Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East (94 page)

Conclusion

Having focused in this study primarily on the problems of the German summer offensive, there might be those who would wish to point out that things were much worse on the Soviet side of the line. That the summer of 1941 represented a Soviet debacle of grand proportions, typified by mass confusion and an enormous wastage of men and material, is not in question here. The fact remains, however, that these losses, while dreadfully costly to the Soviet war effort, were bearable. Indeed, far from crumbling, the Red Army was in fact growing in size, fed by the huge pool of non-active reserves. Moreover, unlike the German army, the Red Army did not have to win the war in 1941, it only had to survive long enough for Germany's offensive strength to exhaust itself. The winter granted the Soviet Union a reprieve, which was sweetened by the entry of the United States into the war. Thus, whatever may be said of the Red Army's weaknesses in the summer of 1941, it was entirely successful in one fundamental respect – it confounded the German leadership's plan to conquer the Soviet Union in a Blitz-style campaign in the early weeks of the war.
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As Jacob Kipp concluded in his study on the battle of
Smolensk:

At a horrible cost in losses, Russia gave up her sons and her land to bleed the Wehrmacht white, even if the losses were 10 to 1 in favour of the German invader. Nazi ideology and occupation policies in the end made such sacrifices seem justified and legitimized Soviet totalitarianism…After Smolensk it was clear that this would be a long war, not a Blitzkrieg. The Soviet state and society, which Lenin and Stalin had cast as a vast mechanism for mobilization and militarization, had begun that process in earnest.
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A further challenge to the conclusions of this study may arise from those seeking to showcase the results of the German battles at
Kiev,
Briansk and
Viaz'ma in September and October 1941. These battles collectively yielded well over a million additional Soviet prisoners of war and, on the
surface, seem to suggest that German operational mobility was still capable of crushing Soviet resistance. Unfortunately, space does not permit a more detailed analysis of these battles, but one of the key aspects to understanding the extent of the German successes in the autumn is the complicity of
Stalin himself. In the same way that Hitler's obstinate insistence on holding the line at all costs dogged German defensive operations from 1943 to 1945, by September 1941 Stalin grossly over-estimated the success of his counter-attacks on the German armies and refused to permit the abandonment of Kiev. In any case, the Soviet dictator was confident Bock would only strike towards Moscow and took no account of
Zhukov's warning that Kirponos's
South-Western Front was in grave danger.
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Accordingly, Bock's path to the south was left dangerously open, inviting another Soviet calamity. The extent of Stalin's blunder was compounded by the fact that, once German intentions became clear, Stalin still refused to allow
Kirponos to retreat with whatever he could save until it was much too late.
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Guderian's and Kleist's weary panzer groups were thus handed a victory far in excess of what their reduced forces could have achieved had Zhukov not been dismissed and his counter-measures ignored. Even with Stalin's spectacular mismanagement, it still took the Germans another month to exploit their good fortune and eliminate the huge Kiev pocket. By the time German armies were able to reassemble for their renewed drive on Moscow in Operation
Typhoon, it was already 30 September. The available combat strength and logistical support had fallen far below what would be required to seize the Soviet capital. Following the pattern of early offensives, the attack began well and again took advantage of the dreadful Soviet strategic direction to bag another huge haul of Soviet prisoners in two enormous pockets. As Halder recorded on 4 October: ‘Operation Typhoon is following an altogether classic course…The enemy is standing fast on all parts of the front not under attack, which gives hope for the creation of pockets.’
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As in the past German offensives, however, the pace could not be sustained. Over vast distances, the spearheads weakened as their flanks grew and their supply lines became impossibly long. Soviet counter-attacks became unrelenting. The road conditions worsened along with the weather, and soon German troops everywhere were finding themselves in freezing temperatures with little more than their worn-out summer uniforms. Deprived of the chance to win the war, or even to extract itself from the slogging
battles of attrition, Germany's stalled eastern front underwent a rapid de-modernisation. This accentuated the bitter deprivations of life at the front, especially as the winter took hold. As one German soldier wrote in December 1941: ‘Technology no longer plays a role…The elemental power of nature broke the operations of our engines. What do we do?’
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As historians have been keen to show, the launch of the Soviet winter offensive before Moscow in December 1941 spelled the end of Operation Barbarossa, but it was really only the final nail in the coffin; a coffin which had already been built by the end of the summer. The German victories at
Kiev,
Briansk and
Viaz'ma in September and October 1941 did not change this fact, nor did they achieve what the battles at Minsk, Smolensk and Uman had not. Nazi Germany's last chance for a successful military outcome in World War II ended in the summer of 1941.

Summing up the first two years of the war Michael Geyer observed: ‘However successful the first two years of the war, the Third Reich never came close to escaping the dilemma posed by the fact that the political and military-strategic costs of the expansion continuously outran the benefits of a newly gained hegemonic position.’
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When the hoped-for lightning victory against the Soviet Union proved beyond the Wehrmacht's strength, a longer-term war-winning solution was all that remained open to Germany, but the prospects of success for this option can be immediately dismissed. As Omer Bartov has written:

Once blitzkrieg failed, production, industrial capacity, material and manpower resources, organisation and technical skill, all became more important than tactics, training, and courage. Of course blitzkrieg itself depended on technology, indeed, it made a fetish of modern fighting machines. But now technological innovation had to be paralleled by quantities produced, while the initial psychological impact of mass (but spatially and temporally limited) use of modern weaponry lost much of its force. In this area Germany had no chance of competing successfully with its enemies.
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Raw statistics make this clear.
In 1941 German industry managed to produce a total of 5,200 tanks, 11,776 aircraft and 7,000 artillery pieces (over 37mm).
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In the first half of 1941 the Soviet Union produced 1,800 modern tanks, 3,950 aircraft and 15,600 artillery pieces and mortars. What is extraordinary is that these figures rise considerably in the second
half of 1941 in spite of the loss of important production centres, and the massive industrial relocation to the east. In the midst of the war on its doorstep, Soviet factories turned out another 4,740 tanks, 8,000 aircraft and 55,500 artillery pieces and mortars.
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Thus the Soviet Union out-performed Germany in all the major armaments even in the first year of the war and thereafter production almost always exceeded losses in the main categories.
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The disparity becomes even clearer when one adds production figures from Britain and the United States (who were shipping considerable quantities of military aid to Europe even before their direct entry into the war). In 1942 Germany significantly raised its armament output, but this was still hopelessly out-performed by Allied production. Even allowing for the fact that a sizeable portion of British and American production would be sent to the Pacific theatre, the disparity between Allied and German industrial production was still staggering. In 1942 Germany produced 15,409 aircraft, while the combined Allied total reached 96,944 (25,436 USSR, 23,672 UK, 47,836 USA). In the same year, German tank production numbered 9,200 units, while the Allies turned out 58,054 units (24,446 USSR, 8,611 UK, 24,997
USA).
¹²
In November 1941
Stalin confidently exclaimed: ‘Modern war is a war of motors. The war will be won by the one who produces the most motors. The combined motor production of the USA, Britain, and the USSR is at least three times that of Germany.’
¹³
In fact the combined motor production of the three Allied powers was far in excess of Stalin's three-fold estimate. The remaining years of the war continued to see a commanding Allied lead in armament production, dooming Germany to eventual defeat by sheer weight of arms. The ebb and flow of battlefield successes affected only the length of the war, not its eventual outcome.
¹⁴

In 1942 the Germans could only resume the offensive on the southern part of the front. This new offensive pushed all the way to the Volga, but
here again, the Germans fatally over-extended themselves and met with disaster at the battle of
Stalingrad. In 1943 they lost the strategic initiative altogether when their third summer offensive was stopped cold after only a few days. From this point on until the end of the war, Germany's eastern front became an entirely defensive war.

This study presents a revealing picture of the German generals at war. It is not a picture that will be familiar to many readers, especially those in the English-speaking world, where military histories abound and the German generals of World War II are often portrayed (and even unfortunately admired) as consummate military professionals. In Germany that picture is very different. The focus on the criminal legacy of the Nazi state has, in the last 25 years, shifted more and more attention towards the role of the army and its extensive activity in the war of annihilation, particularly on the eastern front.
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As a result, unlike military histories in the Anglo-American world, the campaigns and battles fought by the German generals do not form the principal subject of interest for academics. The question more commonly asked in contemporary German debates is to what extent the German army and its commanders were complicit in issuing, or at least condoning, criminal orders. The weight of research supports the conclusion that this was very extensive indeed. Yet the all too common tendency among Anglo-American historians to separate the strictly military performance of the German generals from their wider political and ideological actions has, in this author's opinion, allowed too many favourable judgements to be passed. In doing so many English language publications have inadvertently set a worrying precedent. One would never conclude that Joseph Goebbels was an excellent propaganda minister without rendering a fuller and morally deserving judgement on the consequence of his actions. In the same vein the German generals should not escape a fuller accounting of their actions in World War II. The men in control of Hitler's armies were not honourable men, carrying out their orders as dutiful servants of the state. With resolute support for the regime, the generals unquestioningly waged one war of aggression after the other, and, once Barbarossa began, willingly
partook in the genocide of the Nazi regime.
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For historians to comment exclusively on military matters, and render judgements about these men on those facts alone, allows a distorted and potentially dangerous perception of the generals to arise.
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While the German generals cannot avoid a degree of guilt for the crimes committed during the war, from a strictly professional standpoint one must also question their role in the military failure of the war against the Soviet Union. Far from the picture presented in many publications, which in the early years of World War II laud the German field marshals as grand operators and the panzer commanders as dashing innovators of a revolutionary military concept, this study presents a contrasting image. In addition to the complicity of the field commanders in the many planning and conceptual blunders inherent in Barbarossa, these same men compounded these initial oversights with an enduring blindness towards the difficulties encountered during the summer campaign. Even in August 1941, when the supply system was greatly over-extended, the army group's offensive strength widely dispersed, and the refitting process incomplete, the generals argued for an offensive towards Moscow, which was in practical terms impossible to realise. The fatal inability to recognise the limitations of the forces under their command was inherent to the campaign itself, but what is more surprising is the slow learning curve among the generals at the front who were confronted with the day-to-day problems of the advance. Surely these men could see the problem posed by the vast extent of the Soviet Union and could calculate for themselves the logistical and military costs of continued operations? Even if future planning was too much of a distraction from the day-to-day operations, one wonders what they had learned from weeks of warfare over the Soviet Union's roads and against the Red Army's relentless
counter-attacks. Had these not weakened the all-important motorised formations to a critical point? How were the chronic supply problems going to be solved adequately to sustain the next big push before too much time elapsed? Where were the reserve units to help plug the gaps in the line and later fill the vacuum of space in the still-to-be-conquered territories? Positive answers simply didn't exist, and each of the field commanders prominently featured in this study retained a sufficiently large overview of the strategic situation to be able to identify this dire state of affairs.
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The fact that none of these men were pointing to Barbarossa's impending failure, to say nothing of urging some form of negotiated settlement before it was too late, is itself an indication that the German generals were unaware of how much trouble the campaign was in.