The World at War (27 page)

DR TOKATY

Stalin showed himself as the supreme leader of the whole war effort to the public on 3rd July 1941 when he made his first war speech and for the first time and for the last time addressed his countrymen, very gently, very beautifully. Everybody repeated it since then. I think he realised by this time his mistakes and tried to correct them.

ALBERT SPEER

Hitler's Chief Architect

Now Hitler took over from the Army so many commands, he was the highest in command and he was in command of the whole Army. And more or less he was also in command of the Armaments Office because he told me details of the armaments and this compelled him to have another itinerary of the day. The day was now filled up from morning to evening with the different duties he had to do because the decisions had to be made and the map of the situation was there and had to be shown to him, if he liked it or not. And I think this made a change in Hitler's whole system,
health system, he was getting more and more – he was no more approachable. He was getting more and more a man without any possibilities to discuss. I think he was also getting some numbness and some of the liveliness went out of him. He was in some way – 1 have the experience of being a prisoner for twenty years – he was in some way behaving like a prisoner. Hitler hadn't had any vacations in this whole period; he never stepped out because he thought without him all would be wrong.

COLONEL HASSO-ECCARD FREIHERR VON MANTEUFFEL

Battalion Commander, 7th Panzer Division

The first stage of the Russian campaign were going according to schedule and the plan worked out but in the end of July came a halt at the autobahn in Moscow. And I was with my division and we asked why and were informed that Hitler have a new order, Directive 33, the main failure of the Russia campaign in 1941. Hitler gave an order to disperse the forces. At the beginning of the war against Russia, on June 21st, we had a main objective Moscow, but now in July he ordered in another direction. One Army Group would go south-east and another to take cities first, then attack against Moscow. During August we faced the empire of mud and in beginning of October of snow. But the dispersion was the main failure of the campaign and when Hitler ordered to attack Moscow at the end of October we had not sufficient forces to attack.

DR TOKATY

Ordinary people lost any regard for the authorities and the authorities themselves were utterly sure that Moscow will be taken and they were unable to do anything else but to swallow lots of insults, sometime direct attacks on the security forces' automobiles, just to stop top-ranking secret-service officers and shout insults at them without any fear. The real patriotic part of the population found itself united. I don't think any attempt on the part of the secret services to continue their traditional lines these days would lead to anything we could possible imagine today. I think it would be a revolt. We could not afford any land of revolt these days because the Germans were next to Moscow. Yes, we hated Stalin; very many people began to speak openly against the Party. But we could not contemplate revolt because that would mean weakening our position. Everyone with a keen heart used to say, never mind who, Stalin or the devil himself, number one is not to allow the Germans to take our town. Nothing was allowed to interfere with that and the secret service realised that and behaved accordingly. Although the official history denies it I was there, I saw it; my colleagues and everybody else was looting – but I wouldn't say there was widespread looting. It's extremely interesting that the Soviet population displayed another quality, highly disciplined attitude to the situation. There were certain parts of the population which tried to begin preparing themselves to serve the new masters when they come, but they were in a very limited scale. Literally hundreds of thousands of women and people with children, old men, were digging defence lines at the very same time outside of Moscow. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary people, without being mobilised, doing everything possible for their town, for their history.

MAJOR HANS HINRICHS

German Army engineer

It was completely different from France and, of course, from the desert area. France had a very dense road network, there were only a few woods and the population of France was rather indifferent. There were no ambushes. It was really a war in a very civilised country. In Russia we had very few roads and these became rather muddy already in September. You couldn't diverge for a moment in Russia because of the large woods and of course the many rivers and streams you had to cross without bridges or river-crossing installations. I, with my engineer company, built more than a hundred bridges on the way to Moscow.

DR TOKATY

When the country found itself face to face with the enemy, with the danger look in the eyes, something else appeared among us. Religious feeling just appeared in the midst of nowhere and that helped to unite the people. Religion, the church, suddenly joined the ranks of those who opposed the enemy and after that was natural that nobody even dared say a word against the church, an ally. We were driving through Moscow and suddenly we stopped after a dreadful night and suddenly I walk along my train. I thought everyone must be dead asleep and I heard somebody singing about the defeat of Napoleon, a very patriotic song which glorified the eternal values of Russia, that which never dies and I don't think it will ever die. Russia is too big a place to chop off just in one go.

ALBERT SPEER

Of course I hadn't much knowledge of what the German people was thinking because in a system if you are on a higher level you are quite a distance to the people itself – I heard only from some officials of administration who said they were very poor conditions in Russia and that there was a catastrophe of the transport. Of course I realised too from the newspapers, which said the advance had stopped. I was bothered about those situations and in November 1941 I offered Hitler to use about thirty thousand of my workmen, which were working on these huge peace buildings in Berlin, for to rebuild the transport system in Russia. But Hitler still didn't want to be convinced of his defeat in Russia and he hesitated for a few weeks until he gave the order that his workmen in Berlin are to be shifted to rebuild the
Russian transport system.

ANTHONY EDEN

I was leaving from Scapa Flow with Ambassador Maisky and Sir Alec Cadogan, my Permanent Secretary, in a cruiser called
HMS
Kent.
The weather was appalling and it was the only time in the war I got flu. I went to Invergordon and was anxious to get on board the destroyer and get to the cruiser as soon as possible and sail. And to my slight indignation I got a message from Winston saying I must talk to him on the telephone. That meant a long march to a shed where the telephone was, so I asked if it was really very important, because I wanted to get on board if it wasn't, and the message came back that it was of the utmost importance. This was Winston telling me about Pearl Harbor. So then I said to him, 'Well, what do we do now?' He said, 'I'm going to the United States,' and I asked, 'Do I go on to Russia?' He said, 'Certainly, you can't not go. Stalin's expecting you. It would make the worst impression. You go to Russia and I'll go the United States and we'll feed our telegrams to each other,' which is what happened.

DR TOKATY

Stalin gave a speech on 6th November from an underground station, a very good speech. He said, 'Hitlers come and go, but people remain' – and we used to say, 'Stalins come and go, but people remain.' The next morning he received the parade in Red Square and we could see that in spite of all his shortcomings, Stalin rendered a great service to the USSR by that presence because it showed the Supreme Commander does not run away and that is very important in critical times. Secondly he made a speech about Lenin which showed that Stalin retained his nerve. That sense spread at once into all the armed forces, all the commanders began saying, 'Stalin himself hasn't lost his nerve, he is sure – let us fight,' and that made a tremendous impact on the battle qualities of the armed forces.

ANTHONY EDEN

Stalin himself was always a tough negotiator, imperturbable, unyielding, ruthless, but I have a regard for him as a leader and a statesman despite all the cruelties that I have no doubt he did perpetrate. We had difficult discussions because he wanted me to give all sorts of commitments about the post-war period, which I wasn't in a position to give. But it was typical of him that he knew then, with the Germans a few miles from the gates of Moscow, exactly what he wanted to get at the peace table. And he wanted to get it into my head as soon as he possibly could, and if possible get a commitment from me, which he didn't get, to back what he wanted. And what he wanted above all was the security of Russia, never mind anybody else's particular interests in the matter. Max Beaverbrook had been there a little before I went out, with Harriman, on a purely supply mission, and he'd done a very good job in making the Russians understand that we were prepared to play our full part fairly with them. But I've no doubt the Russians had a lingering suspicion, and they ought to have guilty consciences. During the period we were alone they did absolutely nothing to help but they did a good deal to help the Germans. And so perhaps they did suspect that we would play the same sort of game they'd played, do very little, the minimum, and leave them to bear the burden. But gradually I think they realised that wasn't so, and not because of any great generosity on our part. It was due to the fact that it was very much in our interests that the Russians should make as fine a show as they could against the Nazis.

MAJOR HINRICHS

The conditions became very bad during the period end of October to early November, when the mud period set in. And particularly bad for mechanised forces once we had the first frost in the middle of November. My company was mechanised; we had large lorries carrying one section and these lorries stuck in the mud – frozen the next morning, could not move at all. Within a period of two or three days we had to improvise mobility by requisitioning horses and wagons.

LIEUTENANT HEINRICH SCHMIDT-SCHMIEDEBACH

German artillery

The mud froze to irregular hard waves and we had horses. I was the platoon commander with two three-inch guns and this frozen mud was very bad for the horses. And the carts, they were often demolished only by movement, not by shooting, so we had doubts that our material would be in a position to march towards Moscow. At first it was not so bad, perhaps fifteen or twenty degrees under zero and there was no danger for our weapons. But suddenly at a certain point the rifles didn't shoot any more. This was the turning point in the winter war, I think, and it was the greatest point for the soldiers. The lubricating oil we had was not suitable for this sub-arctic winter, but the Russians had the real lubricating oil for their weapons.

ANTHONY EDEN

Towards the end of my stay I was allowed, after a lot of pushing, to go to the front, or near the front, and that taught me a lot about the war on that front because I saw some captured German prisoners. That was about the most pathetic thing I'd ever seen because it was ice cold and none of them had a decent overcoat at all, hardly even a pullover of any sort. And there they were dragging their shirt cuffs down over their hands to try to keep warm. They thought I was a Russian officer or a Russian politician and began to complain to me about the cold, not surprisingly. There was little I could do for them but seeing those youngsters – they'd mostly come from the Sudetenland – there in those conditions made you realise how unprepared the so-called perfect Hitler machine had been for a winter war in Russia. And I remember saying to Winston when I got back, 'They can't be all that good because I can't believe we would have sent divisions into Russia at this time of year without something, some form of overcoats.'

ALBERT SPEER

We were all quite happy about the success of the German armies in Russia and the first inkling that something is wrong was when Goebbels made a big action in the whole of Germany to collect furs and winter clothes for the German troops, and then we knew that something was happening that was not foreseen.

ANTHONY EDEN

The Russians were avid in their demands: tanks, aircraft, raw materials, aluminium, wanted them all and I don't blame them for wanting, they were carrying the main burden of the battle in those days, but to get them to them was a problem and our shortages were very real. And I always feel that perhaps in this country we forget too easily the tremendous contribution of our Merchant Marine, protected by the Royal Navy in those convoys to Russia. The conditions were so terrible, the cold, and yet they got through after heavy losses sometimes. The Russians certainly never understood: partly they didn't understand the problem of the whale and the elephant again [a sea power versus a land power], what it meant, how difficult it was, partly perhaps they didn't want to understand. I had many arguments with Stalin about these convoys. Once we virtually had to stop them because we considered he wasn't treating our sailors the way they should be treated and he retaliated that our sailors were not treating his people properly, which was not true.

ALBERT SPEER

Because Dr
Todt was responsible for the whole construction work in Germany I was with him around Christmas 1941 to discuss how my workmen should be used. This time Todt was very depressed and he told me that we shall certainly lose the war because not only physically but also psychologically the Russians are much stronger than the German soldier. 1 was shocked because I knew that Todt was rather an optimist.
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COLONEL MANTEUFFEL

My division, which was a panzer division, was the only unit which crossed a bridge within thirty miles of
Moscow. We cannot see the capital because of the mountains but we could ride with electric train to Moscow and took the bridge, which had not been demolished, in the night of 27th November 1941. I hoped that was a great success for the whole Army. Some hours after I put my feet on the bridge and my troops were going on towards the hills that were north-west of Moscow I heard from my radio operator that no troops came after my division, and because I command no reserves we have to retreat.