In Europe (64 page)

Only then did it become clear how poorly this new German offensive had been planned. Napoleon's disastrous campaign of 1812 was described in detail in all the handbooks of military strategy, yet the Germans made precisely the same mistakes in 1941. They had only one scenario: a fast and easy victory. Their intelligence services consistently underestimated the capacities of the Red Army. The Germans were absolutely unaware of the existence of the new Soviet T-34 tank, probably the best tank in the world in 1941, until they were confronted with it on the field of battle. The path of the advance had been charted so badly that two German infantry units wandered unexpectedly into the enormous Pripyat swamps and became hopelessly bogged down. Hitler had refused to allow his soldiers to take winter equipment with them; after all, the whole expedition would be over before Christmas.

By early December 1941, three quarters of all the German tanks had become mired in the mud, ice and snow. The exhausted soldiers in the front lines could see the flash of the artillery around the Kremlin, but could not move one step closer. The Germans dealt mercilessly with Russian farmers and partisans – often youthful Komsomol members. Two photographs of eighteen-year-old Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya made their way around the world. The first one was found on the corpse of a German soldier: it had been taken just after her capture, she looked dignified and proud, aware of what was going to happen. The second photograph showed her frozen, ravaged body as it was found in the expanse of snow outside Moscow, tortured, hanged.

For Stalin, there was only one real question: what was Tokyo going to do? For him, everything depended on the situation in the Far East. Japan was clearly occupied with establishing a new empire in East Asia, and so the only question was which country they would attack next: would it be Mongolia, or the Pacific? This state of uncertainty forced the Soviet
Union to hold back a major part of the Red Army, to counter a possible attack from the east.

It was here that agent Richard Sorge's espionage network played a decisive role. On 15 October, just as it seemed that Moscow would fall, a report came in from Sorge saying that Tokyo had made a final decision to concentrate on Singapore, Indochina and the United States. This time Stalin believed him. A few days later, during the festive parade to celebrate the anniversary of the October Revolution, his troops marched almost defiantly across Red Square and straight on to the front, just outside the city.

Forty Siberian divisions were now dispatched hell for leather to Moscow, with troops specially trained and equipped for fighting under arctic conditions. They had warm white uniforms, thick fur-lined boots and fast skis. At twenty degrees below zero their T-34 tanks raced effortlessly through the snow. Atop their trucks were the strange-looking Katyusha rocket launchers that, with a gruesome howl, could fire more than a dozen 130-millimetre rockets at a time; the Germans soon began referring to them as ‘Stalin Organs’. In addition, these troops were fighting under the leadership of one of the outstanding generals of the Second World War, Georgi Zhukov. They deployed unobtrusively on the other side of Moscow, and began the counterattack on 6 December.

The numbed soldiers of the
Wehrmacht
did not know what had hit them.

Not far from Sheremetyevo airport stands the most significant war memorial in Europe. Today the traffic races heedlessly past, the monument suffers from the same inflation as the medals for sale on Moscow's street markets, yet its sobriety is moving. It consists, in fact, of nothing more than a pair of tank traps, a huge cross of welded rails, highly effective obstacles against any armoured attack. In all its simplicity, however, this iron sculpture marks the divide of the Second World War, the moment at which chance took a definitive turn, the furthest spot reached by German troops in December 1941. They never got any closer to Moscow.

One week after the Germans had been routed, the Franco-American journalist Eve Curie, daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie, the famous chemists, drove out from Moscow onto the battlefield with a convoy of her colleagues. She saw tanks and armoured cars abandoned everywhere in the open field, ‘stubborn, dead and cold, beneath a shroud of snow’.
Along the highway lay hundreds and hundreds of frozen Germans, amid dead horses and deserted artillery, often in strange positions, like wax figurines fallen from a display case. Beside a demolished tank she saw the bodies of three
Wehrmacht
soldiers. The first one lay on his stomach, ‘his bare back looked like frozen wax’, the snowflakes floating down onto his blond hair. The other two lay on their backs, their arms and legs spread wide, one of them wearing an Iron Cross. ‘The uniforms were of such thin material that they would not have been warm enough even for occupied France’.

This huge turnaround in the course of the Second World War took place within the space of a few days. Everything happened at the same time. On Saturday, 6 December, 1941, the German troops were beaten back from the gates of Moscow. The next day, Japan attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. On Thursday, 11 December, Hitler declared war on the United States with a lengthy tirade against President Franklin D. Roosevelt who, with the ‘satanic cunning of the Jews’, he said, was out to destroy Germany.

Hitler's declaration of war on America is the most baffling of all his decisions. He owed Japan nothing, their alliance in no way committed him to fight alongside Japan against the United States. But with it he gave Roosevelt the decisive argument he needed to go to war in Europe, something the majority in Congress had blocked vehemently until then.

Hitler himself was clearly itching for this war. He wanted to demonstrate that he could still take the initiative. ‘A great power does not let war be declared upon it, but declares war itself,’ Ribbentrop told Ernst von Weizsäcker, and that was Hitler's view as well. The attack on Pearl Harbor was exactly what he needed. After all the misery on the Eastern Front he could suddenly give a new, positive twist to his propaganda. After receiving the news about Pearl Harbor the Führer actually called for a bottle of champagne and, very much contrary to custom, drank two glasses himself.

Hitler's optimistic assault on the Soviet Union, and above all his declaration of war on the United States, belong in that row of historical errors precipitated by ‘groupthink’: decisions made by small groups of policy-makers who see themselves as all-powerful, and who dismiss all problems by refusing to admit any undesirable information from outside. Leaders great and small – the phenomenon has been seen at all levels
and in every age – can in this way create for themselves a fictitious world that will, sooner or later, but inevitably, come crashing down.

Hitler's commanders had only rarely, if ever, visited the front, Albert Speer complained after the war. ‘They knew nothing about the Russian winters and the quality of the roads during that season … They had never witnessed the damage caused to the cities by the enemy's bombs … Hitler never visited a single bombed city in the entire course of the war. As a result of this ignorance, the way things were represented during the daily staff meetings became increasingly inaccurate.’

This mentality was reinforced even further by Hitler's retinue, from which almost every critical and independent spirit had been removed in the course of time. The level of Hitler's discourse at Berlin and Obersalzberg in no way approached that of Churchill's discussions at Chartwell, or the thorough reports delivered to Roosevelt day after day. In his memoirs, Speer – Hitler's closest acquaintance of long standing – hammers on and on about the all-pervasive provincialism of those with whom Hitler spent his days. Almost none of those around the Führer had ever seen anything of the world. In June 1940, Hitler had spent three hours driving through Paris in the early morning hours: that was almost the sum of what he had seen of France. Speer: ‘If someone had taken a holiday in Italy, that was discussed at Hitler's table as a happening, and the person in question acquired the reputation of having foreign experience.’

For Hitler and those around him, the war in this way remained a German war, and not a world war. The Third Reich's relationship with allies like Italy, Finland, Rumania and Hungry was only fair. While the British and the Americans carefully coordinated their activities, the Germans proved incapable of any form of cooperation with their most vital ally, Japan. Hitler and the most important Japanese leaders never even met. The Germans invaded the Soviet Union without ever consulting Japan; the same applied, conversely, to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Yet both attacks served to determine the further course of the war.

It was also during winter 1941 that the first leading German figures began to realise that the Reich was on course for disaster. Germany's success depended entirely on quick victories. The country did not have the reserves to accommodate long campaigns in the field, and was utterly unprepared for a war with distant America. The German fleet could barely go to sea,
the few battleships Germany had were no match for the combined British and American navies, and its air force – with all the technology available to it – could barely get further than England. Germany, in other words, was not even capable of reaching the territory of its greatest foe.

As early as 29 November, 1941, Hitler and the Nazi high command had been warned that the Soviet Union was producing more tanks than Germany, and that the military balance would be thrown even further off kilter if America entered the war. At the meeting held that day, Fritz Todt, the minister responsible for Germany's arms production, concluded that ‘the war can no longer be won by military means’.

One month later, after a troop inspection, Speer found this same Todt in an exceptionally sombre mood: ‘Later I would recall his words, and the extreme sadness on his face, when he said that we would probably not win the war.’ Shortly afterwards, Todt was killed in a plane crash.

Brigadier General Alfred Jodl wrote from his cell in Nuremberg that, in winter 1941–2, Hitler had already grasped that victory was no longer possible. ‘Before anyone else in the world, Hitler sensed and knew that the war was lost. But can a person surrender an empire and a people before matters have truly come to an end? A person like Hitler could not.’

Following the debacle outside Moscow, the Germany Army moved on in spring 1942, many hundreds of kilometres into Russia. Wolf Siedler observed that the atmosphere of triumph had disappeared completely in Berlin; even so, Hitler still enjoyed the people's confidence. His supporters were sure he would find a political and diplomatic way out. ‘What the average German did not see was that not a single great battle was fought after that. The Russians simply drew back, saving their strength. In 1941 the papers were full of reports about millions of prisoners of war, in 1942 there were no more such reports.’

Only one year later, after Stalingrad, did the Germans truly begin to understand how badly, how very badly, the war was going.

The sound of Moscow's resurrection is that of the grinder and the excavator. An underground shopping mall is being built outside the gates of the Kremlin. The builders worked on day and night, using everything the
Russian Army and commerce has to offer in terms of manpower, cranes and excavators, and now the complex is finished, gleaming and glowing, the showroom for the new Russia.

Moscow is like a household after a divorce: after a period of neglect and confusion, the city is once again bursting with activity. My regular taxi driver, Viktor, calls his mafia boss: will he go along with a special rate for a regular customer? ‘You pay me twelve dollars now,’ he says to me, ‘but don't forget: seventy per cent of that goes to him.’ At the city's most chic parking spots the gates open for him free of charge: that, too, is the mafia. He shows me the wooden cudgel beside his seat: his personal protection. One of his childhood friends now owns a gym and acts as bodyguard to a big industrialist, another old friend became a sharpshooter; he was Gorbachev's bodyguard ten years ago, and now he works for the country's biggest oil magnate.

‘This is no life, this is a fire in a packed theatre!’ Chekhov's poor country doctor, Sobol, shouted a hundred years ago. ‘Anyone who stumbles or screams in fear and loses his head is the established order's number-one enemy. You have to remain upright, keep your eyes open and not make a sound!’

The more respectable part of Moscow's population still tries to follow those directives from 1892. Almost all the people I meet have two or three jobs and race around the city from this job to that deal. There is hammering and painting, one café after another is opened, a new merchant class is starting to take root. Everyone who visits the city is amazed by the speed with which it is changing, and meanwhile the pioneers of local trade and industry move on, further into the provinces.

In the café beside the disco on Pushkin Square, the city's
jeunesse dorée
are sipping at coffee with cognac. These are the children of the new
nomenklatura
: bankers, businessmen and odd-jobbers. The price of admission at the disco is thirty dollars, half the monthly salary of a journalist, and I am told the place is always full. ‘This is the great going-out-of-business sale for savers, honest incomes and respectability,’ wrote Erich Maria Remarque of the inflationary fever in the Weimar Republic in 1922, and in the Moscow of 1999 things are not very different: the vultures come flocking in from all sides, and only those with power, bad friends and a big mouth are well off.