The Second World War (21 page)

In the two weeks that followed the Chancellery meeting, OKH laboured to transform its draft plan into a Führer Directive. Jodl co-operated in the task, lending to it some of OKW’s thinking derived from Lossberg’s ‘Fritz’. Nevertheless the emphasis on Moscow persisted until Hitler ordered a redrafting which directed Army Group Centre (which had Moscow as its objective) to lend armour to Army Group North for its encirclement of the Russian armies in the Baltic region. ‘Only after this, the most urgent task, has been accomplished, followed by the capture of Leningrad . . . are the offensive operations to be continued with the object of seizing the vital transport and armaments centre, Moscow.’ Führer Directive 21, when issued on 18 December, actually included an instruction for Army Group Centre to ‘swing strong units of its mobile forces to the north, in order to destroy the enemy forces fighting in the Baltic area, acting in conjunction with Army Group North . . . in the general direction of Leningrad’. The directive also included a codename for the Russian operation. It was to be known, after the medieval emperor who legend held, lay sleeping in a Thuringian mountain ready to come to Germany’s aid in her hour of need, as Barbarossa.

The starting date for Barbarossa lay in June 1941, many months in the future; all that Führer Directive 21 prescribed by way of timing was a stipulation that preparations preliminary to the attack deployment were to be ‘concluded by 15 May 1941’. After December, however, Hitler amended the Barbarossa plan little, if at all. On 7-9 January 1941 he assembled his commanders at the Berghof to hear his justification, in detail, for a switch of strategic effort to the east. There he indicated that his objectives lay as far away as Baku, on the Caspian, the centre of the Russian oil industry which German forces had penetrated in 1918. Early in March (before 3 March) he issued instructions to Jodl which assigned all but the immediate operational zone of the Wehrmacht to the responsibility of the SS and ‘Reich Commissioners’ appointed by himself; the implication, as he made clear in a speech to 250 senior Wehrmacht commanders at the Chancellery on 30 March, was that ‘special measures’ (execution, or deportation) were to be taken against Communist Party functionaries and ‘hostile inhabitants’. Otherwise – although, in the words of Walter Warlimont, deputy chief of OKW’s operations staff, ‘during January and February the forthcoming Russian campaign gradually absorbed the efforts of the entire Wehrmacht’, in redeployment, creation of military infrastructure and detailed offensive planning by army group, army, corps, divisional, regimental and battalion staffs – the objects and objectives of Barbarossa were altered not at all. The decision to which Hitler had set his hand in December 1940, which had been in the forefront of his mind since his overthrow of France in June, and which had in truth dominated his ‘world outlook’ since the day he had set out to take power in Germany nearly twenty years earlier, was to remain the fixed point of all he thought and did throughout the first half of 1941, however much supervening events might work to alter it.

Hitler’s certainty of purpose was not matched among his entourage. Numbers of his senior commanders and staff officers were intimidated by the ‘1812 factor’. Halder and Brauchitsch, when first discussing the project on 30 July, concluded: ‘The question whether, if a decision cannot be enforced against England and the danger exists that England allies herself with Russia, we should first wage against Russia in the ensuing two-front war, must be met with the answer that we should do better to keep friendship with Russia. A visit to Stalin would be advisable . . . we could hit the English decisively in the Mediterranean, drive them out of Asia.’ However, though Halder continued to utter warnings of the dangers throughout the autumn, he did not carry opposition to the sticking-point; Brauchitsch, who had been terrorised by his one open difference of opinion with Hitler after the Polish campaign, altogether lacked the nerve to do so. Jodl, who early had his own doubts, suppressed them when he detected the inflexibility of Hitler’s intention, and on 29 July browbeat Warlimont, his deputy, and the three section chiefs of OKW’s operations staff into quelling their own. Manstein and Guderian, rising commanders who were to shine in Russia, were disquieted by the ‘1812 factor’ of space swallowing numbers, and Bock, as a very senior officer, expressed something of this to Hitler when the Führer visited him in hospital on 3 December: Russia, he suggested, was ‘an enormous country whose military strength was unknown’ and ‘such a war might be difficult even for the Wehrmacht’, thus offending his leader without deflecting him. Ewald von Kleist, the senior Panzer general, claimed (but after the war): ‘Most of us generals realised beforehand that if the Russians chose to fall back there was very little chance of achieving a final victory without the help of [a political] upheaval.’ Although that may have been their outlook, nevertheless they collectively kept it to themselves. The army may have been intimidated by the technical difficulties of an advance to the White Sea, the shores of the Caspian and the banks of the Volga – Hitler’s ‘AA’ (Archangel-Astrakhan) line, 1600 miles east of Warsaw, nearly 2000 from Berlin, marked the area of conquest he believed would bring about Russia’s collapse – but they did not differ fundamentally from him in perceiving the Russian war as inevitable, nor (unless in intensity of feeling) in welcoming a confrontation with the Bolshevik and Slav enemies of Germany.

Reasoned opposition came not from the ground commanders but from the representatives of their sister and (to some degree) competing services, the navy and air force. Goering, as head not only of the Luftwaffe but also, however improbably, of the economic planning authority, was concerned by the economic effort a war with Russia would entail. He continued to believe, moreover, in the benefits to be won by sustaining an air offensive against Britain. Goering had confronted Hitler with his arguments on 13 November, immediately after Molotov’s visit to Berlin, forecasting that the course on which Russia seemed bent would draw it into war with Britain, an outcome from which Germany was bound to benefit. Meanwhile, he advocated, Germany should maintain its current strategy. When Hitler turned the economic argument against him, however, claiming that Russian conquests would supply the food and oil needed to beat Britain down, he withdrew his objections and thereafter largely co-operated in the Barbarossa preparations.

Raeder, Hitler’s Grand Admiral, was a more persistent opponent. He saw Hitler the day after Goering, raised the danger of fighting a two-front war, rightly emphasising that Germany’s leaders had always sought to avoid such a strategic predicament, and urged that no new enterprise should be undertaken until Britain was beaten. Raeder had influence with Hitler. It was he who had advocated the attack on Norway, the success of which had reinforced his prestige. It was also he who had persuaded Hitler to prepare invasion plans against Britain, and who had then deflected the Führer from undertaking Sealion by warning of the likelihood of its miscarriage. He had already produced alternatives to Barbarossa – notably Felix, the plan to hamstring Britain in the Mediterranean by capturing Gibraltar – and he was also proposing initiatives in the Balkans and towards Turkey, which would put pressure on Britain at the Mediterranean’s eastern end. Goering shared his strategic outlook. They were both attracted by the opportunities presented by seizing French North Africa, so that Italy could be supported in Libya and Britain outflanked in Egypt. Raeder went further: he wanted to take the Atlantic islands – the Azores, Canaries and Cape Verde islands, Spanish and Portuguese possessions – which would give Germany control of the western mid-Atlantic, particularly since he was outraged at what he called ‘the glaring proof of [America’s] non-neutrality’. However, while Hitler was excited by the prospect of bringing the Atlantic islands under German control, he continued to set his face inflexibly against the idea of adding the United States to the list of his enemies. Within a year, his curious concept of honour between allies would prompt him to follow Japan into war with America. In the autumn of 1940, however, even as he withdrew from the thought of risking thirty-six of the Wehrmacht’s best divisions on the turbulent tides of the Channel, he clung as if by the force of dogma to the principle of placating Britain’s natural co-belligerent in the face of almost any provocation she might offer. Russia he would brave in its lion’s den; the United States he would not confront at all.

There was more than strategic calculation to this diversity of policy. He had no admiration for the American people, as he did for the British, nor did he fear their military power in the immediate term. He did not, indeed, view the United States as a military power at all. It was its commercial and productive capacity which figured in his ‘correlation of forces’, and he did not believe that that capacity could be brought to bear against Germany until the war had run its course much further. However, it was precisely because his attitude to America was devoid of ideological content that he chose to disregard all provocation she might offer him in the months while Barbarossa was in the making. The maintenance of diplomatic, if not friendly, relations with the United States was a necessary simplification of the strategic balance sheet that would allow the preordained struggle with the Soviet Union to be brought on and carried through with the least possible diversion of effort.

Hitler’s attitude towards Russia, by contrast, was suffused by ideology, drawn from many sources – racial, economic, historical – and fermented by his own rancours and ambitions into a self-intoxicating potency. He was obsessed, perhaps most of all, by the ‘story’ of German history: how the Teutonic tribes, alone among the peoples on Rome’s western borders, had resisted the power of the empire, beaten it down, raised warrior kingdoms of their own and then turned eastward to carry their standards into the Slav lands. The epics of the Teutons, as Varangian bodyguards of the Byzantine emperor, as Viking venturers on the northern seas and founders of princedoms along the Russian rivers, first outposts of ‘civilisation’ in the east, as Norman conquerors of England and Sicily, as knights of the Baltic shore, formed a theme to which he returned night after night in the monologues which passed for his ‘table talk’. The survivals and implantations of German settlers east of consolidated
Deutschtum
’s central European front – in Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, even in Russia proper, outside the Baltic states, where 1.8 million German colonists were living as late as 1914 – evoked in him feelings of the ‘manifest destiny’ of the German race akin to those of the British, as they contemplated the diaspora of the English-speaking peoples about the oceanic world, in Victoria’s heyday. Yet while the British saw the bounds of their world destined to grow wider and wider still, as if by the operation of some beneficently divine hand, Hitler was conditioned, by his obsession with the tribulations of the Germans, to see them as a people under threat, from which they were to be preserved only by unrelenting struggle.

The threat was manifold and amorphous, but it lay in the east, its instruments were the ‘motley of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Serbs and Croats, etc.’ (the ‘etc.’ included all the diverse Slav and non-Slav peoples of Russia), ‘and always the bacillus which is the solvent of human society, the Jew’, and its permanent trend was towards the fragmentation and subjection of the German nation. Bolshevism, which he was determined to see as directed by Jewry, in his lifetime invested that threat with unifying and aggressive force. ‘Cosmopolitan’ Judaism denied the principles of racial singularity and purity which stood at the pinnacle of his value system; Bolshevism, by its espousal of the cause of the ‘masses’, itself a term of contempt, and its substitution of faith in economic forces for trust in the warrior’s strong arm, repudiated the creed of aristocratic populism on which Hitler had founded his appeal to his folk. ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ had therefore to be confronted head on, its dominions wrested from its leaders by brute force, and the ‘life space’ (
Lebensraum
) thus liberated settled with the ‘higher peoples’ – Germans of the Reich proper, Germans of the eastern settlements, associated ‘Germanics’ of northern Europe – who, if they did not win supremacy in war, were fated to subjection and enslavement by the myriad hordes of their inferiors.

‘Irrevocable and terrible in its finality’, as David Irving, Hitler’s biographer, has characterised his Barbarossa decision, it was therefore ‘one he never regretted, even in the jaws of ultimate defeat’. However, though the decision was certainly fixed by December 1940, six months were to elapse before the forces necessary to implement it were set in motion. In the meantime a sequence of events centred on the Balkans, where German and Soviet power politics were most directly engaged against each other, was to distract his attention from the inception of the coming campaign. For all its appalling risk, Barbarossa was characterised by a certain ‘stark simplicity’: which would prove the stronger on the field of battle, the Wehrmacht or the Red Army? In the Balkans, during the months while the German army’s divisions completed their redeployment to the start-lines from which Barbarossa would be launched, Hitler found himself embroiled in the complexities of an ancient strategic quandary: which way to throw his power among small states, militarily insignificant in themselves, which might nevertheless, by invoking the help of stronger protectors, disrupt the smooth unrolling of his chosen strategy?

‘Crossroads of Europe’ is a catchphrase designation for the Balkans, conveying little more than unfamiliarity with the region by those who use it. The Balkans, spined and herringboned by some of the highest mountains on the continent, offer few highways, and none deserving to be called a path of conquest. No single power, not even the Roman Empire at its height, has dominated the whole region: cautious generals have consistently declined to campaign there if they could. It has been a graveyard of military operations ever since the Emperor Valens succumbed to the Goths at Adrianople in 378.