Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East (4 page)

Shortly thereafter a landmark work by Andreas Hillgruber
¹⁶
appeared that contributed more than any other to the achievement of a factually based middle road between the competing extremes of communist and German apologist interpretations.
¹⁷
The latter, sponsored largely by former generals, suggested that Hitler alone dominated the decision-making process but that he was mentally too erratic to follow a detailed plan. Moreover, the generals asserted that Hitler's constant interference in military operations was solely responsible for most of the major military defeats. Many even subscribed to the preventive war theory which centred on an unproven assumption equating Soviet expansionism in eastern Europe with a determination to attack Germany.
¹⁸
Communist theories took the diametrically opposed view, blaming Hitler and his ‘fascist cohorts’ for unleashing a war of unsurpassed aggression, supported all
the while by western capitalist powers who accordingly were not seriously interested in containing Germany during the summer of 1939.
¹⁹
Similarly, the post-war contributions of the German generals were depicted to be those of a self-serving clique, aimed at absolving their caste of guilt and restoring militarism to western Germany.
²⁰

Hillgruber's study rejected both of these views in favour of a meticulous review of the available evidence which highlighted the dominance of an ideologically driven quest for ‘living space’ (
Lebensraum
) as the guiding principal of Nazi foreign policy. This set the tone for many instructive future studies, with the concept of an ideological interpretation interwoven with pragmatic considerations of the political and strategic kind,
²¹
as Hillgruber himself had emphasised.

The acceptance among many historians of ideology as a fundamental component of Hitler's strategic outlook did not exclude occasional challenges from new revisionists, nor alter the unrelenting attitude of Soviet and East German historians more interested in the ardent adherence to entrenched dogma than historical truth.
²²
Debate also resurfaced with
renewed vigour in the late 1980s over the preventive war theory with the old line of the German generals repackaged to include supposed ‘new evidence’ that amounted to no more than a reproduction of existing documents in an unconvincing attempt to provide a guise of academic merit.
²³
The first-rate studies produced to rebut these pseudo-academic apologists’ works not only revealed their yawning lack of credibility, but have contributed greatly to clarifying the pre-war motivations and political manoeuvring of Stalin and Hitler.
²⁴

While debates on the origins of Hitler's war against the Soviet Union form an important background to the first part of this study (dealing with the strategic conceptions and operational planning for the campaign), the central thesis, that the German military campaign failed in the summer of 1941, remains to be proven in the second part (looking at the progress of the war itself). Here the existing literature has far greater implications for the study and therefore a comprehensive orientation is required both to familiarise the reader with the field of study and to provide a clear historiographical context for the present work.

Seldom are works of military history popular bestsellers, but in 1998 that feat was achieved by Antony Beevor's
Stalingrad
, a comprehensive and authoritative account of that epic battle. For many readers, particularly in the English-speaking world, it was undoubtedly an introduction to the lesser-known conflict in eastern Europe during World War II. Beevor's study traced the fighting from the beginning of the war in June 1941 with the opening assertion: ‘Seldom had an attacker enjoyed such advantages
as the Wehrmacht in June 1941.’
²⁵
Beevor's statement is certainly not exceptional. Histories lauding the victorious progress of the Wehrmacht in the first two years of the conflict form a characteristic representation of the war. With unprecedented victories and comparatively bloodless battles, the temptation to over-estimate German strength has always been great. In the case of Barbarossa this tendency has been further aided by the poor standing of the Red Army following Stalin's purges
²⁶
and its chaotic reorganisation following its disastrous performance in the war against Finland (1939–40). Russel Stolfi has taken such logic so far as to suggest that historians have largely under-estimated the offensive capabilities of the German army and over-estimated those of the Red Army,
²⁷
leading to his revisionist thesis that Operation Barbarossa represented a realistic war-winning alternative for Germany. Accordingly, Stolfi sees the invasion in glowing terms, allowing him to draw the ill-informed and dangerous conclusion: ‘Hitler showed impressive decisiveness in ordering the attack against the Soviet Union, an indomitable will for which he has not received adequate recognition for the potential consequences.’
²⁸
Not all histories which describe Germany's promising state of affairs in the prelude to Barbarossa hold to such radical and misguided views. Nevertheless, they lack a required understanding of Germany's core military and economic institutions that, in relation to the scale of the undertaking and Germany's wider geo-strategic position, offer little cause for optimism.

Histories covering the early stages of the campaign are often equally problematic. Striking statistics detailing the extraordinary number of Soviet prisoners of war, or the huge quantities of equipment seized and destroyed, tend to dominate many of these accounts, impressing upon the reader the magnitude of the German victory and suggesting the campaign was not only a realistic undertaking, but one that could only have failed by the narrowest of margins. This line of argument began, like so many falsehoods of World War II, in the memoirs of former German generals. As Field Marshal
Erich von Manstein wrote after the war: ‘[T]hanks to the superiority of German staff-work and the performance of the combat troops, we achieved extraordinary successes that brought
the Soviet armed forces to the very brink of defeat.’
²⁹
Such representations passed all too easily into established histories producing characteristically upbeat assessments of German operations in the early period of Barbarossa. Oxford historian R. A. C. Parker's 1989 study
Struggle for Survival
concluded:

By any standard of military accomplishment, except that required by Barbarossa, the achievement of the German army in Russia was incomparable. This superb instrument, the most effective land force ever known, won the biggest victories in the history of war…The six months’ campaign of 1941 can be summarized very simply: the immense German superiority was not quite great enough.
³⁰

In similar fashion the renowned British historian Richard Overy asserted in his 1995 book
Why the Allies Won
:

The wide even grasslands of the Soviet Union showed German armoured forces at their most deadly in the summer of 1941. Against overwhelming odds – some 3,648 tanks against an estimated fifteen thousand Soviet tanks – the Panzer armies cut swathe after swathe through the Soviet defences, virtually destroyed the Soviet tank and air arm, and brought the Soviet Union almost to the point of collapse.
³¹

While the shattering defeats suffered by the Red Army remain categorical, they were only achieved at a cost so great to the Wehrmacht as to quickly preclude any hope of final victory in 1941, and at no time succeeded in eliminating major Soviet resistance. Overy himself makes the valid observation that in truly explaining the outcome of wars, reliance on straightforward statistics or basic facts can be misleading
³²
and it is on this point that many hitherto recorded histories of Operation Barbarossa may be found to be at fault. Indeed the German armies did make enormous territorial gains, destroy vast quantities of Soviet war material and capture enemy soldiers in the hundreds of thousands. A true appreciation of their success, however, can only be gauged from a relative accounting against the cost to German forces. The imposing figure cited by Overy of 15,000 Soviet tanks (of which the overwhelming majority were antiquated models, in varying states of disrepair and manned by barely trained crews) is of less significance to an industrial power capable of sustaining and ultimately replacing the loss, than it might represent to a nation less well resourced. By the same token, the much lower rate of loss suffered by
Germany proved calamitous to an army already heavily overtaxed and finding itself increasingly incapable of replacing losses or meeting its growing operational requirements.
³³

Robert Citino's various histories about the Prussian/German army have attracted a wide and deserved readership. Yet his 2007 book, on the Wehrmacht's demise in 1942, includes a chapter on 1941 that recounts the German army's initial progress in Operation Barbarossa in the most glowing terms. Citino writes:

[T]he opening of Operation Barbarossa saw the Wehrmacht pound the Red Army senseless, methodically encircling and destroying huge Soviet forces at Bialystok and Minsk. In this opening phase, the Germans fought the
Kesselschlacht
to perfection, taking hundreds of thousands of prisoners and overrunning a huge swath of territory as large as Britain. The operational plan for Barbarossa called for destroying as much of the Red Army as close to the border as possible before it could retreat into the endless depths of the country, and it could not have worked much better than it did.
³⁴

Citino later continues:

A month into the campaign, the Germans could look with satisfaction on their progress. The Red Army seemed to be coming apart at the seams…Things only got better through July. The third great
Kessel
at Smolensk yielded up another 348,000 Soviet prisoners by the end of the month…As always, the Wehrmacht maneuver scheme had been a thing of beauty, completely baffling Soviet attempts to counter it.
³⁵

Citino does go on to describe the difficulties of the 1941 campaign, but this arises in his narrative as something abrupt and sudden, as if the factors which undermined Barbarossa were not present, much less having a terribly corrosive impact, from the beginning of the war. Accordingly, it is only after the ‘dizzying’
³⁶
success of the initial weeks that Citino concludes: ‘it was at this very moment – with Soviet Russia seemingly on the ropes and the Red Army having apparently dissolved – that Barbarossa began to fall apart’.
³⁷
A comparable angle appears in Andrew Nagorski's 2007 history of the battle of Moscow. It is only in early October 1941, according to Nagorski, that German operations begin to lose what he presents as their lofty superiority: ‘[T]he German forces finally advancing on Moscow, while still victorious and formidable, weren't quite
the juggernaut that they had been during the early weeks of Operation Barbarossa.’
³⁸

With the early progress of the campaign still commonly recorded as a further laurel for the Wehrmacht, there should be little surprise that challenges to this portrayal, namely from East German and Soviet historians, were accorded little serious consideration. Albert Seaton, in his extensive history
The Russo-German War 1941–45
, dismissively concluded: ‘On the Soviet side there has been an attempt to build up the Smolensk battle [July/August 1941] to the proportions of a victory.’
³⁹
Following this lead, the long-since discredited historian David Irving
⁴⁰
later claimed: ‘Hitler had every reason to scent victory throughout July 1941.’
⁴¹
Although legitimate criticism may be made of the communist predisposition to explain Soviet successes as proof of the virtues encompassed in a Marxist-Leninist ideology, there remains surprising value in the strictly factual substance of their historical research. As early as 1961 Wolf Stern and Ernst Stenzel suggested that the West German preoccupation with the early success of Barbarossa gave it an artificial and undeserving prominence in the discourse.
⁴²
In 1962 Hans Busse challenged what he saw as the West German attempt to aggrandise the Hitler–Halder command crisis of July/August 1941 into an explanation for the failure of the summer campaign. He argued that this belittled the role of the Red Army and placed the onus for failure on a German strategic decision rather than adequately acknowledging the counter-moves and strengths of the Soviet Union.
⁴³
A few years later in 1965 Helmut Göpfert provided an insightful article assessing the early period of fighting on the eastern front in which he highlighted the sizeable inconsistency between Germany's operational goals and available forces. The resulting attempts to encircle large Soviet armies and operate in such depth, while exposed flanks were suffering constant, albeit ill co-ordinated, counter-attacks, was simply too taxing on German strength. The result, Göpfert argues, was an
unsustainable rate of loss in momentum rendering the operational plan doomed to failure, and this was clearly evident in the beginning phase of the campaign.
⁴⁴