, so as to
free the German Reich of the Eastern nightmare for centuries to come.

This plan—the "Wall against Muscovy"—may
have had a certain romantic appeal for Hitler, with its suggestion of
the legions standing guard on the Barbary frontier, but privately the
Führer rejected Rosenberg's principles—at least on a
political level. With characteristic brutality of logic Hitler
declared:

Small sovereign states no longer have a right to exist . . .
the road to self-government leads to independence. One cannot keep by
democratic institutions what one has acquired by force.

His own view, which he was to express at the notorious 16th July
conference on the future of the occupied East, was:

[See Ch 1]

While German goals and methods must be concealed from the world
at large, all the necessary measures—shooting, exiling, etc.—we
shall
take and we
can
take anyway. The order of the day
is

first: conquer
second: rule
third : exploit.

Sometimes it is hard to understand why Hitler ever installed
Rosenberg as chief of the
Ostministerium
or gave even
qualified endorsement to his schemes. But it must be seen in a
context separate from Reich foreign policy and in relation to the
personal power struggles that cut fissures across the Nazi hierarchy.
Pursuing the analogy of the Roman Empire, Hitler must have seen that
the only threat to his own position in the future—a future of
German domination, actual and undisturbed, over half the globe—would
come from the provincial governors, "over-mighty subjects"
who were allowed an excess of freedom in building up their private
empires. Indeed, Ovens' assessment of Bormann can be applied,
a
fortiori
, to Hitler.

He preferred a crackbrained Ostminister to a clever one; a
block-headed foreign minister to an adroit one; a wishy-washy
Reichsmarschall to one hard as iron.

After Hitler the two most powerful figures in the Reich were
Himmler and Bormann. Each was a direct claimant to his succession and
each saw in the limitless potentialities of an Eastern empire the
means to tip the balance in his own favour. Their rivalry and their
mutual personal dislike lie at the root of all the inconsistencies in
German
Ostpolitik
, for first one, then the other would use the
bewildered Rosenberg as an indignant pig in the middle, blocking,
perverting, or exploiting his policies to achieve their own long-term
ambitions.

Rosenberg's great weakness was that he had no personal
corps
d'élite
, and the quality of the material from which he was
compelled to draw to staff his Ministry and execute its policy has
already been the subject of remark. Bormann, on the other hand, had
at his disposal the mass of the SA, decapitated by the purge of 1934,
but still substantial, frustrated, and experienced in politics and
administration. From the very day when the
Ostministerium
was
incorporated, it was subject to a double stress—from Himmler,
who wished to sterilise it completely, and from Bormann, who tried to
staff its higher posts with his own nominees.

As early as April 1941 talks had begun between the SS and OKW
concerning the operation of the SD detachments in the rear of the
advancing troops. Himmler rapidly forced the pace and tried to extend
the "talks" into a general agreement that the Army would be
left as undisturbed master of the forward zone, "with the SS as
a free corps in effect responsible for the New Order in the East . .
. the SD would be advance teams of the future commissariats." At
the last moment the Army took fright and started to back away—
". . . these demands must be refused," Halder noted grimly
in his diary. Bormann, who had got wind of the scheme, persuaded
Hitler to "discuss the affair with everyone concerned," not
in conference, but one by one.

When his turn came, Bormann had warned Hitler that an
accommodation between the SS and the Army would result in "a
measure of power which was inconvenient, perhaps even dangerous, to
the Party." Rosenberg put things more formally, and unlike
Bormann, was not reticent about declaring his views to anyone who
would listen. Hitler threw the scheme out, although he reserved
"police matters" to the SS, and Himmler blamed his defeat
on Rosenberg's duplicity.

In a state of pique, Himmler complained innocently to Bormann:

The manner in which Rosenberg approaches this question once
again makes it endlessly difficult to work with him, man to man ...
to work with, let alone under, Rosenberg is surely the most difficult
thing in the Nazi Party.

Inflamed by his "victory" and rampant with megalomania,
Rosenberg now proceeded to claim the right "to approve all
assignments of SS personnel to the East." Once the campaign had
begun and conquered territory began to accumulate, relations between
the various agencies deteriorated to such an extent that Hitler was
obliged to call another conference (on 16th July). Himmler was not
present, but Goering, Rosenberg, and Bormann all took part with
vigour, and there were some undignified scenes—particularly
when it came to selecting the names for the actual commissariats, or
regional governorships. At the end a Führer directive
promulgated that the conquered regions should pass from military to
civilian administration "once they had been pacified." The
authority of the Army, the SS, and the Four-Year Plan were to be
defined under separate agreements, and it was to be hoped that ".
. . in practice the conflict [between the different bodies] would
very soon be settled."

In practice, however, nothing had been settled except the names of
the commissars. Each of the separate directives, being negotiated
separately and under the pressure of its own particular lobby,
granted a measure of overlapping authority to that agency with which
it was concerned. For example, the SS was specifically delegated
responsibility for "police security" in the East, and by
Article II the Reichsführer (Himmler) was empowered "to
issue directives on security matters" to Rosenberg's
subordinates. To ensure that his privileges would be enforced, and
that he would be kept informed of any opportunity for their
extension, Himmler appointed as "liaison officer" to the
Ostministerium
Reinhard Heydrich, his most trusted deputy and
one of the most evil figures in the Nazi Party.

The effect of this squabbling was that the Nazi machine was to
administer Russia on a basis of almost complete fragmentation—at
the levels of both policy and personality. The only sentiment which
may have united them was Backe's [Herbert Backe, German Minister for
Food and Agriculture] when he spoke of "The Russian . . . who .
. . has stood poverty, hunger, and austerity for centuries. His
stomach is flexible; hence, no false pity!"

The General Commissar for Belorussia (the vital central sector of
the front, with civil responsibility behind Bock's army group) was
Wilhelm Kube, a former Nazi member of the Reichstag who had been duly
promoted in the West Prussian administration on Hitler's accession to
power, but whose subsequent behaviour had been so scandalous that he
had been "retired" before the outbreak of war. By the end
of June, however, he was installed in Minsk and making the most of
his vice-regal powers. Kube was delighted to find that many of the
Belorussians were "blondies and blue-eyed Aryans." He also
spoke highly of the vodka and the beer. He found himself a
magnificent building for his commissariat and embraced a number of
peasant girls in his domestic service.

[The harem, as oriental scholars know, has its own perils, and
these are not exclusively venereal. Eventually one of the "blondies"
put an anti-personnel mine in Kube's bed and he was blown to pieces.
See Ch. 15.]

The administrative staff, in contrast, was far from decorative. It

consisted of woefully unprepared personnel . . . Nazi waiters
and dairy men, yesterday's clerks and superintendents, graduates of
quick training courses . ..'. dizzy with power, yet quite unfit for
their jobs. In practice Kube's instructions were often disregarded by
his subordinates ...

Another factor which irritated Kube was the constant encroachment
by the SS upon his jurisdiction and the manner in which its members
held themselves above either civil or military law. They were
particularly prone to "sequestrate" gold and silver in any
form, and their indiscriminate violence against the civilian
population was already having effect. A typical day in Slutsk saw the
arrival of a black-uniformed SD detachment which

fetched and carted off all the Jews . . . with indescribable
brutality they were brought together from their apartments. There was
shooting from all over the town, and corpses of dead Jews [and
Belorussians, too] were piled up in several streets. Besides the fact
that the Jews . . . and the Belorussians . . . were mistreated with
frightful roughness before the eyes [of spectators] and "worked
over" with rubber belts and rifle butts. There is no more
question of a Jewish action. Much rather it looked like a revolution.